I see myself as an applied social science researcher, with a special interest in environmental issues and collaborative research with community partners. My current research is focused on primary school children’s environmental learning both in Kunming, China and here in the Seattle area. I have spent a total of over ten years studying and conducting fieldwork in Japan and the People’s Republic of China and I use Chinese and Japanese in my research on Sino-Japanese relations and environmental issues in contemporary China.   

Recent Activities and Key Publications

• I recently returned from a one-year Fulbright research fellowship (2011-2012) in Kunming, the provincial capital of southwest China’s Yunnan Province. I was there conducting research on environmental education for Chinese primary and middle-school students.
• Efird, R., John Chi-Kin Lee and Philip Stimpson, eds. Schooling for Sustainable Development across the Pacific. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, [under contract and forthcoming 2013])
• “Learning the Land beneath Our Feet: The Place of NGO-led Environmental Education in Yunnan Province.” Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 21, No. 76 (2012). 
• “Learning By Heart: An Anthropological Perspective on Environmental Learning in Lijiang.” In Kopnina and Ouimet, eds. Environmental Anthropology Today (New York: Routledge, 2011).
• “Guest Editor’s Introduction: NGOs and Institutions of Higher Education in China's Environmental Learning.” Chinese Education and Society, Volume 43, Number 2 (March/April 2010) 
• “Distant Kin: Japan’s War Orphans and the Limits of Ethnicity.” Anthropological Quarterly (Summer 2010).
• “Japan’s ‘War Orphans’: Identification and State Responsibility” in the Summer 2008 edition of the Journal of Japanese Studies. 
• Co-creator of Seattle University's taqwsheblu Vi Hilbert Ethnobotanical Garden