Jessica DiCarlo is Doctoral Candidate in geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She situates her research in critical development studies, political ecology, and infrastructure studies. Her regional expertise is centered in China, where she has worked in Yunnan, Liaoning, Tibetan regions, as well as Beijing and Shanghai. Her interest in Chinese borderlands led her to research in Nepal, India, and Laos. Her dissertation draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Laos and examines the construction and planning of the Laos–China Railway and economic zones to ground ‘global China’ in complex host contexts and histories. She is interested in connecting the large-scale infrastructures and their (geo)politics with the environments and lives that sustain them.