Junjie Ren

About

I am Junjie Ren (任峻杰), Senior Communications Manager at the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development program. I also serve as Managing Editor of the Future Development blog and lead communications across several research portfolios, including the Center for Sustainable Development, the Center for Universal Education, the bipartisan Brookings-AEI Commission on U.S. Rural Prosperity, the Reimagining Rural Policy initiative, and workstreams on workforce and AI.

My work involves helping ideas travel from technical and policy research into the messages of policymakers, journalists, and the wider public. It's a business of turning useful information into what gets used without losing substance.

Before Brookings, I trained at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought, where I held a Kathryn Davis Fellowship and wrote a master's thesis on the architectural and philosophical lineage of intentional communities. I graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse University. Earlier work took me through the United Nations, The Economist, and a stretch of time in a Zen monastery.

This site is a slower, more public companion to my professional work. It's a public archive in the age of digital cognition, where I write about what I read, what I notice, and the longer-term questions that tickle me: political ecology, the global circulation of capital, ideas, and culture, and the lengthy thread of utopian thinking.

I read and write in English and Chinese.

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Junjie Ren