I am a Stanley Ho Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. My primary research interests lie in investigating grassroots creativity, community activism(s), alternative practices, and care under restricted socio-economic-political contexts. While the context I primarily engage with is contemporary China, I am attentive to how local practices and practitioners travel across the ‘borders’ and connect with one another.

Trained as a sociologist of work and culture, my research has focused on the self-employed/independent workers, freelancers, cultural workers/artists, craft workers and craft-making, and alternative communities in contemporary China. This research stream was initially driven by a curiosity about what it means to ‘being independent as a creator’ in the Chinese context. As my engagement and practices with independent cultural workers and their communities deepened, I came to recognise their individual and community-based experiments with alternative lifestyles, which is a hopeful and creative journey yet with uncertainties and very concrete obstacles. My continuing engagement with my interlocutors (since 2020) has allowed me to go deeper to one of my field sites – Jingdezhen and explore the changing meaning and politics of craft-making in China. 

I enjoy teaching and exchanging ideas with students. In 2024-2025, I was a departmental lecturer in the Contemporary Chinese Studies programme at OSGA, co-teaching the Study of Contemporary China, Qualitative Research Methods, Dissertation Workshop, and offering my Master’s-level option on Creative Labour in China. In 2025-2026. I teach for the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Modern China) and the School of Global and Area Studies (Qualitative Research Methods and Dissertation Workshop). 

I am a college advisor here at Pembroke and am committed to strengthening the Chinese Studies community with Stanley Ho Professor Henrietta Harrison.