A Warm Welcome to the New SUPRA Students May 2022

We are happy to announce that we have four new students joining us for our Virtual SUPRA Programme in April 2022! It is a pleasure to welcome:

Lu Chen, PhD candidate at the University of Oslo

Lu Chen is a PhD student in China Studies at Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages of University of Oslo. Lu’s doctoral research focuses on the impact of and local adaptation to environmental and climate change. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in mainly rural areas in eastern China, her research explores the topic from several different angles including gender, disaster, water safety, emotions entangled in village residents’ relations with the Chinese government and surrounding place. She holds a M.A. in Area Studies (East Asia) from Korea University, South Korea. She starts and develops her research interest in environmental issues after conducting research as a research assistant of the AirBorne project studying people’s experiences of air pollution in China. Her research interests lie in the fields of environmental humanities, political ecology, rural studies and environmental anthropology.

McKenzie Linden, MA student at Lund University

McKenzie is a masters student at the Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University. She is interested in economy and society in East Asia, and is currently working on her degree project on fintech, financialization and state capitalism in China. She obtained her M.Phil. from Fudan University in Chinese philosophy in 2017 and her B.A. from UNC Charlotte in global, international and area studies in 2015. 

Ruoxi Liu, PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge

Ruoxi Liu is a third-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD project investigates the self-employment of the cultural workers in mainland China as a working mode, a cultural production mode, an identity and a potential subculture. From May 2020 to April 2021, Ruoxi conducted her fieldwork mainly in Jingdezhen and Guangzhou. By adopting a mixture of qualitative methodologies (participant observation, in-depth interview, and diary method), she examines how self-employment as a niche working mode in China has contributed to emergent work- lifestyles and cultures that may offer an alternative-seeking against or paralleling the Chinese neoliberalism and state-led narratives. With a focus on the cultural industries, her research also sheds light on how self-employed workers have negotiated and mediated with the agency, the state, and the audience during their cultural production. Through these discussions, Ruoxi intends to investigate the issue of risk exposure, self-realisation, alternative seeking, and solidarity among the self-employed in the Chinese labour market and society.

Yijian Liu, PhD Candidate at the University of Oslo

Olivia is a third-year PhD candidate as part of the European Research Council-funded BROKEX project at the University of Oslo. She holds a Master's degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies (2017-2018) from Oxford University, Foreign Service Programme (2016-2017) from Oxford University, Bachelor's degree in Peace and Conflict Studies (2013-2016) from the University of Pisa in Italy and exchange programme (2014-2015) at the University of Porto in Portugal. She has worked for the European Chambers of Commerce and EU SME Center in Beijing and been an intern at the UN Environment Finance Initiative in Geneva. Olivia studies high-tech entrepreneurship in China ethnographically.