Kefan Xue
Kefan Xue is a final-year DPhil candidate in Area Studies (research discipline: Sociology) at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research has been funded by Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and the British Association for International and Comparative Education. She is expected to graduate in July 2025.
Kefan’s academic commitment to addressing social and educational inequalities is rooted in her long-standing experience of volunteer teaching in marginalised areas across China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Kenya. These engagements continue to inform both her research agenda and pedagogical values. Her broad research and teaching interests span childhood, family, care, education, gender, health and wellbeing, and qualitative methodology.
Her DPhil thesis, also her first book project, is titled Young Carers in China. It explores the lives of children who provide unpaid care to ill or disabled family members, a largely invisible group in both Chinese policy discourse and academic research. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 30 families across rural and urban China, the study conceptualises the emotionally intense and morally charged caregiving relationships co-constructed between children and their families. The research contributes new empirical insights and conceptual tools to the global sociology of childhood, family, and care, while challenging Western-centric frameworks by situating children’s caregiving in the Chinese sociocultural context.
Kefan holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (2020) and a BA from the University of Warwick (2019), both in Educational Research. Beyond her thesis, she has collaborated on several interdisciplinary research projects in sociology, education, and public health. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles in Sex Education, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and Annals of General Psychiatry, with multiple further manuscripts currently under revise & resubmit at Journal of Marriage and Family and Qualitative Inquiry.
Kefan has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students at Oxford and beyond, with a particular focus on Qualitative Research Methods, the Sociology of Childhood and Family, and Gender in Development and Education. Her teaching experience spans curriculum design, seminar delivery, dissertation supervision, and international guest lecturing. Committed to inclusive and reflexive pedagogy, Kefan creates intellectually rigorous and socially responsive learning environments that empower students to engage critically and compassionately with complex global challenges.
You may find her C.V. and more information on her website.
Supervisor: Professor Rachel Murphy
