Dr Mingdan Wu

My research sits at the intersection of sociolinguistics and social policy, with interests in lived experiences of welfare, livelihoods and state-society relations.

I conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the UK among people experiencing homelessness and migrant women working in the service sector. I examine how people navigating precarious work and unemployment exercise subtle forms of agency, often by mobilising meaning-making resources in economic and social life, and how these meaning-making practices become sites through which social differentiation and control are reproduced, normalised and contested. By language, then, I do not mean only bounded linguistic systems such as English, French or Mandarin.

My current project examines lived experiences of social insurance in China amid population ageing and wider socioeconomic, environmental and digital transformations. Across my projects, I seek to bring the UK and China into comparative dialogue around welfare, governance and income inequality. I take the global as a methodology rather than a geographical category: to grasp changing nature of connections and distinctions across regions and question stereotypes attached to particular societies, and to use regionally grounded understandings to speak to challenges faced across the globe.

I am also part of Oxford’s wider anthropology community through ‘Other Anthropologists at Oxford’.