Dr Ruoxi Liu

I am a departmental lecturer at the School of Global and Area Studies, the University of Oxford. My primary research interests lie in investigating individual agency, grassroots creativity, and community activism(s) under restricted socio-economic-political contexts. My research has focused on the self-employed/independent workers, freelancers, cultural workers/artists, craft workers, and alternative communities in contemporary China.

I completed my PhD and MPhil from the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge. Based on an ethnographic study from May 2020 to April 2021 across a number of Chinese studies, my PhD thesis entitled ‘The Meaning of Being Independent: Precarities of Work and Lifestyles and Alternative-Seeking among Chinese Self-Employed Cultural Workers’, investigates various forms of precarities and reveals the trends of ‘individuality’, ‘creativity’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-sufficiency’' in China vis-a-vis its authoritarian context and the neoliberal tendencies.

I am now working on turning this thesis into a book monograph, which, while highlighting alternative-seeking of independent cultural workers against various precarities in a context full of rising uncertainties, also address the issue of ‘temporality’ and the drifting features of independent cultural workers. The monograph wishes to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of cultural/creative work, cultural/creative workers, and their communities, and develops new insights into the individual-society-state relationship as well as individual agency at the grassroots levels in China.

I am inspired by many people I have met during my fieldwork and in my life, their alternative practices, and different forms of activism(s). I wish my practices go along with my research.

I am also a research affiliate at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge and an associate member of St Antony’s College, the University of Oxford.