Ruoxi Liu

Ruoxi Liu is a Departmental Lecturer at the School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford. She holds affiliations with the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and is an associate member of St Antony’s College. Her research focuses on individual agency, grassroots creativity, and alternative cultural practices in contemporary China. She completed her PhD and MPhil in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, with fieldwork conducted May 2020–April 2021.

Education:

• PhD in Sociology, University of Cambridge
• MPhil in Sociology, University of Cambridge

Research Interests: Liu examines self-employed cultural workers, freelancers, and craft workers in China, exploring themes such as precarity, creativity, autonomy, and resistance under authoritarian and neoliberal pressures. Her work bridges sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, emphasizing grassroots activism and temporal dynamics in marginalized communities.

Grants & Projects: Her current book project, derived from her PhD thesis, analyzes the temporality and drifting patterns of independent cultural workers. She has also engaged in socially engaged art projects like Threading through the eye of the needle, funded by He Di Zai Chuang (2024).