Ruoxi Liu

Stanley Ho Junior Research Fellow
Ruoxi.liu@pmb.ox.ac.uk

Faculty/College 

Pembroke College 

Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 

School of Global and Area Studies  

Biography

I am a cultural sociologist interested in how people imagine, practise, and make sense of alternative ways of working, living, and making culture amid social change. I ask: What does it mean to imagine that life and work could be organised otherwise—and what happens when people begin to experiment with that possibility?  
 
My research examines cultural and craft labour, grassroots creativity, collective practices, precarity, independence and subjectivity, and care in contemporary China, with a particular interest in how meanings attached to cultural practices evolve, are negotiated, and sustained within changing social worlds. While the context I primarily engage with is China, I am attentive to how local practices and practitioners travel across borders and connect with one another. Increasingly, I am also interested in how ideas about the past interact with contemporary social imaginaries and practices. 

Current Projects 

I am currently completing my first monograph, based on my ethnographic research (since 2020) with people whom I term ‘independent cultural workers’: cultural practitioners who occupy shifting identities and in-between positionalities within both the art world and social world. This heterogeneous group has been repeatedly (re)named and categorised since the establishment of the PRC and constantly make sense of themselves by appropriating existing terms, creating new terms, and/or using self-deprecating terms, from flexible workers to unemployed nomads. This book starts with a simple question: what it means to be “independent” in today’s China? It examines how independence in culture-making, work, and everyday life is produced, practised, and sustained in contemporary China, how the pursuit of independence gives rise to alternative cultural politics that are themselves continually negotiated, and how individuals think of and position themselves in response to institutions.  

 

This long-term ethnographic research among independent cultural workers also brought me into the craft world of Jingdezhen, which developed into my second major research project. Through the fieldsite Jingdezhen, a historic porcelain centre and a major contemporary hub for craft production and creative migration, I examine the politics and changing meanings of craft-making in contemporary China. One strand of this research investigates the power dynamics within craft production between individual craft workers, craft agencies as cultural intermediaries including art galleries, museums, alternative cultural spaces, select shops, and digital platforms, customers, and state-led tourism institutions. I particularly look at the role of emerging craft spaces and how these agencies and practitioners contest the boundaries of crafts, arts, and business. The second strand asks how the meanings and values attached to craft are being remade along with the development of the creative economy, heritage-making, urban redevelopment, digitalisation and growing discussions of ‘alternative lifestyles’. Rather than taking contemporary revival of interest in “folk craft” (minyi in Chinese/mingei in Japanese), and the handmade, artisanal ways of life as it is, I ask how craft has been narrated and aestheticized in contemporary China, and how it has come to embody particular ideas about labour, authenticity, self-making, and the possibility of living differently. 

Courses Taught 

  • Modern China (AMES, 2025-2027)  
  • Qualitative Research Methods (OSGA, 2025-2026, 2024-2025)  
  • Dissertation Workshop (OSGA, 2025-2026, 2024-2025)  
  • Creative Labour in China (OSGA, 2024-2025)  
  • Study of Contemporary China (OSGA, 2024-2025)  

Recent publications

Articles
Other publications