Loretta Ieng-Tak Lou
Biography
I am an anthropologist whose research revolves around the moral landscapes of Chinese societies. Across my work on green and sustainable living, social movements, health, healing, and medicine, I examine how people embody ethical commitments, cultivate virtues, take responsibility, and negotiate moral dilemmas within particular social and institutional milieus. I am also interested in how people syncretically draw upon various Chinese philosophical and religious traditions in cultivating themselves as ethical subjects.
What unites my research is an enduring interest in world-building through self-cultivation: when can transforming the self become a means of transforming the world, and what are the limits of such projects? I am especially interested in what happens when ethical ideals encounter competing obligations and structural constraints, and when demands for self-transformation and personal responsibility risk individualising problems that are fundamentally social, political, or institutional.
My first monograph explores the role of self-cultivation and moral exemplarity in mobilising and sustaining Hong Kong’s green living movement. More broadly, the book seeks to contribute to research on climate activism and prefigurative politics by foregrounding the significance of virtue ethics and moral exemplarity alongside movement repertoires and organisational strategies.
I am currently developing a new research project on comparative medical ethics and the cultivation and transmission of medical virtues in the United Kingdom and several Chinese-speaking societies.
Research Interests
- Morality and ethics, especially environmental and medical ethics
- Self-cultivation
- Social movements and prefigurative politics
- Green and sustainable living
- Health, healing, and medicine
- Spirituality and reenchantment
- Engaged Buddhism and Humanistic Buddhism
Current Projects
- Comparative medical ethics and the cultivation of medical virtues.
- Spirituality in medicine and mental health care.
- The ethics and politics of responsibility for health, with particular attention to self-care.
Education
DPhil in Anthropology, University of Oxford
MSc by Research in Anthropology, University of Edinburgh
BA in Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle
Selected publications
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Lou, L., 2025. Taking responsibility for one’s life. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. [online] Available at: https://medanthro.net/critical-care/taking-responsibility-for-ones-life/
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Lou, L.I., 2025. Nationalism and the legitimacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Macau: Colonial legacy and contemporary imaginaries. In Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries (pp. 277-298). Routledge.
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Lou, L.I.T. and Lora-Wainwright, A.L., (2025). When sociality fails to produce solidarity: environmental NGOs and the politics of public engagement in contemporary China. BioSocieties, 20(4), pp.683-703.
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Lou, L.I., 2023. Healing nature: spiritual ecology, self-cultivation, and social transformation in Hong Kong. Worldviews: Religions, Culture, and Ecology, 27(3), pp.189-209.
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Lou, L.I., 2023. Preservation by demolition: Toxic heritage in contemporary China. In Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice (pp. 174-187). Routledge.
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Lou, L.I.T., 2022. The art of unnoticing: Risk perception and contrived ignorance in China. American Ethnologist, 49(4), pp.580-594.
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Lou, L.I., 2022. From hygienic modernity to green modernity: Two modes of modern living in Hong Kong. Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity and Transnational Exchange 1945-1990, p.105.
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Lou, L.I.T., 2019. Freedom as ethical practices: On the possibility of freedom through freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. Asian Anthropology, 18(4), pp.249-265.
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Fabian, N. and Lou, L.I.T., 2019. The struggle for sustainable waste management in Hong Kong: 1950s–2010s. Worldwide Waste, 2(1), pp.10-10.
Doctoral Supervision
I welcome inquiries from prospective doctoral students.
- Ruoyu Jia, Menstrual Governance in Socialist China (History, Durham University, co-supervised with Chris Courtney and Roslyn Malcolm)
- Yumeng Liu, Psychotherapy for the Chinese: An ethnographic study of Imagery Communication Psychotherapy (Anthropology, Durham University, co-supervised with Liana Chase and Qing Cao)
- Bohan Xiao, In Search of Freedom: Lifestyle-Migration to a Post-Industrial City in Contemporary China (Anthropology, Durham University, co-supervised with Felix Ringel)
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