Loretta LOU is Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford. Trained in Anthropology, her research revolves around the moral landscapes of Chinese societies. Across her work on social movements, green and sustainable living, environmental politics, health, healing, and medicine, she examines how people embody ethical commitments, cultivate virtues, take responsibility, and negotiate moral dilemmas within particular social and institutional milieus.
What unites these projects 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? She is 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. Her first monograph, forthcoming with the University of Washington Press, examines the potential of green living as a form of “exemplary activism.”
She received her DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Before returning to Oxford, she was Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Macau and Durham University, where she taught courses about contemporary China, Climate Change and the Anthropocene, Planetary Health, Critical Global Health, and Social Movements