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Shanglin Liu

PHD SCHOLAR | UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER | 2024 – 2027

Shanglin is a Sociology PhD researcher at University of Manchester, guided by an interdisciplinary supervisory team from both Sociology and Politics. His PhD project focuses on the everyday life of Romani community in contemporary UK, trying to illustrate how their lived experience as racialised subject has been ‘naturalised’ and ‘neutralised’ under the existing power dynamics, and emphases on how they formulate alternative resistance against racialisation. Shanglin aims to understand racialisation and its resistance under Stuart Hall’s frameworks of ‘the conjuncture’, expanding the analytical power of Stuart Hall’s theories on race and class. By looking into Romani community’s resistance to racialisation with their lived experiences, Shanglin attempts to re-understand race and class in UK, reading ‘the crisis’ from an everyday life perspective.

With great academic interest in race, class and postcolonialism, Shanglin is also interested in spreading theories of Stuart Hall and beyond to non-English speaking audience. Currently, Shanglin is introducing postcolonial critiques on sociology to Chinese academia, through platforms including the Chinese Sociological Association Annual Conference. He aims to translate more works by Stuart Hall and others into Chinese language, making postcolonial theories and cultural studies more accessible to Chinese readers.

As an East Asian, with strong heritage from Hui Chinese and Manchu, Shanglin is also interested in East Asia as postcolonial experience. For this field, Shanglin has been collaborating with colleagues in China, utilising archives from both China and Japan, to re-interpret Manchukuo (1932-1945) and Japanese colonialism in China from everyday life perspective, discovering how modernisation and modern life was re-imagined in Manchuria. With his colleague, Shanglin has presented several working paper (in Chinese) in the field.