Mr Tongyu Wu

My overarching research interest is in understanding students’ lived experience, identity construction, educational inequalities in relation to higher education.

In my current PhD project, I aimed to understand/explore the interplay between rurality and higher education by focusing on rural students’ transition to universities in the Chinese context.

My theoretical focus at present, is on theories related to identity development/construction in practice from a social-cultural perspective. Specifically, I mainly draw on Dorothy Holland (1998)’s work of “figured worlds” to examine identity production of rural university students in my current PhD project. Also, based on this, I would like to extend my theoretical interest to epistemic injustice in relation to the marginalized positioning of rural knowledge, values and experiences in the process of modernization in Chinese society.

My methodological interest is on using narrative inquiry in diverse ways to research individual’s lived experiences.