Dr Vickie Zhang

I am a cultural geographer interested in the intensities and energetics of working life in times of economic change.

My research can be broadly categorised into three strands: Empirically, I explore experiences of economic change for industrial and migrant workers, through fieldwork in Australia and China. Conceptually, I develop cultural geographical approaches to affect, embodiment and subjectivity, especially those that foreground negativity and exposure. Methodologically, I experiment with non-representational styles of working and writing, including documentary filmmaking and photography.

I am currently also a Research Fellow at the School of Geography and Remote Sensing, Guangzhou University, and Treasurer of the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). 

Prior to joining Bristol, I was Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. I completed my PhD in the School of Geography, University of Melbourne, after a first year spent in the School of Sociology, Australian National University. My undergraduate studies, also at the University of Melbourne, were in Geography and German.

I was born in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, to migrant parents from Guangzhou, China. Geography has been my way of making sense of the cascading and contradictory effects of these inherited dislocations.