Kexin Huang

ResearchGateLink opens in a new window: Kexin Huang

Email: Kexin.Huang@warwick.ac.uk

Current PhD student

Biography

Kexin Huang is a PhD candidate and a recipient of the International Chancellor’s Scholarship. Her doctoral research investigates children’s play as a vital everyday practice for the cultivation of democracy. She has worked as a social worker, art exhibition coordinator, and cinema workshop facilitator. Before starting her PhD, Kexin worked as a Research Assistant at Northumbria University on the Gender-Inclusive CitiesLink opens in a new window project, with several academic publications and co-developing an exhibition that focuses on urban gender justice. Currently, in addition to her research, she also works part-time as a social media manager at the London-based technology company NetMind, which contributes to her broader interest in technology and sustainable human futures.

Research overview

In her PhD research, Kexin examines how children’s everyday play creates spaces where normative social orders are disrupted, hierarchies are challenged, and alternative forms of collective life can be imagined. Her work approaches play not only as a developmental activity, but as an everyday practice through which power, autonomy, and social relations are continually negotiated. Beyond questions of democracy, she is also interested in the aesthetic dimensions of the everyday: the pleasures, rhythms, and improvisations of ordinary practices, and how these seemingly mundane moments shape both individual experience and wider processes of social and cultural transformation.

Academic background

2023 - University of Warwick: PhD Global Sustainable Development

2021 - 2023 Northumbria University: Research Assistant

2020 - 2021 Newcastle University: MA Sociology and Social Research
Grade: Distinction

Supervisors

Dr. Wes Lin - Global Sustainable Development
Dr. Camilla Audia - Global Sustainable Development

Research interests

Play
Everydayness
Gender
Power and Subversive Practices
Sociology of Technology
Urbanism and Spatial Politics
Creative and Participatory Research Methods

Publications

Jin, J., Huang, K., & Zhu, M. (2023). Engendering the city: A participatory approach to gender-responsive planning and urban design in Cairo. In M. Pourya Asl (Ed.), Urban poetics and politics in contemporary South Asia and the Middle East (pp. 269–290). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-6650-6.ch013

Jin, J., Bertolino, N., & Huang, K. (2023). Gender walks in the city: An exploratory study on gender-responsive urban planning. In Conference proceedings – XXIX International Seminar on Urban Form: ISUF 2022: Urban redevelopment and revitalisation. A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 565–575). Łódź University of Technology Press. https://doi.org/10.34658/9788367934039.45

Jin, J., Bertolino, N., & Huang, K. (2022). Gender walks in the city: A study on gender responsive planning and neighbourhood design. In Book of Abstracts: XXIX Conference International Seminar on Urban Form: Urban Redevelopment and Revitalisation – A Multidisciplinary Perspective (p. 80). Łódź University of Technology Press. https://isuf2022.org/abstracts/

Media

2022 Group Exhibition, Design Feminisms, Gallery North, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK