Dr. Loretta Lou is an anthropologist at the University of Warwick and a Postdoctoral Associate at Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA). Her research interests lie in the areas of environmental humanities, medical anthropology, social changes, social movements, and the meanings of a good/ethical life in southern China, including Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. After she received her DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford, she went on to work as a Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies (SIAS) for the Forum on Health, Environment and Development (FORHEAD) before joining the ERC funded project Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry at the University of Warwick.

Loretta’s doctoral research was an ethnographic study of a new way of ethical living called ‘green living’ in Hong Kong. She was interested in the implications of green living for self-nature relationship, social dynamics, ethics, political mobilizations, and the ways these domains are being shaped by Hong Kong’s social and political climate since its handover from British to Chinese sovereignty.

Building on her previous research on environmentalism in Asia, Loretta's postdoctoral project at Warwick focuses on the ways Chinese people make sense of environmental pollution and their psychological coping strategies. More broadly, her research in China has led her to explore notions of responsibility, rights, justice, and the politics of complicity and victimhood in contemporary China.

Prior to her academic career, Dr. Lou was a Public Health Researcher for the National Health Service (NHS) in the U.K., where she conducted a qualitative study on migrant women’s experience of antenatal care in Scotland. She retains a strong interest in applied medical sociology and is committed to action research on women’s health movements in the U.S. and the U.K.

Publications

Referred journal articles and book chapters

(Under contract) ‘From Hygienic Modernity to Green Modernity? Two Modes of Modern Living in Contemporary Hong Kong’, in Modern Living in Asia 1945-1990, edited by Yunah Lee and Megha Rajguru, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

2017. 'In the Absence of a Peasantry, What, Then, Is a Hong Kong Farmer?', in Made in China: A Quarterly on Chinese Labour, Civil Society, volume 2, issue 4, pp.56-59.

[Reprinted in Franceschini, I., & Loubere, N. (Eds.). (2018). The Made in China Yearbook 2017: Gilded Age. Australia: ANU Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvgd1hr.38)]

2017. 'The Material Culture of Green Living in Hong Kong’, in Anthropology Now. April: Volume 9 (1), pp.70-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2017.1291055

2016 'Beyond Miracles: How Traditional Chinese Medicine Establishes Professional Legitimacy in Post-colonial Macau', in Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, Anthropology.

Book reviews

2018. Review of 'Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century' (2016), edited by Gonçalo Santos and Stevan Harrell, in The China Quarterly, volume 233, pp.258-260.

2017. Review of ‘Anthropology of China: China as Ethnographic and Theoretical Critique’ (2016), by Charlotte Bruckermann and Stephan Feuchtwang, in LSE Review of Books.

2015. Review of ‘Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World’ (2014), edited by Melissa L. Caldwell, Jakob Klein, and Yuson Jung, in Allegra: Anthropology, Law, Art & World, April 1.

2014. Review of ‘Green Politics in China: Environmental Governance and State–Society Relations’ (2014), by Joy Zhang and Michael Barr, in The China Journal. Issue (72), pp.176-178.

Public writing

2018. ‘Village Besieged’: An Elegy for Victims and Protest Against Taiwan’s Petrochemical Pollution, in Toxic News (edition 13), 1 November.

2018. “The (In)visibility of Fireworks Pollution”, in Toxic News (edition. 9), 1 February.

2014 “Hong Kong’s Vegan Guru”, in China Dialogue, 16 April.

Email: L dot Lou at warwick dot ac dot uk

Office: E0.21