Dr Kailing Xie

Dr Xie worked at the University of Warwick prior to joining Birmingham in September 2021 and completed her PhD training at the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Women’s Studies, at the University of York. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

Multi-disciplinary and internationalization of teaching and learning underpin Dr Xie’s teaching philosophy and practices. She has gained substantial teaching experiences in the field of International Development, Sociology and Politics. She is also experienced in deploying innovative methods in both research and teaching. In 2020, she worked with local artists and presented an online exhibition that showcases the generational changes among Chinese immigrants through the angle of food as part of the City of Culture Coventry 2021.

A key aspect of Dr Xie’s research engages with critical debates in gender and equality beyond a Euro-centric perspective. Based on her previous research, she is currently developing two research initiatives. The first project examines the gendered lived experience of women in light of China’s recent changes in the marriage law and population policy. The second project takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the rise of familial nationalism in China, especially during the Covid-19 crisis. It examines the affective language used in official and popular discourse to combat various challenges brought by the health crisis, and to evaluate Chinese public interpretations and responses to them as ‘patriotic citizens’.

For the current academic year, 2023/24, Dr Xie is teaching on the following modules: Identity, Inequality & Inclusive Development (Undergraduate) and Research for Public Policy and Management (Postgraduate).

In previous years, Dr Xie has taught on the following Postgraduate modules:

• Making Policy
• Gender and Development

Kailing is open to supervising projects in these areas:

• gender and reproductive politics
• emotion, identity and governance
• social and cultural transformations of China
• Chinese diaspora
• politics of citizenship and migration
• critical perspectives on emerging powers and the international order

Research interests

Current project: Politics of love: Emotional Governance in Familial Nationalism in China’s New Era

This research project builds on Kailing's published work on middle-class women’s gendered subjectivities and aspirations in which she argues that heterosexual marriage is emphasized as a primary governing institution in the organisation and reproduction of labour for China's market economy. As such it is inseparable from structures and practices of gendered inequality (Xie, 2021). This project takes the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as an empirical entry point to investigate the representation and negotiation of meanings of the interplay between family and nation in the embodied and gendered habits of social life. Crucially, it asks: how does Xi’s increasingly authoritarian rule, shored up by repressive measures and censorship, position itself as an object of love to the public? How do ordinary citizens make sense of the politics of love embedded in state discourse in their everyday experience?

Previous project:

Kailing won the City of Culture Award 2019-2020 as the Principal Investigator of the Research Project ‘Making Alien-land Home-land: A Visual documentation of Chinese communities in Coventry’ as part of the City of Culture 2021 Coventry. This project takes food as a shared cultural memory to investigate how migration to the West has shaped their understanding of and (non)performance of ‘Chineseness’. Moreover, how do these experiences contribute to their sense of (non)belonging, political (non)participation living as an ethnic minority group in the
UK. A visual exhibition is available online.