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Staff profile

Overview

Dr Loretta Lou

Assistant Professor

Affiliations
AffiliationTelephone
Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology
Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities

Biography

Social purpose is at the heart of my academic practice, and my work is driven by a desire to inspire change through research, writing, and education.

Broadly speaking, my research focuses on environmental movements and regenerative practices that aim to heal both people and the Planet Earth. My first project was an ethnographic study of ‘green living’ in Hong Kong, an environmental and cultural movement that encompasses a wide range of activities, such as permaculture and sustainable gardening, freeganism and freecycling, zero waste initiatives, spiritual ecology, and more. I argue that green living is not a neoliberal project of responsibilization imported from the West, but rather a mode of prefigurative activism aimed at healing both personal and social wounds, with roots in traditional Chinese thought, particularly the ideal of moral exemplars.

Building on my interest in agency and environmental movements, my second project focused on how Chinese people lived with toxic pollution by bargaining with their toxic heritage and coping through unnoticing. While these strategies highlight the lack of solidarity in the face of environmental injustice, they also foreground the creative and life-affirming ways people in the Global South adapt to the Anthropocene. (This research was part of the ERC-funded project 'Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry,' Grant Agreement No. 639583).

In addition to my work on environmentalism, I have a sustained interest in health, healing, ethnomedicine, and medical pluralism. Prior to my PhD, I worked as a public health researcher and medical translator within the NHS. I have also researched how colonial legacies shape the research and writing of Macau's medical histories, how these histories are leveraged to serve contemporary political agendas, as well as nationalism and the legitimacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in postcolonial Macau.

My current research explores what healing means in contemporary societies, with a focus on how various social, ecological, and spiritual practices facilitate healing across diverse contexts and settings. This work aims to contribute to the anthropology of restoration, repair, and resilience, as well as the broader field of global mental health by illuminating alternatives to biomedical and psychiatric approaches to healing. In doing so, it seeks to cultivate more inclusive and sustainable pathways to holistic wellbeing.

At Durham, I teach modules on the Anthropocene, Critical Global Health, Planetary Health, and Social Movements in the Department of Anthropology. I was a finalist for two teaching awards in 2024: 'Outstanding Contribution to Teaching and Learning' and 'Inspirational Educator'. 

I received my DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford and was awarded a Landhaus Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center in Germany in 2023. Prior to Durham, I had worked at the University of Macau and Warwick University.

My latest publications can be found here.

Research interests

  • Ecology and Environmentalism
  • Health and Wellbeing
  • Healing and Therapies
  • Spirituality, especially Buddhism
  • Mental health
  • Self-care and Self-cultivation
  • Social movements
  • East and Southeast Asia, especially China

Esteem Indicators

Publications

Book review

Chapter in book

Journal Article

Supervision students

Bohan Xiao

Jamie Emmerson

Postgraduate Fellow

Yumeng Liu