Staff profile

I am an anthropologist interested in the intersection of ecology, health, spirituality, healing, and activism. As an Asian specialist, I have conducted long-term fieldwork in various parts of China, including Hong Kong and Macau. I received my DPhil in Anthropology from Oxford University and was a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Germany in 2023.

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 sustainable gardening, freeganism and freecycling, zero waste initiatives, non-toxic living, spiritual ecology, and more. My research demonstrates that green living is not merely an emerging lifestyle originating from the West, but a form of prefigurative environmentalism that responds to local societal and political challenges, with roots in traditional Chinese philosophy.

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 'chemo-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 in 'Global Asia.' 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.

Underpinning all of my research are questions that revolve around agency, healing, resilience, responsibility, the interplay between self-cultivation and social transformation, and the production of knowledge and ignorance in the most mundane aspects of everyday life. I am an advocate of interdisciplinarity and strive to produce work that is accessible to audiences across multiple fields.

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'. 

My latest publications can be found here.

• 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

• 2024: Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies:
• 2023: Landhaus Fellow & Society of Fellows, Rachel Carson Center, LMU München, Germany:
• 2023: Fellow, Institute for Medical Humanities:
• 2022: Editor in Chief, Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies:
• 2020: Board member, Sci-Tech Asia:
• 2018: Lay Examiner (MRCOG Part 3), Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists:
• 2016: Editor in Asian Studies, Amsterdam University Press:

Book review

• Lou, L. I. T. (2018). Review of Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Gonçalo Santos and Stevan Harrell. Seattle, WA, and London: University of Washington Press, 2016. China Quarterly, 233, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0305741018000292
• Lou, L. I. (2014). Review of "Green Politics in China: Environmental Governance and State–Society Relations", by Joy Y. Zhang and Michael Barr. London: Pluto Press, 2013. The China journal (Canberra, A.C.T. Online), 72, https://doi.org/10.1086/677088

Chapter in book

• Lou, L. I. T. (2025). Nationalism and the Legitimacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Macau: Colonial Legacy and Contemporary Imaginaries. In I. Gaitanidis, L. F. B. Junqueira, A. Morrow, & S.-Y. Han (Eds.), Therapy, Spirituality, and East Asian Imaginaries (277-298). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.25136991.21
• Lou, L. I. (2023). Preservation by Demolition: Toxic Heritage in Contemporary China. In E. Kryder-Reid, & S. May (Eds.), Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice (174-198). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003365259-20
• Lou, L. I. (2022). From Hygienic Modernity to Green Modernity: Two Modes of Modern Living in Hong Kong Since the 1970s. In Y. Lee, & M. Rajguru (Eds.), Design and Modernity in Asia: National Identity And Transnational Exchange 1945–1990 (105-120). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350091498.ch-6

Journal Article

• Lou, L. I. T. (2023). Healing Nature: Spiritual Ecology, Self-Cultivation, and Social Transformation in Hong Kong. Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, Ecology, 27, 189–209. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685357-02703004
• Lou, L. I. T. (2022). The art of unnoticing: Risk perception and contrived ignorance in China. American Ethnologist, 49(4), 580-594. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13099
• Lou, L. (2021). Casino capitalism in the era of COVID-19: examining Macau’s pandemic response. Social Transformations in Chinese Societies, 17(2), 69-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/stics-09-2020-0025
• Fabian, N., & Lou, L. I. T. (2019). The Struggle for Sustainable Waste Management in Hong Kong: 1950s–2010s. Worldwide Waste, 2(1), https://doi.org/10.5334/wwwj.40
• Lou, L. I. T. (2019). Freedom as ethical practices: on the possibility of freedom through freeganism and freecycling in Hong Kong. Asian Anthropology, 18(4), 249-265. https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478x.2019.1633728
• Graeber, D., & Lou, L. I. T. (2019). Bullshit Jobs: A Conversation with David Graeber. Made in China (Canberra, A.C.T. Online), 4(2), https://doi.org/10.22459/mic.04.02.2019.19
• Lou, L. I. T. (2017). In the Absence of a Peasantry, What, Then, Is a Hong Kong Farmer?. Made in China (Canberra, A.C.T. Online), 2(4), https://doi.org/10.22459/mic.02.04.2017.10
• Lou, L. I. T. (2017). The Material Culture of Green Living in Hong Kong. Anthropology Now, 9(1), https://doi.org/10.1080/19428200.2017.1291055