Staff profile

I am a sociocultural anthropologist with research interests in environment, health, healing, social movements, agency, and subjectivity. As a China specialist, I have conducted long-term fieldwork in different parts of the country, including Hong Kong and Macau.

My first project was an ethnographic study of green living and its implications for individuals, society, and activism in postcolonial Hong Kong.

Building on my interest in environmental movements, my second project, funded by the ERC and titled 'Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry', focuses on the ways mainland Chinese people negotiate and make sense of toxic pollution, their perceptions of (environmental) injustice, and how they cope with contrived ignorance.

Currently, my research is concerned with various modalities of healing therapies and self-help endeavors amidst the growing mental health crisis. Through an ethnographic exploration of these practices and interventions, I hope to portray the condition of life in the contemporary world and processes of healing in non-clinical settings, with a particular focus on China.

Underpinning all of my research are questions that revolve around the interplay between individual agency and social constraints, acceptance and resistance, self-transformation and social transformation, as well as the production of knowledge and ignorance in the most mundane areas of people’s everyday life.

At Durham, I teach modules on environmental sustainability, critical global health, planetary health, and social movements at the Department of Anthropology.

I was primarily trained in the U.K. (DPhil. Oxon.), but I have taught and studied in other countries before coming to Durham. I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Macau and held Postdoctoral and Visiting Fellowships at Warwick, the LSE, and the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany.

My latest publications can be found here.

• Environment and sustainability
• Wellbeing
• Mental health
• Therapy and healing
• Social movements
• Agency
• Subjectivity
• East Asia, especially China

• 2023: Landhaus Fellow & Society of Fellows, Rachel Carson Center, LMU München, Germany:
• 2023: Fellow, Institute for Medical Humanities:
• 2022: Co-editor-in-chief of Worldwide Waste: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies:
• 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. (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, 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