Staff profile

Xiao is a Bridging Fellow (2025-2026) based at the Narrative Practices Lab in the Discovery Platform of Institute of Medical Humanities. Her project – entitled ‘Redrafting Futures: Postpartum Stillness, Craft and the Remaking of Selves – will pilot creative, participatory workshops that reimagine postpartum ‘self-care’ as collective feminist preservation.

She holds a PhD in Women’s Studies from the University of York, where her doctoral research investigated the commercialisation of zuoyuezi (‘sitting the month’) in China. Positioned at the intersection of political economy, feminist cultural studies, and medical humanities, her work challenges Eurocentric, biomedical and individualised models of health by reframing postpartum well-being as a culturally situated practice of self-care, negotiation, and embodied resistance.