Duoduo Li

MPhil Social Anthropology, 2024

I’m Duoduo, a recent graduate in Social Anthropology, interested in how people make sense of themselves, their emotions, and the worlds they live in.

My research explored the rise of popular psychology and therapeutic culture in contemporary China. Through ethnographic fieldwork with middle aged women in a county level city, I looked at how psychological ideas and everyday practices of self cultivation shape the ways people understand themselves and imagine a good life. More broadly, I’m interested in gender, care, subjectivity, and the ways ideas change as they travel across different social and cultural worlds.

Outside anthropology, I love animals of all kinds, anime and manga culture, and slightly melancholic novels that encourage a little too much self reflection. I also enjoy strength training and Pilates.

More than anything, I love meeting people whose lives and ways of seeing the world are different from my own. Perhaps unsurprisingly for an anthropologist, I find few things more fascinating than discovering how many different ways there are to be a person.