School of Social and Political Science

Research interests

Yuzhu (pronounced yoo-joo) is a doctoral researcher in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to joining University of Edinburgh, Yuzhu completed her undergraduate and master's degrees in sociology at Sun Yat-sen University, China. With longitudinal research in a tertiary cancer hospital in Guangzhou, her pervious research approached cancer experience from a life course perspective, examining how advanced treatment technologies and clinical trials shape young patients' senses of temporality and futurity.

Yuzhu’s doctoral project is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a county in southern Shanxi, China. By following patients, relatives, doctors, and village medical practitioners across multiple care settings, her research traces how cancer care moves and is distributed between clinical institutions, domestic spaces, and village life. Yuzhu’s current work focuses on cancer treatment as an ongoing process of decision-making rather than a single medical intervention. She is particularly interested in how patients and families understand the limits of cure and care, and how decisions about treatment, spending, accompaniment, and dying are evaluated within flexible moral frameworks of kinship, rural community, farmer identities, and everyday citizenship. 

Yuzhu’s broader research interests include the anthropology of cancer and end-of-life care, kinship and care, morality and ordinary ethics, rural China, Traditional Chinese medicine and village healthcare, environment and sensory anthropology, and ethnographic writing as a methodological practice.