Arzhia Habibi is a DPhil in Education Candidate and uses Mandarin to conduct her research in the Chinese higher education context.

Arzhia’s research focuses on ‘expressions’ of global or world citizenship education in a Chinese higher education institution In the study, she explores the perspectives and practices of educators and students at a China-based university, which experiments with discourses related to citizenship. She further investigates how individual, local, national and global dynamics and the surrounding discourses influence worldviews and practices in a university setting.

As empirical studies on global or world citizenship education in the Chinese context are scarce, Arzhia hopes to contribute to a nascent knowledge base which may extend and add depth to the critical global discourses of global and world citizenship education, beyond Eurocentric framings.

Prior to her studies at Oxford, Arzhia received a first class Bachelor’s degree in Contemporary Chinese Studies at The University of Nottingham, and a Master’s in International Communication in Taiwan at National Chengchi University. As a child, she also attended kindergarten in Fuzhou, Fujian province of China.