Yiran MA (马一然) is a DPhil student studying Higher Education and Research on Research, at the University of Oxford, supervised by Professor Simon Marginson and Professor Alis Oancea. Yiran’s DPhil research explores inclusive, diverse, equal, and sustainable impact cultures in multidisciplinary challenge-led research collaborations. Informed by a theory of change, she compares universities’ climate-nature emergency research centres in the UK, America, Canada, Australia, Finland, mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa, and South Asia based on a phenomenology philosophy. She particularly focuses on multi-level implementations as a change process resulting from imaginaries of outcomes, futurity, agency, resources and knowledge mobility in the networks, and coordination of various interests of multiple stakeholders.
Her MSc in Higher Education dissertation at Oxford was entitled ‘All Rivers Run into the Sea: Ecological Research Cultures Shaping Situated Convergence in International Research Collaborations at Sino-Anglophone Research Centres for Higher Education’ with the mixed methods of conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-two early career researchers in the UK, the US, Hong Kong, and mainland China combined with bibliometric social network analysis on cross-border co-authored publications. The findings were constructed with a systems thinking approach by comparing international research collaboration with a water-cycle system, as a metaphor for plural international-collaborative research cultures moving beyond the Euro-American hegemonic centre-periphery model. Chinese Taoist moral values informed the discussions, treasuring ‘the supreme goodness is like water’ to envision a cultural and values-oriented unity-in-diversity global science system, empowering researchers’ self-determining agency freedom in embracing diverse knowledges as global common goods.
Before embarking on her DPhil in 2024, Yiran studied MSc in Higher Education at the University of Oxford (2023-2024), an MEd in Comparative Global Studies in Education and Development at the University of Hong Kong (2022-2023), and a B.A. in English Language and Literature in the Northeastern University, China (2018-2022) with an exchange semester in the University of Silesia in Poland to study Pedagogy and intercultural education.
She is passionate about making real-world changes inspired by her working experiences at the International Centre for Higher Education Innovation under the auspices of UNESCO, International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Commission for Education and Communications, United Nations Volunteer, and Columbia University Global Centre’s ANOBO (arts has no boundary), committing to digital transformation of higher education internationalisation, world heritage -protection and female arts education for sustainable livelihood, refugee children’s peaceful education through games, and global citizenship and environmental education through arts exhibition respectively. She has voluntarily taught English online to an orphan school’s children in Tanzania and a rural primary school in China for two years. Currently, she voluntarily serves Innovative Food Systems Teaching and Learning (IFSTAL), a pioneering interdisciplinary training community enabling a step change in food systems thinking for sustainable transformation facing climate and nature emergencies.
Embracing a planetary citizenship identity in an Anthropocene era, Yiran aspires to justify global opening ontology with pluralistic ecology of knowledges to advocate an entangled more-than-human relationality. She aspires to expand her research impact beyond academia by collaboratively producing knowledge with multiple-stakeholder participation, followed by artistically and creatively disseminating research findings via developing hand-in-hand toolkits, holding global open workshops, organising awareness-raising arts exhibitions, establishing virtual knowledge-exchange hub and Podcast to facilitate the local communities’ autonomous self-cultivation agency with planetary identity, and reshape the long-term-impact research cultures and more-than-human social morality. She welcomes collaborations with friends worldwide from diverse disciplines, cultures, and sectors beyond academia to ‘learn to change the world’ together by reshaping our relations with self, others, the world, and nature!
Supervisors
Professor Alis Oancea and Professor Simon Marginson
Publications
MA, Y. (2024). Jumping out of the fishbowl. Swimming to the sea: Scholars’ reflexive agency in shaping global opening research network. Cambridge Educational Research e-Journal (CERJ), 11, (upcoming in December 2024).
MA, Y. (2024). All rivers run into the sea: Ecological research cultures shaping situated convergence in international research collaborations at Sino-Anglophone research centres for higher education. Oxford University Research Archive.
MA, Y. (2024). Shaping ecological research cultures for Sino-US Humanities and Social Sciences international research collaboration: ‘Chinese-characteristic’ knowledge diplomacy in geopolitical negotiations. Poster presented at the Centre for Global Higher Education’s ‘Rethinking the Geopolitics Of Higher Education’ conference. https://www.researchcghe.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Poster-session-Yiran-Ma-CGHE-Geopolitics-2024.pdf
MA, Y. (2022). Multiple-sphere comparative case study of ICT, equality, and 21st-century competence in higher education internationalisation resilience: Diachronic IC map framework based on organisational change theory. Studies in Humanities, 71-95. https://www.dakamconferences.org/_files/ugd/bac820_81a9148cc5b242be8d0e6c5d6071e1b1.pdf#page=71
MA, Y. (2022). Chinese students’ dilemmas of neoliberal storm in ivory tower: A top-down reasoning and bottom-up implications. International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Science, 9 (3), 344-348. https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijaers.93.40.
Recent conference presentations
Higher Education and Research Association Annual Conference (HERA), From Competition to Collaboration in Higher Education (2024):
Jumping out of the Fishbowl. Swimming to the Sea: Sino-Anglophone Multi-case Study of Ecological Research Cultures in International Research Collaboration at Research Centres for Higher Education
University of Oxford STORIES Conference (2024):
Reconciling Ecological Sustainability through Multi-Spatial Imaginaries Created by Tertiary Education Institutions: Nested in Reconstructed Development Views through Global Social Imaginaries
University of Cambridge Kaleidoscope Conference (2024):
Teaching Empowering Research Through Student-Engaged Knowledge-Construction Communities: Ecological Nature of Knowledge for Openness, Reflexivity, and Criticality