Yushan Xie is a Research Officer at Oxford University’s Centre on Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance (SKOPE). Her research is grounded in a commitment to social justice, educational equity, and individual agency. She completed her DPhil in Education at Oxford University, during which her research investigated the interplay between student mobility, access, experience, graduate outcomes, and the socio-political imaginaries that shape higher education (HE) and student life trajectories in China. She worked with students coming from marginalised rural backgrounds pursuing HE at the lower tier of the institutional hierarchy and explored how they navigated and negotiated with dominant ideological frameworks like meritocracy, elitism, and credentialism. As a researcher at SKOPE, she has contributed to various consultancy and research projects on diverse tertiary education systems, working with UK policymakers and international organisations like WorldSkills International.
She was a fully-funded Clarendon Scholar and successfully secured several scholarships and grants during her DPhil journey. At the Department of Education, she taught postgraduate-level modules for two years as a Doctoral Teaching Fellow.
Publications
Xie, Y., Khanapurkar, R., & Patel, J. (accepted). On the move: Reflections on using mobile methods in rural areas of China and India. International Journal of Qualitative Methods.
Robson, J., Xie, Y., Neagu, M., & Relly, S. J. (2025). From competition to coordination: Rethinking post-16 education and training in the UK. Report presented to the Nuffield Foundation.
Xie, Y., & Sum, M. (2024). Higher Education Leadership Challenges and Responses to COVID-19 in China and the UK: A Need for Ethical, Collaborative, and Compassionate Leadership. In M. Drinkwater, P. Deane, & Y. Waghid (Eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Context and Transformative Leadership in Higher Education, 105-127. Chicago.
Xie, Y., & Robson, J. (2024). WorldSkills as a catalyst for system-level change. Report presented to WorldSkills.
Xie, Y. & Liu. Y. (2021). Who do you hang out with? How Chinese students’ social networks relate to perceived oral proficiency gains during study abroad experiences. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, 6(1), 59-90.