Dr Yushan Xie is a Research Officer at Oxford University’s Centre on Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) and a Social Science Engagement Fellow working with the Government’s Department for Education. Her research is grounded in a commitment to social justice, educational equity, and individual agency. Yushan’s research focuses on the post-16 education landscape, which brings together areas including youth transitions and educational trajectories, skills, mobility, and the experiences of marginalised youth.
At SKOPE, she contributes to various projects on diverse tertiary education systems, working with UK policy actors and international organisations like WorldSkills International. For her Social Science Engagement Fellowship, Yushan works closely with the Task and Finish Group researching and mapping a range of stakeholder-led interventions that support care-experienced young people’s access to, participation, and outcomes in higher education.
She was a fully funded Clarendon Scholar during her doctoral research, which 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. At the Department, she taught postgraduate-level modules as a Doctoral Teaching Fellow for two years.