Dr Yushan Xie’s 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, covering technical and vocational learning, higher education, and other pathways of learning, training and work.
At the Department, Yushan leads and contributes to various projects on diverse tertiary education systems, working with UK policy actors and international organisations. She was awarded a Social Science Engagement Fellowship in 2026, working 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 leads the NEET Narratives and Youth Re-Engagement project, which looks at how people who self-identify as NEET (not in education, employment and training) collectively make sense of education, learning, and work in a digital community.
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 and student life trajectories in China. She worked with students coming from marginalised rural backgrounds pursuing higher education at the lower/middle 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 supervises MSc dissertations and has taught postgraduate-level modules. She has a professional background working across NGOs, government and the corporate world.