Kefan Xue

Kefan Xue is a final-year DPhil candidate in Area Studies (research discipline: Sociology) at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research has been funded by Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and the British Association for International and Comparative Education. She is expected to graduate in July 2025.

Kefan’s academic commitment to addressing social and educational inequalities is rooted in her long-standing experience of volunteer teaching in marginalised areas across China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Kenya. These engagements continue to inform both her research agenda and pedagogical values. Her broad research and teaching interests span childhood, family, care, education, gender, health and wellbeing, and qualitative methodology.

Her DPhil thesis, also her first book project, is titled Young Carers in China. It explores the lives of children who provide unpaid care to ill or disabled family members, a largely invisible group in both Chinese policy discourse and academic research. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with 30 families across rural and urban China, the study conceptualises the emotionally intense and morally charged caregiving relationships co-constructed between children and their families. The research contributes new empirical insights and conceptual tools to the global sociology of childhood, family, and care, while challenging Western-centric frameworks by situating children’s caregiving in the Chinese sociocultural context.

Kefan holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (2020) and a BA from the University of Warwick (2019), both in Educational Research. Beyond her thesis, she has collaborated on several interdisciplinary research projects in sociology, education, and public health. Her publications include peer-reviewed articles in Sex Education, Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, Applied Research in Quality of Life, and Annals of General Psychiatry, with multiple further manuscripts currently under revise & resubmit at Journal of Marriage and Family and Qualitative Inquiry.

Kefan has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students at Oxford and beyond, with a particular focus on Qualitative Research Methods, the Sociology of Childhood and Family, and Gender in Development and Education. Her teaching experience spans curriculum design, seminar delivery, dissertation supervision, and international guest lecturing. Committed to inclusive and reflexive pedagogy, Kefan creates intellectually rigorous and socially responsive learning environments that empower students to engage critically and compassionately with complex global challenges.

You can find Kefan’s C.V. and more information about her research and teaching here: https://kefanxue.com/. You may contact her via email at kefan.xue@lmh.ox.ac.uk or viickyxue@gmail.com. Thank you very much. Looking forward to hearing from you.

DPhil/book topic

Young Carers in China

Abstract

Like adults, children also care. This thesis explores the lives of young carers – children who provide informal (unpaid) care to ill or disabled family members. While young carers have received growing attention in the Global North, this vulnerable population remains largely unrecognised, undefined, and unsupported in China. Based on 15 months of fieldwork with 30 young carer families in both rural and urban China, this study draws on Hamilton and Cass’s (2017) age-sensitive theoretical framework of caregiving to examine how children experience and navigate caregiving in contemporary Chinese families.

Findings show that young carers in China undertake a complex mix of tasks, including constant emotional labour not typically expected of children by adults. They also experience ongoing physical, emotional, educational, and social depletion, such that caregiving often constrains multiple aspects of their life opportunities. I argue that young carer families function as key sites of gender socialisation and the reproduction of inequality, with girls disproportionately burdened, an issue under-explored in global young carer literature. Although children in this study demonstrated autonomy in choosing or strategically negotiating their caregiving roles, their agency was often limited, conditional, and shaped by familial and cultural expectations.

Beyond documenting how caregiving shapes children’s lived experiences and futures, I develop the concept of cruel interdependency to conceptualise the relational dynamics within young carer families. Cruel interdependency refers to a multidirectional caregiving relationship co-constructed by children and their families. It is both depleting and empowering: it places significant burdens on children, yet also deepens familial bonds and embeds caregiving within a shared moral universe of love, obligation, suffering, and resilience.  As such, this thesis contributes new empirical and conceptual insights to the global literature on care, and to the sociology of childhood and family in China.

Funding

This research has been generously supported by Lady Margaret Hall and the British Association for International and Comparative Education in recognition of academic excellence.