Rachel Murphy is Professor of Chinese Development and Society and Fellow of St Antony’s College. She obtained her doctorate in Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 1999. Her research sits at the intersections of area and development studies, sociology and anthropological demography. She examines social changes occurring in China because of industrialisation, urbanisation, demographic transition, migration, marketisation, education and state policies. Over the past twenty years she has conducted ethnography, interviews, documentary research and surveys in villages, townships, counties and cities, and has spent more than six years in China.
Her latest book, The Children of China’s Great Migration (Cambridge University Press, 2020), supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, draws on longitudinal fieldwork with children, their caregivers and migrant parents from two urbanising landlocked provinces in eastern China. It provides a rare exploration of migration, urbanisation, education, and families’ gender and intergenerational relations through the eyes of rural children whose parents have migrated for work without them. Her earlier publications appear in Population and Development Review; Population, Space and Place; Development and Change; Journal of Peasant Studies; China Quarterly and International Journal of Educational Development. She is developing new research to explore selected social problems emerging as part of China’s ongoing urbanisation.
In December 2021 (together with Genia Kostka at Freie Universität, Berlin) Rachel was awarded a small grant from the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership for collaborative activities on ‘Privacy and Ethical Online Research into Private Lives in China’.
Rachel is President of the British Association for Chinese Studies and serves on the editorial board of Modern China.
Research Interests: labour migration and urbanisation; education, culture and social mobility; anthropological demography, esp. gender imbalances; rural transformation; media
