I was born in London, but grew up in a small village in Cornwall, though I now spend most of my time in Beijing. I originally graduated in French from Aston University, where I had the good luck to be influenced intellectually by Professor Paul Chilton, who ran a course on the French school of discourse analysis, including such thinkers as Saussure, Bourdieu and Foucault.
Following this, I followed a slightly indirect route to China, passing via Barcelona, where I spent two years teaching predominantly business English. Feeling the need for a personal challenge, I applied to VSO, was accepted, and in 2001 found myself en route to a remote town in Yunnan Province in the southwest of China.
Wenshan, high on a dry plateau in the southeast of Yunnan, is a comparativey poor area of China, and this is where I was sent by VSO. I spent two years at Wenshan Teachers College, where I taught English, communicative teaching methodologies and started developing an interest in health issues in China, through carrying out HIV/AIDS education work in the College.
This interest in health in China stayed with me and in 2004, a year after leaving Wenshan, I found myself on the MA Chinese Studies course at Leeds University, combining my interest in Chinese politics and health with critical studies and Michel Foucault.
Since then, I have been living continuously in China, first working at Shenzhen Chronic Disease Prevention and Control Hospital on STD/HIV prevention education and more traditional public health research, and subsequently in research roles in Beijing, where my focus has been on China's social development (with a focus on health issues).
I remain committed to understanding health and the politics of health in China, and am currently applying for PhD funding to return to the UK in 2008 to work on this. Equally, I am a reflective person, and I am concerned with how values inhere in everyday life and practices and in thinking about values in research.
I enjoy food, films, books, friends and travel. I love exploratory travel, and recently returned to Yunnan, exploring places off the beaten track. I keep planning to write a Yunnan cookery book, but this somehow never comes to fruition.
