Lai Pik Chan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology of the University of Cologne.  She completed her Bachelor degree in Comparative Literature in the University of Hong Kong, and her Masters degree in Professional Language and Intercultural Studies in the University of Leeds.

The GSSC provides a great office environment for me to focus on my writing as well as discuss with other PhD students who work on similar topics.  Also, the academic workshops organised and research fundings provided by the GSSC have given me the opportunities to further academic exchange with international scholars in Cologne and abroad. 

Lai Pik’s PhD project ‘Foreign English teachers: opportunities and challenges (working title)’ focuses on the lived experience of foreign English teachers in Shenzhen, one of the four most economically developed cities in China. While Shenzhen aspires to become an ‘international city’ and places a strong emphasis on the internationalization of education, it attracts a lot of international migrants to work in Shenzhen as English teachers.  The research provides an ethnography of the life of foreign English teachers working in different education institutions in Shenzhen. The project also investigates how foreign English teachers of different backgrounds experience and navigate China’s immigration policy and employment practices in the English teaching industry, as well as how they perceive the issue of legal citizenship and cultivate cosmopolitan citizenship as foreigners trying to make a life in China.