Keynote speakers

Fengshu Liu is Professor at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo (UiO), Norway. She is the director for the new international Mphil. program in ‘Education and Social Change: Childhood and Youth Studies’ at UiO. She also coordinated the UiO’s international Mphil. program in Comparative and International Education until 2020.

Liu’s research cuts across childhood and youth studies, sociology of education, comparative and international education, and China studies. Much of her work examines the interplay between socio-cultural and institutional changes and children and young people in contemporary societies, with special, but not exclusive, regard to China. More specifically, it studies children’s and young people’s experiences of ‘global modernization’ and how current political, economic, cultural, technological, educational, socio-spatial and demographic processes shape various forms of challenges as well as opportunities for young people. Besides, her work also touches upon such kindred themes as culture and education, Confucian self-cultivation, school culture and gender, and teaching and learning in higher education.

In addition to articles published in highly reputed international journals, she has also authored two books: Urban youth in China: Modernity, the Internet and the self (2011, Routledge), and Modernization as lived experiences: Three generations of young men and women in China (2020, Routledge) as part of her larger project on three generations of young men and women in China and Norway.