Name: Dr. Loretta Lou
Affiliation: University of Macau
Contact details: lorettalou@um.edu.mo
Dr. Loretta Lou is an anthropologist with research interests in environment, well-being, social movements, morality and ethics. Geographically she focuses on Greater China, including Hong Kong and Macau. After she received her DPhil in Anthropology from the University of Oxford, she worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick before joining the University of Macau as a Lecturer of Sociology & Macao Fellow in Social Sciences.
Dr. Lou’s doctoral project was an ethnographic study of a new way of living called ‘Green Living’ in Hong Kong. She was interested in the implications of Green Living for self-understanding, social relations, everyday ethics, social movements, and the ways these domains were being shaped by Hong Kong’s social and political climate since the handover in 1997. Building on her previous research on environmentalism in Asia, her postdoctoral research at Warwick focused on the ways Chinese people make sense of toxic pollution, their everyday experiences of (in)justice, and their psychological coping mechanisms. More broadly, her research in China and Hong Kong have led her to explore notions of freedom, responsibility, and the politics of complicity and victimhood in contemporary Chinese society.
Geographical/topical area of interest: East Asia, especially China, Hong Kong, Macau.
