Lijia Yu is a PhD Candidate in the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication. He holds an MA in Education Management from King's College London and an MA in English Studies from The University of Hong Kong. He is one of the committee members of the LDC seminar series. Before rejoining King's, Lijia worked as an English lecturer at a higher education institution in China. He also served as a government relations officer for a leading cosmetics company in Shanghai. His doctoral research investigates the language identity of Chinese people influenced by the intersection of massive internal migration and the Mandarin language policy. Specifically, following a Bourdieusian tradition, his project examines how dialect speakers negotiate and perform their identities through everyday linguistic practices and interactions with a set of social relations.

His principal supervisor is Professor Constant Leung and his secondary supervisor is Dr Martin Dewey.

Thesis title: The Identity of Chinese People in a Mandarin Era: An Ethnography