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Staff profile

Overview

Xin Fan

Research Student

Affiliations
Affiliation
Research Student in the School of Education

Biography

Xin Fan is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at Durham University, funded by the ESRC NINE Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP). She is supervised by Dr Cora Lingling Xu and Professor Vikki Boliver.

 

Her doctoral research investigates rural school choice in China through an ethnographic study based on one year of fieldwork and 98 interviews with families in B City. The project examines how rural parents understand, navigate, and experience school choice within a highly stratified and policy-mediated educational system. It focuses on the ways in which educational decision-making is shaped by unequal access to resources, institutional constraints, and broader urban–rural inequalities.

 

The study draws on Bourdieusian sociology to conceptualise school choice as a socially structured practice rather than a purely individual decision. It explores how parental aspirations, strategies, and experiences are formed within unequal field conditions, and how educational investment extends beyond financial expenditure to include emotional, temporal, and relational forms of commitment.

 

Xin’s work contributes to debates on educational inequality, family strategies, and rural transformation, with a particular interest in how individual practices intersect with wider social and spatial processes. Her research has been presented at major conferences including BERA, ECER, and the Cambridge China Education Forum.

 

She has published in journals including the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Studies in the Education of Adults, Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, and is currently developing further outputs from her doctoral research, including a forthcoming book chapter. She also serves as an editor for the Australian and International Journal of Rural Education and as a peer reviewer for several international journals.

 

Prior to her PhD, Xin completed a BA in Japanese at Nanjing University (Outstanding Graduate, top 5%), an LLM at Beijing Foreign Studies University, and an MA in Education and International Development at University College London, where she graduated with Distinction under full scholarship from the China Scholarship Council.

 

Her research interests include educational inequality, rural education, school choice, family decision-making, and socio-spatial processes of educational change.

Publications

Journal Article