Summary
Dr Canglong Wang is currently the Co-Programme Director for Chinese Studies at the University of Hull. He joined the University firstly as a part-time modular lecturer and then a full-time lecturer since Feb 2019. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Edinburgh.
Since completion of his doctoral project about Confucian education in contemporary China in December 2018, he maintains intense interest in this topic and keeps on his exploration. As a China Study researcher and a sociologist, he is skilled at addressing this project by both empirical and theoretical approaches. Besides Confucianism and classical education, his other research areas cover Chinese citizenship, sociology of education, social theory (particularly of Foucault), individualisation of Chinese society, and qualitative methodology.
Canglong is committed to furthering and expanding his research in two directions.
(1) The first theoretical approach is to draw upon the conceptual toolkit by Michel Foucault, in particular, technology of self, care of self, and ethical mode of self-government, and link them up with the empirical data of Confucian education in contemporary China. By this he aims to reveal what subjectivity and how subject-making are actualized through Confucian learning and teaching in the modernity conditions in China.
(2) The second is concerning the shifted methodology for data collection. Besides doing fieldwork in "material" spaces, he is engaged in expanding to digital media such as WeChat, which has been playing a vital part in rejuvenating Confucian education in contemporary China.
He is currently serving as PI for an international cooperation research project, “Reconstruction of Confucian Jiaohua Spaces in Contemporary China” (project ID: 2020ZA01; funding amount: ¥200,000, equivalent to £21,000). This two-year project is funded by the State Laboratory of Sub-tropical Architecture at South China University of Technology (SCUT). This project aims to bring scholars of multi-disciplinary backgrounds together and to encourage international collaborations surrounding the particular topic.