Cara Xu is a PhD candidate at Loughborough University, supported by institutional sponsorship. She has over ten years of experience in the media and creative industries, where she held managerial and director roles leading cross-functional teams and projects.
Her MBA from the University of Birmingham marked a transition from industry to academic inquiry. Her doctoral research explores creative labour in China’s digital economy, with a particular focus on the normalisation of precarity, the structural inequalities shaping women creators’ experiences, and the ways they navigate temporary anxiety and self-exploration.
Grounded in cultural and feminist studies, her work offers critical insights into gender, affect, and labour in platformised creative cultures.
“Precarity as the Norm”: A Feminist Ethnography of Women Content Creators in China’s Platform Economy
PGR Supervisors: Prof Lise Jaillant and Dr Jilly Kay
Cara’s research examines women creators on Xiaohongshu, focusing on precarity as a norm, gendered inequalities, and how creators frame anxiety as temporary while pursuing self-exploration. She works at the intersection of cultural and feminist studies.