Mingdan Wu is trained in the fields of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. She received her MA in Applied Linguistics at the same department, with Distinction, in Fall 2018. Her research focuses on language, race, work, and governmentality. She has a particular interest in ethnographic approaches to language as a site of the reproduction of social inequality, and to questions of labor, gender, and race and ethnicity. She was also invited by the University of Vienna to give a lecture on ethnography to undergraduates in applied linguistics. She received her visiting scholarship from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). And, she was one of the founders of UCL Language, Inequality and Politics Society and a committee member of an independent European research network, Language & Work Group. 

Her doctoral research was been accepted and presented as standard panel presentations at major conferences of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics: 

• AILA 2023 World Congress (Lyon, upcoming)
• 3rd International Conference on Sociolinguistics (Prague)

Presentation Title: Making a Living on the Streets: Language, Work and Female Migrants

Panel: Language and Migrant Economies: affordances and constraints

Presentation Title: Outsourcing Surveillance: Charity and Stancetaking in Discourses of Homelessness

Invited Colloquium: Securitisation and surveillance in sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics Symposium 23 (Hong Kong) 

Presentation Title: Doing (De/Re)colonization: Language, Race, and the Exoticizing of Researchers

Thematic Panel: Decolonising, unsettling and rebuilding sociolinguistics

• AILA 2021 World Congress (Groningen)

Presentation Title: Doing Solidarity: Language and Race in Spaces of Otherwise

Panel: S001: ‘Spaces of otherwise’? South-North dialogues on languaging, race, (im)mobilities

• V EDiSo International Symposium 2021

Presentation Title: The Fatigue of being Researched: Shall We/How do We Move on with the Politics of Vulnerability in Ethnography?

Panel: Thinking about vulnerability and resistance in precarious spaces: Streets, squats, squares and beyond.