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- Student
- IOE - Culture, Communication & Media
- UCL Institute of Education
Eleanor Yue Gong is a PhD candidate, trained in the fields of critical sociolinguistics, anthropology and political economy of language and discourse. She holds a MA degree in Applied Linguistics (thesis with distinction) also from UCL, a BA major degree in Spanish Language and English Literature and a BA minor degree in Economics and Financial Management. She organized a panel "(Un)thinking everyday borders" at Sociolinguistics Symposium 2022 and presented her doctoral research in several international conferences. Her research interests include language, migration and (in)mobility; language, labor and capitalism; neoliberal governmentality, and east Asian study.


My research explores how the discourse of “meritocracy" is understood and enacted in contemporary China and how it is linked to a project of making middle class who are performing multilingual worker-citizens and neoliberal subjects in the global city Shanghai. It draws on an ethnography in a Shanghai-based industrial park of multinational companies, which constitutes a very typical multilingual and multicultural site at the centre of global capitalism.
To this point in my career, I have had opportunities to teach a diverse group of students in a wide range of educational contexts: adult English/Spanish to Chinese highly skilled professionals, junior and senior secondary students (a Shanghai-based English medium instruction education center and a London-based secondary school), and postgraduates (MA in Applied linguistics and TESOL in UCL).