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Date
Time
5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Venue
SOAS Gallery
Room
SOAS Gallery Lecture Theatre
Event type
Event highlights

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Professor Marloes Janson and and Professor Jieyu Liu from the College of Law, Anthropology and Politics deliver their inaugural lectures from two different and distinctive themes.

Professor Janson's inaugural lecture, 'Rewriting Africa's Narrative', explores how media portrayals of West Africa focus disproportionately on conflict, corruption, and poverty, thereby creating a monolithic view of the continent. By means of four examples of her ethnographic research in the Gambia and Nigeria, Professor Janson will highlight how she has endeavoured to rewrite detrimental anti-African stereotyping with more balanced narratives of how people in the region cope with the contingencies of everyday living.

In our second lecture, Professor Liu's inaugural lecture, 'Doing Intimacy: Family Life and Social Change in China', examines the intimate workings of family life in China since the 1949 Communist Revolution. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and multi-generational life history narratives, Professor Liu presents an interconnected, nuanced and nonlinear view of Chinese family life over the last seven decades, countering dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.

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Professor Marloes Janson 

Professor Marloes Janson


Marloes Janson is Professor of West African Anthropology. She served as Associate Director of Research (2018-2021) and Interim Head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology (2022-2023) at SOAS. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK. Marloes holds a PhD in Anthropology from Leiden University, the Netherlands. 

Before joining SOAS in 2012, she was a researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany.

Professor Jieyu Liu

Jieyu Liu is Professor of Sociology and China Studies at SOAS University of London. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, family and generation.

From 2024-2026, Jieyu is Research and Knowledge Exchange Convenor for the College of Law, Anthropology and Politics (COLAP) and Chair of the SOAS Research Ethics Panel. She has been the principal investigator for a number of research projects supported by major funders such as the European Research Council, UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and British Academy.

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The SOAS Inaugural Lecture Series recognises that research is an integral part of university life, and offers a platform for newly appointed and promoted professors to share their significant contributions to their field while also showcasing the overall strength, depth and vitality of research at SOAS.

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