Professor Lisa Eklund

Lisa Eklund holds a PhD in Sociology from Lund University, Sweden. She has written extensively on the social politics of demography in the Chinese context. Drawing on perspectives from family sociology and political sociology, she has investigated topics including son preference and daughter aversion, sex ratio imbalance, involuntary bachelorhood, mate selection and intimate relations, and the politics of sex-selective abortion. During her Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship at OSGA, Eklund will further advance the field of the social politics of demography which engages with critical questions around demographics as a social and political force. It interrogates the discursive and performative propensities of demographic categories, problems and goals, and how these are constructed, negotiated and translated into policy and practice under diverse structural and institutional conditions. In addition to her research on China, Eklund has undertaken comparative research on China and India and has worked on two research projects related to the welfare state, family and gender in Sweden.