Lajiadou (Lajia) recently graduated from TC with a PhD in Comparative and International Education in May 2022. He currently holds a position as a lecturer in the International Education program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is set to take up a three-year McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship Program position at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
Dr Lajiadou has been a fellow of The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) from 2020 to 2021 and again from 2022 to 2023. His research interests revolve around promoting educational equity and justice for marginalized groups, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, and Indigenous peoples, in public education systems. His areas of expertise include multilingual/multicultural education, diversity and inclusion, and issues related to social justice in education.
Dr Lajiadou’s research is primarily concerned with the integration and international flows of bi/multilingual and multicultural ‘diversity education,’ as well as global education politics and policies broadly conceived and how they are locally implemented in the context of the global South. His research approach is qualitative and centers around understanding educational opportunities for marginalized groups such as Indigenous people and racial and ethnic minority students in the transition from secondary school to tertiary education and career pathways.
At TC, his doctoral dissertation focused on ‘minzu’ (nationality) diversity education for ethnic Tibetans in China’s tertiary education. The dissertation critically examined how the growth of bilingual degree university programs may have generated new forms of equality or inequality for minority students, and what structural supports or barriers have been built around the broad themes of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The study explored how “choices” available to Tibetan students in national university admission policy may impoverish their rights to equal opportunities and limit their prospects for broader participation in the national tertiary education system
For his future research topics and projects, Dr Lajiadou will continue to focus on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of diversity and inclusion in education, and the global and transnational dimensions of inequality in educational and occupational attainments of racial and ethnic minority groups, with a focus on the global South. His research has practical implications on addressing the group-based rights of minoritized students in education and preserving the integrity of their cultural identity.
During his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Melbourne, Dr Lajiadou will embark on his first book project, which will build on the fieldwork conducted for his doctoral dissertation. Specifically, the book will investigate how the expansion of diversity programs in tertiary education may have impeded the participation of minority students, including ethnic minorities, and consider the broader implications of state-enforced diversity education without adequate structural reforms for ethnically minoritized groups in China’s multicultural and multi-ethnic society. By examining the complex interplay between state policies, institutional practices, and cultural identities, this book project seeks to deepen our understanding of how the pursuit of diversity and inclusion in education can both advance and constrain the rights and opportunities of ethnically minoritized groups in contemporary China.