Joy Y. Zhang

Professor Joy Zhang

Small Group Project 2022-23

Decolonise global participation: Developing new conceptual and participatory paradigms

With Bridget Penhale & Ewen Speed & Fiona Poland & Nicola Yeates & Peter Beresford

This project is led by a team of leading empirical social scientists who are committed to the development of new conceptual and participatory paradigms in political participation globally. In recent years, novel forms of political participation and the growing importance of the role that ‘civic epistemology’ plays in legitimising policy agendas and knowledge production have underlined the urgency for a truly transdisciplinary and non-Western centric approach to comprehending political participation. What is equally important, is foregrounding the ‘duality’ of some of the commonly-imagined enabling factors in political participation, such as the hopes and hype brought by technology and the slippery boundary between liberal and illiberal activism. This will help to develop a more realistic view of how inclusive and productive political participation can be cultivated.

More information

Research outcomes

Beresford, P., Penhale, B., Poland, F., Speed, E., Yeates, N. and Zhang, J. Y. (eds) (2024)

Routledge Handbook of Global Political Participation. Routledge.

Areas of interest

Risk Sociology Ethics Environment Biomedicine

Cohort

FG8

Biography

Joy Y. Zhang is a sociologist with a first degree in medicine. She is the Founding Director of the Centre for Global Science and Epistemic Justice at the University of Kent. She is an internationally leading expert on the transnational governance of scientific risks, specializing in emerging life sciences that affect both humans and the environment.

Her research focuses on the erosion of epistemic boundaries and the rise of cosmopolitan identities formed by changing disciplinary, geopolitical and state-society power relations. Her expertise is in expanding the transnational governance of risk beyond a Western-centric approach and in aligning theoretical frameworks with real-world challenges. Conceptually, her work contributes to sociological theories of risk, cosmopolitanism, decolonisation and subaltern politics. She has also undertaken empirical studies on emerging life sciences, food movements and environmental politics, with a primary focus on four major scientific powers: China, India, the UK, and the US.

Biographical details correct as of 20.04.26