From PhD to Published Author:

Congratualtions to PhD candidate Yuanting Qiu who has recently published her debut book, One Year in Cambridge: An Autoethnography about Love, Hugging, and Feminism.

Blurring the boundaries between life-writing and academic research, the book traces Yuanting’s transformative year at Cambridge, following a woman’s journey of empowerment through reconnection with the body and the rediscovery of feeling. It explores how love, friendship, and everyday acts—such as hugging—can become sites of feminist inquiry and decolonial reflection.

Rooted in her MPhil research at the Faculty of Education, the work develops what Yuanting calls a “pedagogy of hugging”—an embodied and affective approach to knowledge-making that challenges traditional divisions between the personal and the scholarly. The book also marks the beginning of Yuanting’s broader doctoral research on decolonising education through embodied everyday practices, which she continues at Murray Edwards as a Cambridge Trust International Scholar.

We sat down with Yuanting to learn more about this exciting new publication. 

Q: What inspired you to write One Year in Cambridge?

A: Before coming to Cambridge, I was, like so many women, trapped in an emotionally abusive relationship, feeling powerless to escape and to pursue my own ambitions. As a new immigrant with language barriers, and a mature student who was approaching her early 30s, the journey of coming to Cambridge was a struggle. I faced the choices of giving up a well-established profession in a familiar cultural environment, of breaking from an unhealthy relationship, of starting a new life all over again in a foreign country, of dealing with uncertainty during Covid…

However, my diasporic experience and the people I met in Cambridge, have profoundly reshaped the way I see myself and the world. I wanted to record this transformative journey – how the experience of studying a wonderfully unconventional MPhil in Arts, Creativity and Education (ACE) made me realise “research should and could be related with oneself and come from one’s belly.” I could legitimately write about street dance or “being the worst hugger in the world” in my research; I learned how to feel with my body; I began to express my critical reflections on elite education from a working-class perspective. Most importantly, I learnt about love and friendship – or, more broadly, relationships of all kinds, with love at their core.

These topics came straight from my heart, and I felt a strong urge to share them with a wider audience. Inspired by the feminist ethos that ‘the personal is political’ (Hanisch, 1970), I decided to develop my MPhil dissertation The Pedagogy of Hugging into a book in my mother tongue, Chinese.

It ultimately presents a journey of feminist awakening through self-rediscovery and self-reconstruction in embodied everyday acts and relationships against the backdrop of Cambridge. I want to dedicate it to all the women who are struggling in relationships with self-doubt, as well as to the wonderful love and friendship I encountered in Cambridge.

Q: Feminism is a key theme of the book – did Murray Edwards, as a women’s college, influence your experiences in any unexpected ways?

A: I spent a lot of time studying in the Art Café at Murray Edwards with my friend. We simply loved how arty and beautiful Murray Edwards is! We loved just sitting here, surrounded by creative and inspiring artworks made by women.

I remember being deeply amused by an artwork displayed in the Art Café, titled The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist by the Guerrilla Girls. Lines such as ‘working without the pressure of success’, ‘having an escape from the art world in your 4 free-lance jobs’, and ‘having the opportunity to choose between career and motherhood’ made me laugh, yet also reminded me of the poignant reality of being a female artist in this world.

This artwork encouraged me to keep writing about women’s lived experiences, revealing the underlying structural forces that trouble all humans regardless of gender or sex. In the face of this bleak reality, every story we write might, hopefully, accelerate the destruction of patriarchy, like tossing one more brick towards it.

Q: Why did you decide to focus your research on the “pedagogy of hugging”, and could you expand on what that phrase means to you?

A: It began with a personal story of my being the “worst hugger in the world” – something my friend once said about the lack of enthusiasm in my hug. This observation prompted a series of personal and cultural reflections, and was imprinted in my mind for a long time. As the deadline for my MPhil dissertation approached, I was scraping my head over a final topic. Then, this memory resurfaced and that was where my dissertation started.

I started with the question: “Why do I, or Chinese women, not know how to hug others or ourselves?” I conceptualised hugging as a metaphor for connections in my research – between bodies and bodies, between bodies and feelings. I wrote about my own and many other Chinese women’s struggles to embrace our bodies and feelings, and how this often leads to self-devaluation, self-punishment, and emotional suppression. I argue that this tendency was co-shaped by structural forces: an education system driven by one-dimensional numeric assessments, persistent patriarchal traditions, and a political regime that silenced bodies and feelings as a means of control. I wanted to explore whether, or how, hugging could be transformative in an affective and unpredicted way to shift this tendency for self-devaluation and self-punishment.

One example I normally share came from a Russian friend of mine. She told me when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out, the Russian government banned protests of all kinds. Nevertheless, a young man went onto the street with a wooden panel stating ‘HUG ME IF YOU ARE AGAINST THE WAR’.

That’s what the pedagogy of hugging means to me: you can never break people apart as long as they are still trying to hug and connect, to form communities regardless of all the conflicts that intend to separate us.

Q: How has the college supported you throughout your studies?

A: After joining Murray Edwards as a PhD student, I have had the chance to know some of the wonderful women here, through making friends in college, the She Starts and She Soars women’s entrepreneurship programmes, everyday interactions with our lovely gardeners, and well-being activities such as yoga and woodworking classes. All the women I have met here have become living examples to me of how to live in confidence as a woman in various ways.

I am particularly grateful for the college’s support towards my sporting and academic needs. Murray Edwards’ financial support has allowed me to participate in Street Dance competitions at a UK-university level as part of the Cambridge University Dance Competition Team (making me a Blues Level Athlete!), as well as funding part of my fieldwork. Coming from a working-class background, it was only possible for me to do a PhD in Cambridge with scholarships and funding, so I feel immensely grateful and lucky for College’s support in this way.

Lastly – let’s not forget the weekly free formals for postgraduates! So many intellectually stimulating conversations happen during formals, which I have found to be sources of inspiration and happiness!

Q: What is next for you - as an author, an academic, or just as a person?

A: I really like how you phrase the question! Indeed, being a person is so crucial in whatever career choices we make.

I’d like to think it will be all of the above and more! As an author, I already have an idea for my second (or even third) book. Academically, my PhD research allows me to approach inquiries in various creative and deeply engaging ways, supported by my dear supervisor Dr Annouchka Bayley. Ultimately, I want to find a way to converge all these seemingly separate identities – author, academic, and person –  through my practice of living and loving as researching.

One Year in Cambridge: An Autoethnography about Love, Hugging, and Feminism was published in October 2025 by Guangdong People’s Publishing House (广东人民出版社). 

It is currently available in China and can be purchased using the following link, which should only be opened on a phone: Purchase Here