Jiahe (Andy) Cao

Jiahe (Andy) Cao is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on education, youth culture, language ideologies, and social inequality in contemporary China and broader Asia. She holds a BA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Warwick, an MA in Cultural Studies from SOAS University of London, and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. While at Chicago, her master’s research examined how vocational students in China engage with stigmatizing public discourses and develop forms of self-stigmatization in online spaces. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, she explored how these students negotiated dominant ideologies of class, ability, and aspiration—work that continues to inform her broader interest in education as a cultural site of power and identity formation.

Jiahe’s academic trajectory has been shaped by a consistent concern with how marginalized groups are positioned and represented within institutions, and how they navigate everyday life within structural constraints. Her research at Notre Dame continues to build on these themes through an ethnographic study of language, aspiration, and inequality in Chinese educational settings. She is particularly interested in how students articulate personal agency through digital platforms and everyday speech, and how educational institutions mediate ideologies of success, failure, and modern citizenship.