About

About Jonathan Mair

I am a social scientist, consultant and entrepreneur, enjoying life in the sun in Andalucía since 2020. Together with my wife, Baozhen [Obsolete link removed. Original url: https://www.linkedin.com/in/baozhen-shi-a8327420/], I provide support for businesses working on intercultural projects, especially projects with a China connection. You can read more about our services and work at The China Mix and Sensible Martian.

I am a trained social anthropologist, reading for undergraduate and graduate degrees at Cambridge University. I spent a decade and a half working as a teacher and researcher in UK universities. I have held research fellowships at St John’s College, Cambridge and the Cambridge Centre for Research on Social Sciences and Humanities.

I have taught and supervised research projects at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester, and by 2019 I was responsible for running undergraduate degrees in social anthropology at the University of Kent. I have served as external examiner/assesor for PhDs at the LSE and for research grant applications to the Research Council for Culture and Society of the Academy of Finland. Between 2018 and 2020, I was Honorary Secretary of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (the ASA).

As a researcher, I have carried out my own long-term ethnographic projects in Inner Mongolia (northern China), and in Taiwan, as well a shorter studies in Singapore, London, Manchester and Paris. I have published on a range of issues, including the revival of religion in contemporary China, the meaning of belief, the cultural complexities of ignorance, post-truth and metacognition.

Alongside my academic work, I always had an interest in technology and business. In 2012, together with Baozhen, I founded The Chinese Language Consultancy Limited, which we would later rename The China Mix Ltd. In the early 2000s, I spent two years working as a developer (Java, Perl, PHP) and these days I enjoy working with Python.