Associate Professor Michael Mu

Guanglun Michael Mu is Associate Professor and Enterprise Fellow of Education Futures at the University of South Australia. As a sociologist of education, Michael is interested in building resilience in (im)migration contexts, promoting teacher professional development in inclusive education contexts, and negotiating Chineseness in diasporic contexts. His work has attracted a total research income of over one million dollars and has been published into over 80 books and articles. Most of his publications are framed through a Bourdieusian lens. In addition to scholarly publications, Michael has translated his resilience research into a picture book series Journey to Resilience. Michael has deep methodological expertise in quantitative analyses that align with relational sociology. These include but are not limited to multiple correspondence analysis, social network analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis, and structural equation modelling. Michael also has rich experience in conducting mixed methods research in educational contexts. 

Before Michael joined UniSA, he was a DECRA fellow funded by the Australian Research Council; an Associate Professor, a Principal Research Fellow, and a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology; an Eyes High Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Calgary; a Lecturer and international program coordinator at Beijing Normal University; and a schoolteacher in China.

Michael is the chief editor of the Routledge book series Bourdieu and Education of Asia Pacific. He co-chairs the Bourdieu in Educational Research SIG of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). He also leads and convenes two international academic communities for research students and junior academics – one on Bourdieu in Educational Research and the other on Quantitative Methodology in Education Research. Both communities operate through monthly online meetings. Michael is an Associate Editor of Frontier in Psychology and International Journal of Disability, Development, and Education; an editorial board member of Journal of Beijing Normal University (in Chinese); and a member of the Rapid Review Panel of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Beyond academia, Michael is a classical pianist.