Dr Alessandra Aresu

Personal profile

Alessandra Aresu  is a Chiang Ching-kuo Post-Doctoral Fellow at CEAS. Her research project, titled “Under the Chinese cultural umbrella: education, sexuality and health” focuses on  sex education and HIV/AIDS prevention in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Alessandra obtained her PhD at the University of Westminster, School of  Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages, Centre for the Study of Democracy. Her doctoral research maps out the development of Chinese sex education over the last century and, for the contemporary period, it focuses primarily on school sex education in Beijing.

For her post-doctoral project Alessandra continues working on this research topic including in her study also out-of-school sex education. Focusing on Taiwan and Hong Kong her study also explores approaches to sex education that come under a shared ‘Chinese cultural umbrella’ with the aim to develop a comparative study with sex education in Mainland China.

Alessandra has published several articles on young people, education and sexuality in China in English as well as in Italian (her native language). In Italy she also teaches Chinese Culture and Society at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Faculty of Education. This is also her second institution of affiliation for the Chiang Ching-kuo  project

Alessandra is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for East Asian Studies.