Mr Simon Malyon

Profile:

I am an ESRC funded PhD candidate in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. My PhD research is focused on the labour conditions and labour process of migrant workers engaged in the platform sector in Beijing, China. I have been previously awarded a Newton Fund PhD placement grant where I was based in the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Beijing Normal University for the period Autumn 2017-Spring 2018. 

Previously I have completed an MSc at Royal Holloway, an MA in Social Policy at Nankai University, and completed projects for Save the Children, the Rights Practice and the British Council in the UK and China. I am also a capable Mandarin speaker and have studied for several years.

I am currently a Postgraduate Representative for the Developing Areas Research Group. 

Conference Presentations:

• “I choose how much I want to work” — Exploring the precarity of Beijing’s platform delivery drivers. Paper presented in session ‘Interrogating relationships between spatial and social mobility in the Global South’. RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Cardiff University, August 2018
• ‘Precarity’ as a framework to study experiences of platform work — A case study of platform delivery drivers in Beijing. Paper presented at the 14th International Conference & 2018 Annual Forum of Social Policy, East China Normal University, June 2018

Publications:

• “We have to use Mandarin whether we like it or not”: The role of ethnicity in shaping Han and Uyghur small businesses in Ürümqi, China. Accepted in Sheffield Student Journal of Sociology, Autumn 2018