Professor Laurence Roulleau-Berger FGCA 罗兰教授 is a Life Fellow and Vice President for European Engagement of the Global China Academy. She is Research Director Emerita at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and Professor Emerita at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France. She is affiliated with Triangle (UMR 5206), where her research focuses particularly on urban sociology, economic sociology, migration, the sociology of knowledge and post-Western sociology.

She received her PhD in Sociology from Université Lumière Lyon 2 in 1982 and her Habilitation à diriger des recherches (HDR) in Sociology from the same university in 2001. She was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997 and at the Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in 2006. She was also a visiting professor at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2004; Peking University in 2011; Shanghai University in 2018; Seijo University in 2018; and Tongji University in 2019.

Over the past three decades, Professor Roulleau-Berger has led numerous research programmes in Europe and China in urban sociology, economic sociology and the sociology of migration. Since 2006, together with Chinese sociologists and, more recently, with Japanese and Korean sociologists, she has been engaged in research on the epistemological foundations and development of the post-Western sociology paradigm.

She formerly served as French Director of the International Advanced Laboratory jointly established by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, “Post-Western Sociology in Europe and in China”. Through this work and her wider international collaborations, she has played an important role in developing comparative and transcultural approaches to sociology and in strengthening long-term academic dialogue between Europe and China.

Professor Roulleau-Berger has published, edited and co-edited numerous books, as well as a large number of refereed articles in French and international sociology journals and book chapters. Her research covers urban inequalities, migration, labour, economic sociology, gender, epistemology and post-Western sociology, with particular emphasis on dialogue between European and Chinese sociological traditions.

Among her books are: Migration and Gender (2010); Dewesternization of Sociology: Europe in the Mirror of China (2011; translated into Chinese in 2014); China’s Internal and International Migration (co-edited with LI Peilin, 2013); Post-Western Revolution in Sociology: From China to Europe (2016); Work and Migration: Chinese Youth in Shanghai and Paris (with YAN Jun, 2017); The Fabric of Sociological Knowledge (co-edited with XIE Lizhong, 2017, in Chinese); Post-Western Sociology: From China to Europe (co-edited with LI Peilin, 2018); Young Chinese Migrants: Compressed Individual and Global Condition (2021); and Sociology of Migration and Post-Western Theory (co-edited with LIU Yuzhao, 2021).

She is Editor-in-Chief of the series “Post-Western Social Sciences and Global Knowledge” (Brill) and of the series “From the East to the West” (ENS). She also serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Chinese Sociology.

In 2018, she was awarded the Prix Maurice Courant for her scientific research by CNRS, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and the University of Lyon. In the same year, she was appointed Distinguished Professor under the Shanghai University High-End Foreign Expert Programme. In 2021, she was appointed a Life Fellow of the Global China Academy, UK.