Danchen Xu

Danchen Xu is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. She develops the framework of Translocal Security to explain how people define security through spatiality, temporality, and everyday epistemology. She offers an analytical vocabulary for cities shaped by transient livelihoods and limited statutory security presence by showing that urban security emerges through fluidity, mobility, and uncertainty rather than being undermined by them. She applies this approach through ethnographic research in informal settlements in Accra. Her work shows that West African migrants construct order and manage threat through translocal subjectivities, usufruct security imaginaries, tactical coexistence, and fluid boundary work. Alongside the thesis, she extends this agenda by studying everyday security in settings shaped by mobility and urban informality for academic and policy communities, including the China Ghana migration corridor, mobile informal economies in urban markets and scrapyards, the securitisation of African migrants in China during COVID-19, and transnational policing in Nigeria. Danchen received her B.A. in International Relations and Political Science from Boston University and M.A. in Conflict Resolution with a graduate certificate in African Studies at Georgetown University. She is from Zhengzhou, China.