Navigating belonging for South Asians in Hong Kong: Challenging the single story with creative arts-based ethnographic research

Presenter: Professor James Simpson, The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology

Date and time: 5 December 2025, 12.00-1.30 pm (London time)

Place: Zoom (link will show on screen upon registration)

Please register via: https://forms.office.com/e/8p9ZQPR4gb

Abstract

South Asians in Hong Kong experience discrimination and barriers to participation, but while their marginal status is well-documented, how they themselves understand their belonging has received less scrutiny. Over three phases, participants in the Navigating Belonging project engaged in collaborative photography and digital storytelling relating to their sense of belonging. This enabled an exploration of how belonging is shaped by concerns of language, culture, ethnicity, gender and immigration status inter alia.

In this presentation I pay close attention to the narratives of belonging that emerged during the project’s research workshops, alongside the writing, photography, and digital stories that were the creative outputs of the project. I focus on the talk of two participants, Rani and Amir, undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. In my analysis I invoke the concept of transculturality as I describe and explain how – through their narratives – our participants deploy their transcultural capital as they address questions of the authenticity of their belonging. I highlight the transformative power of arts-based ethnographic research to engender critical reflection that challenges essentialist notions of identity and belonging, for minoritised youth of South Asian descent in Hong Kong. I conclude by suggesting implications of the project’s findings for policy development for this population.

Bionote

James Simpson is a Professor in the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. His research interests lie in migrant language education and the sociolinguistics of mobility. His work coheres around a concern with social justice, particularly for people on the move, and of what it means to belong. His books include ESOL: A Critical Guide (OUP, 2008, with Melanie Cooke), the Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics (2011; 2^nd ed. 2023), Adult Migrant Language Education: Challenging Agendas in Policy and Practice (Routledge 2015, edited with Anne Whiteside), and Language Learning for Adult Migrants in Europe (Routledge 2024, edited with Sari Pöyhönen). He is the editor of the Applied Linguistics section of the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Elsevier forthcoming).

From Learner to Professional: Transpositioning, Multimodality, and Critical Interactional Competence

Presenter: Dr David Wei Dai and Dr Simin Ren, UCL Institute of Education

Date and time: 7 November 2025 12.00-1.30 pm (London time)

Place: Zoom (link will show on screen upon registration)

Please register via: https://forms.office.com/e/TgBhFdLdMU

[This session is not recorded due to ethical considerations]

Abstract

This paper examines how professional identity and communicative expertise emerge through multimodal transpositioning (Li & Lee, 2024): the adaptive reconfiguration of stance, role, and embodiment across professional contexts. Drawing on a 14-month longitudinal dataset of 21 recorded sessions tracking an English L2 physiotherapy trainee, the study integrates Conversation Analysis and Multimodal Analysis to trace Lisa’s transformation from a technically focused learner to a relationally adaptive practitioner. Analysis reveals that becoming professional involves not only verbal refinement but the orchestration of gaze, gesture, posture, material handling, and spatial orientation as semiotic resources for recipient design and epistemic stance management. Three developmental movements are identified: (1) from linguistic precision to adaptive recipient orientation; (2) from compensatory embodiment to strategic multimodal integration; and (3) from hierarchical deference to context-responsive negotiation. Across these transitions, transpositioning moments mark critical reorientations in how Lisa coordinates bodily, affective, and epistemic in response to evolving professional demands. The study conceptualises Critical Interactional Competence (CritIC) (Dai, Zhu & Chen, 2025) as a multimodal, ethically reflexive capacity to re-design communicative action and identity in response to situated contingencies. It argues that professionalism emerges not through verbal correctness but through multimodal, interactionally sustained responsiveness to ethical and relational contingencies

Keywords: Transpositioning; Multimodality; Critical Interactional Competence; Professional Communication

Bio

David Wei Dai is an Assistant Professor at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. His research examines the ability to interact (Interactional Competence) in a range of contexts ranging from language learning and teaching, professional communication, intercultural communication and human-AI interaction. He currently holds a British Academy/Leverhulme research grant. He is author of the Open Access monograph Assessing Interactional Competence (Peter Lang).

Simin Ren is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the CritiIC Network project at the International Centre for Intercultural Studies, and an Associate Lecturer (PASHE Programme) at the Institute of Education, University College London. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics, and her research interests span technology-mediated second language learning, computer-assisted language learning (CALL), human-AI interaction, (critical) interactional competence, multimodal conversation analysis, and membership categorisation analysis.