Multimodality Talks – 5 December – Professor James Simpson

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).