Hi there! I’m Christine, a Hong Kong-raised Filipino researcher, educator, and multidisciplinary artist. At the heart of my work lies a broader interest in the relationship between race, migration, and "post"-/anti-/decoloniality in the context of Hong Kong. Storytelling and community building are integral to my praxis. In 2021, with Ericka Regalado, I co-founded be/longing, a community arts-for-education lab based in HK, where we have collaborated with schools, universities, NGOs, and other community-led groups to organise community-building workshops rooted in a critical politics of anti-racism.

Greetings! Michelle here, and I’m the resident web designer and BRN project manager. My research interests lie at the intersection of structural language contact variation, translanguaging (sometimes transmodal) emergence, and how they surface in language use — and in particular their sociocultural implications of belongingness and identity. I am also interested in the role of community-based, multimodal creative digital media in bridging understanding and co-creation between academia and local communities, especially in the realms of arts, language, and humanities.

Hello! I’m Jennifer, one of the members of the BRN team. Currently, I am a second-year MPhil student in Linguistics in the Division of Humanities at HKUST. My research interests include language identity and investment for South Asian heritage students in Hong Kong, language policy (particularly language-in-education policy) in Hong Kong, language ideologies, and Chinese language education. The concept of belonging is an important part to be explored in my current project, as well as in my future research project.

Hello! I'm Anish, and graduated with an MPhil in Humanities (Philosophy and Religion) from HKUST- specialising in the field of Environmental Aesthetics. Having been in Hong Kong since 2021, this city has been incredibly kind to me, allowing me to meet a whole host of amazing people, while at the same time shedding light on some under-discussed questions. The idea of belonging – what it entails and how it is often challenged based on factors out of one's control – has been one of them. This research network allows me to contribute to bringing together people doing interesting and important work with this respect. I currently am a Research Assistant with Prof James Simpson, and am set to begin my PhD studies in HKUST in September 2024.

Hey! I am Ahnaaf, a member of the BRN team. Hailing from diverse backgrounds, I was often asked the daunting question, where are you from? I never had a direct answer and my Accounting major was not of much help. That is when I decided to embrace the humanities courses/department that HKUST had to offer. Through it, I am able to meet interesting personalities from around the world that each have valuable insight and experiences. Finally, I want to help others who may be interested in learning more about themselves.

Sari Pöyhönen is Full Professor of Applied Linguistics, Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research and writing focus on language, identity and belonging; minorities and language rights; migration, asylum and settlement; and adult migrant language education policies.

Jessica Bradley is Associate Professor in Literacies, School of Education, University of Sheffield, UK. She researches people’s creative engagements in everyday life and she takes an ethnographic approach. Projects include creative arts approaches to linguistic landscapes and collaborative research into participatory arts programmes for communities emerging from COVID-19 isolation.