Browsing by Projects - Department "Department of Sociology"

Conventional studies on breast cancer (BC) and gynecological cancer (GC) survivors primarily focus on psychological, sexual, relational, and physical stress, as well as social stigma. However, beyond empirical analyses of these survivors' experiences, there is a need for sociological insights to theorize their post-recovery conditions. In addition, while the social science literature on BC and GC survivors largely centers on Western countries and the Middle East, research on these survivors in Hong Kong has been limited. Among the few studies conducted in Hong Kong, the focus has been predominantly on emotional well-being and quality of life (e.g., Chow et al., 2018; So et al., 2014; Zeng et al., 2011), as well as work productivity (e.g., Cheng et al., 2023; So et al., 2022), indicating significant opportunities for further exploration.
This research aims to explore how breast cancer (BC) and gynecological cancer (GC) impact the sense of femininity in survivors and examine whether and in what ways their experiences have shaped their self-identity. It will discuss sex and intimacy, as well as the working life of BC and GC survivors, as vital domains of their private and public life respectively. Erving Goffman’s negotiation of self (1961) and the feminist orientation of feminine and sexual ideals will serve as the theoretical entry point. The core questions under study include: How does the loss or impairment of female organs affect femininity and, consequently, the sexual and intimate relationships of BC and GC survivors? How does cancer affect their work life and career aspirations? How do they cope with their transformative experiences, and what practical and humanistic strategies can aid in navigating post-recovery life? This study will advocate for the reclamation of selfhood by understanding how negative influences arise, thus purposively reconstructing the self. Additionally, recognizing the (often unspoken) challenges faced by BC and GC survivors, the proposed study will explore appropriate service and policy interventions for local Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the Hospital Authority (HA) to enhance the well-being of this population.
This study will utilize qualitative in-depth interviews, conducting a total of 80 interviews with a diverse range of subjects. Participants will include 40 BC survivors, 15 GC survivors, 10 intimate partners and coworkers, and 15 professionals from the allied medical and healthcare sector, such as medical social workers, counselors, practitioners from healthcare NGOs, hospital volunteers, and nurses. To ensure a diversity of voices and experiences, there will be no restrictions on the racial and cultural backgrounds of interviewees, provided that they have been living and working in Hong Kong at the time of the interview. However, a minimum of 45 local Chinese survivors is anticipated among the total participants (out of 55 survivors).
This study is expected to make several significant contributions to existing research. First, it will introduce the themes of sex and intimacy, femininity, and selfhood—areas that are rarely studied and yet are crucial to local cancer research. The findings regarding the sexual and intimate experiences of BC and GC survivors will provide alternative insights into self and identity analysis. Second, the results of this study will assist managers and practitioners in the medical and healthcare sectors, including the Hospital Authority (HA) and NGOs, in designing effective strategies and services to support these survivors. Moreover, it will raise the awareness among human resource management in the job market about the conditions of female cancer survivors with a humanistic approach.

This research explores the circumstances under which people from ethnic minorities can succeed from ethnic minorities can succeed in Hong Kong, and identifies appropriate interventions for those in disadvantaged situations.

When we think about World Heritage Sites, we often picture a straightforward relationship between UNESCO, national governments, and local communities. However, this view misses crucial players in between – regional governments, museums, and cultural institutions that do much of the actual work in heritage management and promotion. These organizations, which operate between national and local levels, play vital roles in World Heritage nominations. They invest significant resources, manage heritage sites, and shape how cultural heritage is presented to the public. Yet, current research tends to overlook their importance, focusing instead on national-local relationships. This study examines China’s Maritime Silk Road (MSR) World Heritage project to understand how these regional cultural institutions contribute to national heritage initiatives. The research traces the development of the MSR concept from its emergence in UNESCO during the 1960s to 2024, looking at two main aspects:
• How new museums, exhibitions, and research centres present the Maritime Silk Road
• How existing historical sites adapt their stories to connect with this cultural route
This research bridges heritage studies and sociology by examining heritage as a form of capital that shapes institutional power dynamics. Traditional sociological theories of cultural capital focus on individuals, but this study shows how institutions strategically use heritage resources, revealing new dimensions of how cultural power operates at organizational levels. The study also challenges conventional understanding of heritage governance. By examining how regional cultural institutions create their own spaces of influence within seemingly top-down heritage systems, it provides new insights into how cultural governance actually works in practice, offering fresh perspectives on the relationship between global heritage frameworks and local institutional practices.

The project shows how a heritage site can be documented from the perspectives of multiple disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, history, genealogical studies, architecture, geography, visual sociology, digital heritage and communications studies) using the latest technologies.

Hong Kong is a city of cultural diversity. While the people of Hong Kong celebrate a wide array of Chinese festivals, Western festivals are also emphasised. This research sets out to explore the relationship between festivals and Hong Kong's historical development by examining the Chinese and Western festivals widely celebrated in the Chinese community. The research also illustrates changes in the everyday lives of Hong Kong people over the decades and their diverse and complex sense of identification.

This project aims to examine the role of a network of actors in constructing an ancient mushroom cultivation tradition in Qingyuan, Zhejiang, as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS), as well as its impact on the sustainability of the traditional agricultural knowledge system and cultural practices. In 2002, because of the global problem of the agricultural environment and food security, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched GIAHS to promote and conserve the wealth and breadth of accumulated traditional agricultural knowledge and culture as a globally significant treasure. Despite the aim of GIAHS being to identify and safeguard agricultural systems which sustain and conserve biodiversity and the genetic resources necessary for food and agriculture, rural livelihoods, and the systems of culture and knowledge, the selection and inscription process, as well as its cultural impact is a neglected research topic in China. This project will fill in the research gap, and will adopt a multi-site, mixed-method research approach to collect two-wave data to shed light on the issue of heritagization (heritage construction) and conservation in China.

In this proposed project, I plan to adopt Latour’s framework of ANT to understand heritage construction and sustainability of the century-old Qingyuan mushroom cultivation system. This study will be the first attempt to follow the heritage actors (scientists, government officers, and farmers) to understand heritage construction and conservation of a GIAHS in China. Deploying ANT rules, this project will examine the three key processes of heritage network building and management: enrolling actors, fact-building, and circulation of meaning. While many of the current studies on heritagization tend to focus on the separate interests and strategies of the stakeholders to achieve different goals, this project will follow the practices which the actors used to enroll and mobilize other actors, to bring them around to their points of view, to join their heritage network, to build up the seemingly “objective” scientific and agricultural “fact,” and lastly, to circulate the meaning surrounding the cultivation system, so as to construct and conserve it as the only globally-endorsed mushroom cultivation heritage system in the world.

This study will involve three groups of respondents: 15 scientists (in Beijing, Hong Kong, Jinlin, and Qingyuan), 15 Chinese officers (in Qingyuan), 15 mushroom farmers (in Qingyuan) who are involved, and another 15 farmers who are not involved in the Qingyuan mushroom heritage network. In-depth interviews will be conducted with the scientists and government officers, while ethnographic research and participant observation will be carried out with the farmers. This mixed-method research approach provides an opportunity to understand the heritagization process by collecting their oral histories with respect to identification and classification of certain features of the Qingyuan mushroom cultivation system as heritage, to its inscription as a nationally important agricultural heritage system and GIAHS, and how the heritagization process and sustainability is related to scientific research, government funding, and the bonding among the farmers, scientists, and government officers in the network.

In addition to making an academic contribution to the debate on the nature of heritage, the process of heritage construction, and its impact, by tracing the associations and daily activities of the actors in the heritage network, this study will have practical implication for agricultural and heritage policy-makers to formulate policies that will support bonding creation and collaboration among government officers, scientists, and farmers, thereby improving the economic and social status of the farmers, and conserving the disappearing traditional mushroom cultivation practices and culture in China.

There is ample research in the West illustrating cases where ethnic minority patients have either underutilized palliative care services or have received lower quality care when they have cancer. This is as a result of various reasons such as a lack of health literacy, ineffective communication with medical professionals, language barriers, mistrust of the services, or alternative religious values that are contrary to professional medical practice. A number of researchers (Leininger, 1978, 2002; Tsai et al., 2004; Fischer et al., 2007) have called for culturally competent palliative care in which the cultural and religious beliefs of ethnic minority patients are an integral part of the system. While there has been abundant discussion of ethnic minority and palliative care in the West, the issue has not been discussed in Hong Kong at all, despite the fact that the population of ethnic minorities has been steadily growing (Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department, 2016). The aim of this research is to explore how ethnic minority cancer patients and their caregivers cope with their illness in Hong Kong. It also aims to analyse the role of informal social networks as well as religion and faith in the treatment processes. The core questions of this research are: are cancer treatment services in Hong Kong culturally competent, and to what extent do they cater to the needs of ethnic minority patients? What do ethnic minority cancer patients and their caregivers need, and what are the effective ways to address their needs? In what ways does informal social network and religion and faith play a role in the process of fighting cancer? Qualitative in-depth interviews will be used in this research. A total of 70 interviews with various subjects will be conducted: 30 South Asian (namely Pakistani, Nepalese, and Indian) cancer patients, 30 major caregivers named by each individual patient, and ten medical practitioners including oncologists, medical social workers, and medical staff of self-help groups in public hospitals. The interviewees will be approached and referred through voluntary healthcare associations, medical practitioners, religious groups, and personal contacts. This study is expected to make the following contributions to the existing research. First, it will bring the topic of cancer care, which is a rarely studied but undoubtedly significant issue, into the field of local ethnic minorities research. The findings will also contribute alternative insights into the existing social network analysis. Second, the findings of this study will help the healthcare sector to design improved cancer policies, especially on palliative care for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong.

This research project will explore what religion currently means to people via a qualitative case study. We will specifically investigate the ways in which Catholics rely on their religion when they encounter life's solvable and insolvable problems. From the perspective of rational choice theory, religion may serve as a means or resource for people to solve their problems. Religious believers use the resources available to them via church organisations (e.g., charity services), religious rituals (e.g., sacraments of healing) and spiritual practices (e.g., prayers) to acquire what they want or need. This is how we generally understand and use religion when coping with difficulties. However, there is no complete resolution for problems such as living with a terminal illness or raising a handicapped child. In cases such as these, 'solving' the problem is only mitigating the negative effects of misfortune. People must endure the lingering pain and suffering associated with insolvable problems.

At this point, our project will progress from the focus on religious resources to one that reveals the deeper meaning of religion. We shall explore the relationship between suffering and issues related to the human self. Some key questions will be asked, including the following. What are the possible effects that prolonged pain and suffering have on human nature? What makes human self-transformation in suffering possible, and what role, if any, does religion play in the process? These questions will introduce the Catholic concept of redemptive suffering into our study of Catholic beliefs and behaviour, and present two implications. First, analysing how Catholics connect worldly misfortunes to the afterlife will help reveal the meaning of religion at the supernatural level. Second, the virtues embodied in redemptive suffering, such as patience, compassion and self-sacrifice, will enable us to detail the scenarios and behaviour related to moral virtues and the dynamics involved in the human struggle for a better life. We hope that the findings of this project will be useful not only for pastoral care, but also for scholars and practitioners who are interested in the role of religion in social work, counselling and health care.

This project maps out the migratory paths of Medan Chinese and investigates how they are connected and organized across national boundaries. This part of the Chinese diaspora, distributed across Indonesia, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, continues to be connected through kinship, alumni or hometown association ties. Through multi-sited ethnographic research in Indonesia, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, this project will study these ties and ask if they represent a kind of Chinese transnationalism that can persist across generations and geographical regions.

Ethnic minority entrepreneurship has garnered significant attention from both academics and practitioners as a means to improve the economic status and upward socio-economic mobility of underprivileged groups. However, existing scholarship on South Asian entrepreneurship often treats this group as homogeneous, overlooking the specific experiences of Pakistanis. Compared to Indians and Nepalese, Pakistanis are recognized as an underprivileged group in terms of socio-economic status and employment opportunities. Moreover, most studies on South Asian entrepreneurship in Hong Kong have been qualitative in nature, providing fragmented evidence on the challenges faced by entrepreneurs. A comprehensive theoretical framework that explains the factors influencing business initiation, discrimination experiences, social capital, and living conditions of Pakistanis is lacking. This study aims to address these research gaps by investigating Pakistani entrepreneurship and its socio-cultural correlates in Hong Kong through a mixed-methods research design.
Since the 1980s, researchers have developed theories to explore factors influencing the development of ethnic businesses, including discrimination, social capital, and ethnic enclave economies. In this proposed study, these theories will be incorporated for analytical purposes. The research design will adopt a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative focus group interviews and quantitative survey questionnaires. Qualitative data from the focus group interviews will provide rich contextual information on entrepreneurs’ difficulties and coping strategies, while the quantitative data will facilitate a deeper understanding of socio-cultural factors related to the establishment of Pakistani enterprises. Six focus groups, comprising a total of 30 Pakistani entrepreneurs, will be conducted to generate insights into business initiation and the mobilization of social and cultural resources available to Pakistanis. Subsequently, quantitative data will be collected from a structured survey involving 150 ethnic entrepreneurs. The survey questions will cover areas such as social capital, life experiences, perceived discrimination, and demographic characteristics. This mixed-methods approach will ensure a balance between the breadth and depth of the collected information.
In addition to making academic contributions by testing relevant theories and utilizing a mixed-methods approach that reflects the real situation, this study will have practical implications for NGOs serving ethnic minorities. The findings can help create social bonds and facilitate collaboration among Pakistani entrepreneurs, thereby assisting them in sustaining their businesses and improving their quality of life. Additionally, the research findings will highlight the obstacles that Pakistanis may encounter along their path to success. This study can serve as a valuable baseline for future comparisons between the Pakistani community and other successful ethnic communities, allowing for a deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to their achievements.