第一期 - 2023年3月 研究通訊編輯委員會
STANFORD UNIVERSITY RANKS FOUR FHM SCHOLARS AMONG THE WORLD'S TOP 2% OF SCIENTISTS
Created by a group of Stanford University experts, the list ranks academics based on the frequency at which they have been referenced in comparison to other authors in the same subfield. The selection metrics are built on the top 100,000 scientists by calculating C-score (with and without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or better in the respective subfield.
The Faculty of Humanities (FHM) is represented by four prominent scholars: Prof John Erni, the Dean of FHM, Prof Gu Mingyue Michelle, the head of Department of English Language Education (ELE), Prof John Trent, Professor (Practice) at ELE and Dr Zou Di, Assistant Professor at ELE. Inclusion to the Stanford University’s 2022 list serves as a reflection of the international recognition of the research excellence of FHM and demonstrates its preeminent standing in the academic community.
The Cultural Politics of COVID-19
The book edited by Professor John Erni Nguyet and Dr Ted Striphas (University of Colorado Boulder, USA) represents a snapshot of critical responses by researchers from 10 countries and 4 continents, in a collective effort to explore how Cultural Studies can contribute to our struggle to persevere in a "no normal" horizon, with no clear end in sight. Together, the essays address important questions at the intersection of culture, power, politics, and public health: What are the possible outlines for the panic- pandemic complex? How has the pandemic been endowed with meanings and affective registers, often at the tipping points where existing social relations and medical understanding were being rapidly displaced by new ones? How can societies discover the ways of living with, through, and against COVID that do not simply reproduce existing hierarchies and power relations? The 30 essays comprising this collection, along with the editors’ introduction, explore the formative period of the COVID pandemic, from mid-2020 to mid-2021. They are grouped into three sections – ‘Racialisations,’ ‘Media, Data, and Fragments of the Popular,’ and ‘Un/knowing the Pandemic’ – themes that animate, but do not exhaust, the complex cultural and political life of COVID-19 with respect to identity, technology, and epistemology.
Dr Ma Qing on the development of corpus-based language pedagogy
A lack of authentic data of the target language could be considered as a main obstacle in foreign language learning. Using corpus technology, teachers could help students address some language learning difficulties by providing rich and authentic resources and guiding students to explore language inductively and find answers to their own language queries. However, very few teachers have adopted corpus technology in their classroom teaching. To fill this gap, Dr Ma Qing has developed a new corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP) aimed at integrating corpus linguistics technology in classroom contexts to facilitate and diversify language teaching. The CBLP was theoretically and empirically tested in an article Ma et al. (2022). Two subsequent publications show that CBLP can be applied effectively to enhance both pre- and in-service teachers’ competence in teaching with corpora.
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The book of Dr Au Chung To wins the 16th Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature
The Inbetweenness of East and West Matters: A Study of Leung Ping-kwan's Poetics 《東西之間：梁秉鈞的中間詩學論》written by Dr Au is a comprehensive and yet original study of the poetics of inbetweenness in Leung Ping- kwan (Yasi/Ye Si). As suggested by Leung, the concept of “inbetweenness” is considered as studying one’s own culture through the detour of studying others. Since the concept implies an opposition, the book addresses a list of dichotomies in Leung’s texts, namely, traditional and modern Chinese literary traditions (the Chinese lyrical tradition and the yongwu tradition), East-West literary subgenres and conception (travelogues, magical realist novels, and flaneur/ flânerie), home and abroad; and food and human beings. This book includes seven chapters covering these binary oppositions. One aim of this book is to lay the groundwork for further study of Leung Ping-kwan’s poetics of inbetweenness.
Dr Li Zhen publishes her first monograph on Chinese heritage language learner identity
The ‘Identity of Chinese Heritage Language Learners in a Global Era’ is Dr Li Zhen’s first monograph, which focuses on the life stories and identity construction of Chinese heritage language (HL) learners, a group of people with Chinese ancestry who grew up in English or other language-dominant societies and lost their mother tongue competence. The inspiration for monograph came from the previous experiences of Dr Li Zhen as a Chinese language teacher, where she observed overseas Chinese students with a low level of Chinese despite having Chinese-speaking parents.
This monograph contributes to reflections on the emerging discourses of heritage language learner identity in the context of multilingualism and transnational migration. It challenges the stigmatised image of Chinese heritage language learners as ‘diasporic subjects’ or ‘language minority students’ in the literature and conceptualises Chinese heritage language learners as transformative linguistic and social actors in processes of transnational migration and institutional change. Likewise, the book illustrates how positioning is implicated in HL learner identity construction and identity change over time.
The implications of this book are presented to challenge the stigmatised conceptualisation of HL learner identity in diasporic contexts, and to call for a more critical approach to examining identity construction in shifting contexts that were characterised by superdiversity.
“Thanatic Ethics: Response, Repair, Transformation”: Conference convened by Dr Bidisha Banerjee
The International Research Centre for Cultural Studies (IRCCS) recently convened the second international conference for the Thanatic Ethics project, an interdisciplinary project focused on examining the death and migration and representations of migrant death in various forms of art and literature. The conference was held in Kolkata, India on 12-14 December 2022, titled “Thanatic Ethics: Response, Repair, Transformation.” The conference examined the responses that are articulated in contexts of death in migration, with a specific focus on the modalities of hospitality, care and repair. During the conference, 22 academics from around the world presented papers on a range of subjects. The keynote speakers featured prominent scholars who addressed the following topics:
- “Borders and Commons: The Struggle over Political Imagination” by Miriam Ticktin (Graduate Centre, The City University of New York, New York): The presentation covered different political imaginaries about borders.
- “There Used to be Old People” by Deepak Unnikrishnan (New York University, Abu Dhabi): A writer’s talk about the lack of senior citizens among visa-dependent communities in Gulf cities.
- “Death, History and the Destitute Present: Reflections on Recent Fiction from Kerala” by Udaya Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi): A Talk on the emergence of a new genre of fictional narration that departs from realist templates of historical continuity to explore the difficult and indelible links of subaltern presents with death and displacement.
- “Public grief and political transformation” by Alexandra Delano Alonso (The New School, New York) and Ben Nienass (Montclair State University, New York): A talk drawing on distinctions between instrumental and prefigurative politics.
List of FHM General Research Fund (GRF) and Early Career Scheme (ECS) awardees in 2022
GRF Grant Holder | Project Title |
Dr Jin Jing (CHL) | Understanding the Relationship between Interlanguage Pragmatic Learning Strategies and Pragmatic Competence in Chinese as a Second/Foreign Language: A Cross-regional Comparison in Asian Contexts |
Prof Gu Mingyue Michelle (ELE) | Investigating Adolescents’ Digital Citizenship through Social Media: (Trans)Formation, Digital Literacy Practices and Influential Factors |
Dr Mak Wing Wah Pauline (ELE) | Towards an Understanding of Second Language Writing Teachers’ Metacognition in Teaching |
Dr Au Chung To (LCS) | Hong Kong Modernism in Wenyi Xinchao |
Dr Chang Tsung Chi Hawk (LCS) | Orienting Synge: Translation and Reception of John Millington Synge’s Plays in the Greater China Area |
ECS Grant Holder | Project Title |
Dr Fung King Tat Daniel (ELE) | Learning to Listen in EMI: The Effects of Strategy Instruction on Strategic Behaviour and Learner Uptake |