Belonging and collaborative language-and-arts research with forced migrants in Hong Kong

Abstract This paper is about an arts-based research project on the theme of belonging carried out with forced migrants in Hong Kong. The project Navigating Belonging: Exploring Settlement for South Asians in Hong Kong combined the study of oral interaction with participatory photography and digital storytelling to examine how people from South Asian backgrounds narrate and construct their belonging. In the project’s first phase, the research team worked with five women, all clients of a refugee support centre, to explore understandings of belonging in weekly research workshops. The paper presents perspectives on the project’s contexts: the concrete and physical space; the interactional space where meaning is generated; and the meeting point for methodologies. Then we analyse talk involving one project participant. Findings shed light on how the project brought different lifeworlds into contact, and how the physical space of the project’s activities became a place of interaction and meaning, and where static understandings of both “South Asian” and “Asylum seeker” could be challenged. Our conclusions concern the utility of a creative practice project for understanding dislocation and relocation in Hong Kong.