Seminar: Belonging Through the Creation of a Community Space in Hong Kong

School of Education Voices Seminar Series

Belonging Through the Creation of a Community Space in Hong Kong 

Chungking Mansions (CKM) is an iconic, super-diverse building in the heart of Kowloon, Hong Kong, consisting of five interconnected 17-storey blocks, speculated to have people of over at least 70 nationalities in it at any given time. It has featured heavily in pop-culture and films, and is home to a variety of eateries, phone shops, budget guest houses and NGO’s. In one of its now renovated units is the Diversity Hub (DH) run by the NGO Christian Action, a vibrant space meant for diverse communities, and housing in various ways their histories in Hong Kong. While certain facts from such histories have floated into popular discourse, this space is one of the first to act as a consolidatory, centring institution for such stories.

This presentation offers a ‘quasi’ outsider’s perspective on why such a consolidation matters, and the continuing challenges of such an endeavour. Having only been in Hong Kong for 4 years, I have seen social workers, academics, stakeholders and friends deal with this question as directly connected to what ‘belonging’, ‘non-belonging’, and everything in between entails for people of diverse backgrounds. The DH provides a space to house information about the tangible contributions of such communities showing thus a shared history of Hong Kong, something many culturally and linguistically diverse communities have had limited knowledge about or access to. It has within it a timeline of ‘ethnic minorities’ in Hong Kong, as well as a “Wall of Belonging” which houses oral histories, digital stories and objects community members have brought in as markers of their stories. With such a consolidation, it then has a host of initiatives that allow for the dissemination of narratives of belonging, incorporating in them these contributions.

Biography

Anish is pursuing a PhD in Humanities (Philosophy and Religion) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), specializing in the field of Ecological Aesthetics. He was a research assistant for the project Navigating Belonging exploring what belonging entails for people of South Asian heritage in Hong Kong, and is part of the community arts-for-education lab be/longing. He was also involved with the shaping of the Diversity Hub by Christian Action. His research takes a comparative, collaborative and applied approach, grounded in decolonial praxis. While his PhD studies are in philosophy, questions of being shape the everyday for him and everyone around him, making it central to his graduate life.

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