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

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 narrative in oral interaction with participatory photography and digital storytelling to examine how people from South Asian backgrounds narrate and dynamically construct their belonging. In the project’s first phase (of three), the research team worked with a group of women, all clients of – and recruited through – Hong Kong’s Centre for Refugees, a refugee and asylum seeker support centre. The aims of this paper are to consider first how belonging is achieved in the physical and interactional spaces where the research took place; and second how collaborative research practice contributes to the co-creation of this belonging. We meet these aims through a study of one project participant, Rosie (a pseudonym) and her interactions on the project. In so doing, we shed light on how the project brought different lifeworlds into contact in the space where the project activities happened, and – in turn – how the physical space for these activities became a place of interaction and meaning.