• It’s so exciting to have you back in the School of English! You recently completed your PhD at the National University of Singapore. How was your experience there (and in Singapore) compared to the School of English?

The comparison, I would say, is more of a temporal instead of a spatial difference.

I started my PhD in 2020, which was right in the middle of the COVID pandemic. Classes were online and there was not that much happening on campus. I felt like space was compressed in static time. Having said that, I was fortunate to have made friends with colleagues who shared similar theoretical interests, with whom I had nights of long and stimulating chats. My thesis committee has also been very supportive throughout the process. These were the reminder I needed at critical times that ‘I’m not alone’. There were more in-person meetings – reading groups and conferences – near the end of my PhD. I am grateful to NUS for the precious friendships and international experiences. If I were to name one thing I would have wanted to do more, it would probably be to have a bit more time to explore Singapore.

Now that the pandemic is over, I have very much enjoyed the face-to-face interactions with students in class and with colleagues here in the School of English at HKU. There is this sense of connection that one just can’t experience in online meetings – this might just be my pre-pandemic mind speaking, not necessarily a universal experience. I did both my BA and MPhil here, and it does feel like coming home. And I am very much looking forward to contributing to the research community in the School, and, if opportunity allows, to foster collaborations between my alma maters.

  • Could you share a little more about your research interests, and how that has translated to some of your published work?

My research sits at the intersection between language policy, mental health and youth development.

I take language policy as the overarching lens that offers a perspective into tensions between regulatory and open developments, or the tension between fixity and fluidity as it is called in certain strands of sociolinguistic theory. This is the focus of my PhD thesis. The thesis examines the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) as a megalopolis emerging from entanglements between language practices (how people use language), ideologies (how people think and talk about language), and affectivity (how the ways people use and think about language influence one another). The regulatory effect of sociolinguistic activities is not necessarily imposed externally by institutional commands (the traditional sense of language policy and planning).

For instance, the GBA is constituted of Hong Kong, Macao and nine prefectures in the Guangdong Province. While its quadrilingual (Cantonese, English, Putonghua and Portuguese) arrangement is inscribed in the national and regional language-related legislations, this multilingual environment itself emerges out of the historical (political, cultural, social and economic) developments in the region. The legislations are influential regulatory mechanisms, but they are nonetheless products of institutional practices entangled in the broader historical processes, including the trends of migration and trade, and the mundane use of language that has developed with these trends.

In this sense, regularity emerges from the entanglement of sociolinguistic activities themselves. It is formed from within the activities. This allows a view from which regulatory and open developments are not antagonistic but reciprocally constitutive sociolinguistic tendencies. I suggest that language policy is inclusive of confrontations between institutional delimitations and resistant deviations (e.g., the promotion of multilingual classrooms in a monolingual community); however, this form of regulation is entrenched in regularity emerging from entangling activities across different domains in the broader sociolinguistic ecology.

My thesis is not available online yet, as the library database at NUS has been undergoing a migration process. However, some of these ideas have been developed in my article published in Language Sciences entitled ‘Languaging territorial assemblage: regional integration through language policy practices in southern China’.

I have also explored this tension between regulatory and open development in the case of workplace mental health (BMC Psychology), postcolonial transcultural spaces (Language in Society), as well as my current projects on graduate transition – that is, the phase of students transitioning from campus to the workplace upon graduation – with the vibrant research team at HKU RIICH.

  • What is one journal article that you would really love to write, and why?

I have been working with the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage for almost ten years now – that is, since my MPhil here at HKU. Many of the prominent scholars (including Alastair Pennycook, Sari Pietikainen, Lionel Wee, among others) working on the concept have inspired my own research. I would really love to write an article about the sociolinguistic life of this concept. This will allow me to better position my own work in the existing literature. It will also be a way for me to review and organise the meta perspective of my own research. I am currently working on a piece about this, and I look forward to discussing more with readers who are also interested in the concept of assemblage. Please don’t hesitate to email me at jasperzz@hku.hk 🙂

  • You’re currently in a postdoctoral role at the School of English. Please share with us a little about that.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH). This is a dynamic and cross-disciplinary team dedicated to improving health and healthcare communication through evidence-based research. Our team members are pursuing a diverse range of exciting topics, such as mental health care, advance care planning, genetic counseling, and sex variation, to name a few. My own research work focuses on mental health in the workplace, with special attention to youth as a group. I am looking into the language-related and broader discursive experiences of youths going through their phase of graduate transition. One specific case of interest in my current work is the language challenges and opportunities in cross-border employment in the GBA.

Mental health research is a vibrant cluster in HKU RIICH. In addition to academic publications, the team has proactively engaged in public knowledge exchange. We have published two project reports with NGOs: the City Mental Health Alliance, Hong Kong; and the Hong Kong Student Services Association. We have also recently organised two workshops: one on graduate mental health (Thriving@University; Mar 27, 2025) and the other on skills for navigating the workplace (Thriving@Work; Apr 30, 2025). Furthermore, our team has developed a research hub for graduates looking for support in their graduate transition phase or who are interested in the topic of mental health: Graduate Mindmap https://www.graduatemindmap.com/.

  • Do you have any advice or tips for those who are looking to go on to do a PhD?

As an attempt to stay on trend with the rising popularity (or inevitability?) of AI-powered wisdom, I took the liberty to consult DeepSeek on this matter, which generated six tips that are probably fair for general consideration:

  1. Choose a topic you’re passionate about
  2. Develop strong research and writing skills early
  3. Build relationships with mentors and scholars
  4. Research PhD programs and funding carefully
  5. Prepare for the realities of academic life as well as the alternatives
  6. Start small and stay organised

Joke aside (well, not exactly a joke, the points above are useful), from my own experience with doing an MPhil and a PhD, I think the biggest difference lies in the threshold for what counts as ‘contribution’. Throughout the process of doing the PhD, I was constantly asked (by colleagues and by myself) the question, ‘so what is your theoretical contribution’; or, the (in)famous, ‘so what’. I know that for some other PhD students, the ‘so what’ question might be raised more against societal contributions – that is, the practical values of the research. These two lines of research – the theoretical and the practical – are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, there seems to be an increasing tendency to encourage putting the two in dialogue (one may refer to the editorial statement of the journal Applied Linguistics, for instance). This relationship between theory and practice (prioritising one or doing both) might be worth thinking about. This would most likely be relevant to one’s selection of their topic, supervisor(s) and department(s). Different workplaces have different styles and different emphases, which is why getting to know the people at your target university or department can be rather important.