This presentation focuses on the institutional discourse surrounding happiness and social interactions within Chinese diasporic communities at a UK-based cultural NGO, where participants engaged in weekly activities, including book discussions, tea ceremonies, and mindfulness practices, understanding these as coping mechanisms for anxieties and struggles in their transnational lives. Data analysis reveals how these practices constitute values and social relations (e.g., care and happiness) as alternatives to neoliberal logics of profit-making and competition. These imaginaries function primarily at the discursive level yet are constrained by the material conditions of transnational mobility.

SHI Yu (Aimee) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Education University of Hong Kong. She was trained in Applied Linguistics, obtaining her PhD and MA from the Institute of Education at University College London and her BA in Linguistics from the University of Melbourne. Her research examines the transnational experiences of Chinese international students and professionals in educational settings in the UK, focusing on their language socialization and identity formation during the process of becoming. Her work employs institutional ethnography and in-depth case studies informed by sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology.

At the recent turn to translingual approaches in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, language is portrayed as a linguistic repertoire; this definition is made part of a discourse of consistency to reality, which corresponds to the disciplinary pursuit for a scientific status. This paper instead draws attention to the investment of values in the explanation of language and communication by scholars of translingualism. Translingualism involves an ethic of communication that depends on the uniqueness of human subjects. Taking this quality of human subjects as the basis for a sign theory, this presentation discusses potential difficulties for translingual analysts.

Ruyu Yan is a PhD student working on a theoretical dialogue between integrationism and translingualism. Her research interests lie in multilingualism, integrational semiology, and communication philosophies. 

In Hong Kong, mental illness is a culturally-sensitive and stigmatized topic, impacting individuals and communities. To combat this stigma, local campaigns like “More Than A Label (MTAL)” encourage individuals with lived experience to share their stories of mental health recovery. This session will present findings from a study analyzing recovery stories from 17 MTAL participants. Using narrative analysis, the study reveals rhetorical strategies that transform personal stories into persuasive narratives, exploring the construction of tellability and its implications for mental health anti-stigma efforts.

Stephanie Ng is a final-year PhD candidate in the School of English and a member of the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH) in the Faculty of Arts. With a master’s degree in clinical psychology, she adopts an interdisciplinary approach in her research. Her work combines psychology and sociolinguistic perspectives to examine how personal stories of mental health recovery help address stigma in Hong Kong society. She has published first-author articles in renowned academic journals, including The International Journal of Eating Disorders, BJPsych Open, and BMC Psychology.