Education

This article examines how schools in Hong Kong attempt to craft South Asian migrant students into desirable citizens and how the youths understand themselves as members of Hong Kong and of a global community. The contestation has to do both with how South Asians are viewed in Hong Kong and with how post-colonial Hong Kong is related to China. The process of citizen-making of transnational youths, I argue, is best understood at the local–national–global intersection.

This paper draws on Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and practice to explain the controversy surrounding civic education in Hong Kong, through the case of a compulsory secondary school subject called Liberal Studies (LS). The distinct advantage of a Bernsteinian approach is that its conceptual grammar cogently captures the contentious nature of LS and locates the structural autonomy of teachers. This article highlights the fragmented nature of the LS curriculum, which attests to a historical legacy of the Hong Kong education system that favours a subject-based curriculum in practice and a managerialist approach to teacher staffing. These institutional parameters exert profound influences on LS teachers’ modalities of practice. This study contributes to the burgeoning interest in applying Bernsteinian scholarship to the East-Asian region by nuancing the role of teachers in mediating the contentious LS curriculum and implementing civic education. Finally, further application of the Bernsteinian approach will be discussed.

Chinese nationalism (2012). We argue that guidelines about civic education are similar across these times of political turbulence. There are shifts in the content of the guidelines, but fundamental differences are not made explicit. The documents are not aligned with a theoretical framework of colonialism, liberal democracy, or Chinese nationalism, but rather, they are pragmatically oriented. The guidelines are signifiers of attempts to achieve normative

We identify a missing narrative about the place of whiteness in post-colonial Hong Kong. Using an anthropological framework developed by Mary Douglas, we show how white migrants who try to integrate their children into local Cantonese medium of instruction schools are challenged by recurring obstacles that highlight their whiteness and signal them as ‘matter out of place’ by transgressing colonial assumptions about whiteness in the territory. In adopting this framework, we reorient the current focus of whiteness studies away from examining the strategies and performances employed by white migrants in the production of whiteness to the regulation of whiteness by the social order. By identifying the absence of an appropriate narrative for these parents in the local education system, we highlight not just the continuity of colonial constructs of whiteness, but also the constraints upon those who try to escape them.