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DIY Media-Making for Social Change: Hong Kong’s Ethnic Minority Youth Speak Back to Exclusion and Call for Social Action Through Cellphilms

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Youth as Architects of Social Change

Abstract

Hong Kong’s 2014 Occupy Movement brought its citizens and residents—both Chinese and ethnic minorities—to the streets in an effort to protest growing Mainland Chinese influence and express a call for increased democratic measures in the territory. Through a participatory visual research project among four ethnic minority youth using semi-structured interviews and DIY media-making with cellphilms (cellphone + filmmaking), the findings indicate that participating in and responding to the Occupy Movement encouraged ethnic minority youth to feel an increased sense of inclusion and belonging in the territory—where they have grown up and studied feeling excluded and isolated.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The We are Hong Kong Too archive can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKeVRuIJ2fDu9SgP6rdaZxQ.

  2. 2.

    The “one country, two systems” policy also applies to Macau and Taiwan (Gargan, 1997).

  3. 3.

    See, for example, On the Edge of a Floating City, We Sing (2012), which examines creative resistance (through art and social movements) to growing inequality in the city.

  4. 4.

    Ten Years (2015) imagines Hong Kong’s decreasing autonomy (e.g., Cantonese is outlawed; there is an overwhelming Mainland Chinese presence in the city) through five short films by local directors (Zune, Chow, Au, Ng, & Wong, 2015). See the trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46OjIXuF1f4.

  5. 5.

    The Equal Opportunities Commission (2011) emerged from the Race Discrimination Ordinance and is the political body that individuals are asked to go to lodge a complaint if they feel that they are racially discriminated against or harassed (HKSAR, 2017).

  6. 6.

    Each of the We Are Hong Kong Too participants has chosen pseudonyms for the project.

  7. 7.

    https://www.facebook.com/wearehktoo.

  8. 8.

    https://twitter.com/weareHKtoo.

  9. 9.

    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKeVRuIJ2fDu9SgP6rdaZxQ.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Casey Burkholder

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  1. Casey Burkholder
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  1. Department of Public Health Science, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway

    Sheri Bastien

  2. Oslo and Akershus University College, Oslo, Norway

    Halla B. Holmarsdottir

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Burkholder, C. (2017). DIY Media-Making for Social Change: Hong Kong’s Ethnic Minority Youth Speak Back to Exclusion and Call for Social Action Through Cellphilms. In: Bastien, S., Holmarsdottir, H. (eds) Youth as Architects of Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66275-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66275-6_7

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