FRACS Seminar - Film in research, film as research: reflections on the democratising potential of feminist methodologies in Hong Kong (Petula, Sik Ying Ho)

This seminar, illustrated with film clips, takes the form of a reflexive journey through a number of research projects involving dialogic filming, set against the backdrop of social change and political turbulence in Hong Kong. The issues covered are diverse, including the life choices of mid-life women, what it means to be a man, and the gender politics of campaigns for democracy. The films shown offer as a glimpse into the lives of Hong Kong people, narrated in their own words, as they make sense of themselves, their society and the challenges they face. These films, however, are not just recordings of data – they are an active part of the research process, an ethnographic practice combining the camera as a research tool with a dialogue of action-reflection-participatory engagement involving issues of intimacy, including taboo subjects. The practice of interviewing here involves participants as active parties to research, engaging with the researcher in reflecting on what the dialogue between them produces.

Petula, Sik Ying Ho is Professor in the Department of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Hong Kong. She is well known as a scholar, activist and public intellectual. Her work includes Women doing intimacy: Gender, family and modernity in Britain and Hong Kong (2020) co-authored with Stevi Jackson and Love and Desire in Hong Kong (2012), co-authored with Ka Tat Tsang. She is also author of I am Ho Sik Ying, 55 years old (2013) and Everyday Life in the Age of Resistance (2015). Her research projects explore the use of documentary films and multi-media theatre to integrate arts and scholarship. They include: 22 Springs: The Invincible (2010); The “Kong-lo” Chronicles, The Umbrella Movement: A Collaborative Focus Group Analysis” (2016); Labouring Women Devised Theatre (2019) and Our Imagined Future - If Someone Sees This After We Are dead (2021).