彭文朗 | michelle man-long pang

JYUTPING paang4 man4 long5 | IPA / pʰaːŋ˨˩.mɐn˨˩.lɔːŋ˩˧ /

the 'linguist' in me: language, society, identity & belonging / polyculturalism & multilingualism / language & migration / identity in narratives / linguistic spaces & language rights / language contact & sociocultural implications / ethnography & narrative inquiry / ESOL & language / digital humanities / collaborative workthe 'artist' in me: freelance graphic designer & digital illustrator / videography & editing / a chorister with a deep fear of baroque & medieval pieces

Hong Kong Cantonese • English • Mandarin •
a tiny sprinkle of french and japanese

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| Current research interests

I am primarily a language researcher who combines my research interests with multimedia creations, including web design, graphic illustrations, film-making, and music composition. At my core, I am an inquisitive learner with a strong focus on the intersection of language, society, and identity through an ethnographic lens. I am particularly fascinated by how identity expression manifests in one's narratives, how they persist or evovle across time and space, and what these constructed identities reveal about broader sociocultural contexts.As an avid story-listener, I believe in being present in the storytelling moment and developing authentic and meaningful relationships not just with the people I work with, but also an in-depth understanding of the spaces these stories emerge from. My ethos is rooted in honouring these narratives and ensuring they are properly represented in my research work.I have been working with the HKUST Nexus: Belonging Research Network team from 2022 - 2024 on our GRF funded visual ethnography project Navigating Belonging (PI: James Simpson, HKUST; GRF16600322) as the web developer & digital stories curator, workshop co-facilitator and project research assistant. From this project, 13 digital stories were developed and showcased on our Navigating Belonging Digital Stories website. The digital stories, co-created by the research team and participants hailing from diverse South Asian backgrounds, emerged from a series of Photovoice workshops designed to capture images related to their sense of belonging in Hong Kong and at home. Here are some of our most recent outputs:

It might be pretty self-evident from my track record that my research interested was once more focused on theoretical (socio)linguistics-centric explorations of Cantonese-English language contact phenomena — before I began embarking on my more applied linguistics oriented journey.To this substantial and progressive shift, I like to heavily credit my time on the SCOLAR-funded TypeDuck: Cantonese Jyutping Keyboard with Minority Language Prompts project (PI: Lau Chaakming, EdUHK). My time on the project has allowed me to take on outreach and educator roles in research projects that enable me to co-create and interact closely with members of different communities, bridging the intersections of applied digital language technology, Cantonese phonology-orthography interfaces, language and identity work, and collaborative research. Together with a team of student research assistants, we conducted train-the-trainer workshops for teachers, ran sessions in schools where we directly taught students how to use the tool, and organized workshops in community centers to teach parents how to use it.

Our findings were presented at the June 2024 Sociolinguistics Symposium 25 (SS25) in Perth.(PS: I did the visual branding and logo design for the project too - I did the ducks! Quack!)

| Past research interests

My past research interests (when I was still heavily involved in theoretical linguistics work) primarily lied in how language evolves under contact scenarios both structurally and socio-culturally (especially in cyber spaces and participatory multimodal creative media and arts), and what these traces tell us about belongingness, identity, visibility and representation of the speaker community.My methodological approach, research ethos and research vision was (and still is) strongly rooted in the concept of community co-creation: research is not about 'give and take' power dynamics between the 'academia' and the 'lay public' — through co-creation, 'researchers' and 'researchees' can enter into a reciprocal partnership to navigate more nuanced and intimate aspects of a given subject matter and negotiate desired research outcomes.

“This approach [i.e. Co-Creation] seeks to balance the inherent power dynamics that are present in social relationships [and binaries such as “academic” vs. “non-academic”. Co-Creation involves political listening and complex negotiations to address [and properly acknowledge] hierarchies, tensions and disagreements during the Co-Creative process […] If successfully executed, this approach creates an environment of mutual trust in which participants can both listen to each other and negotiate outcomes through the more subtle, embodied ways of collective creative practice.” (Horvath & Carpenter, 2020: 8)

My past research interests had been deeply rooted in my upbringing as a trilingual-biliterate Hongkonger. As the plethora of research efforts in bilingualism would tell us, having no language contact transfer/confluence in our inherently bi/pluralingual minds is not a realistic expectation — yet instructional language education often adopts a prescriptive and 'purist' approach that is often disjunct from quotidian language use. Code-mixing is the basic norm for most of the younger generation (I'd point you to Kongish Daily for a hilarious satirical take on this), and we as a linguistic community have developed unofficial romanizations of Cantonese in instant-messaging, which we call the "Martian Code" (火星文)."Okay, so why should we care?" you might ask. Studying these langauge phenomena provides insights into what products arise from languages being in contact, on both an individual and the broader societal level. More notably perhaps, is that these efforts are active forms of meaning-making, and overt performances of our (sociolinguistic) identity (see Goffman 1974 on 'talk' as social performance).We are asked in formal/institutional spaces to use "proper" language (often a clear cut between English and written Chinese, on paper) (Evans 2013; Li 2017; Jenks & Lee 2016). We are, in these spaces, "proper students" or "professionals". Outside of these spaces and in our daily lives, we adopt other linguistic resrouces in our repertoire (e.g. code-mixing, Kongish, Martian Code) and more - we become someone else. There is a clear display of when language is highly interconnected wth our identities, and when these spaces afford us with the conditions to be express our polycentric, fluid, and dynamic identities.If I feel that my identity has been greatly shaped (and at times even constrained) by linguistic spaces as the ethnic & linguistic majority, where I still have access to almost all linguistic and cultrual resources; then one could tell how much more compounded these issues become for someone with less resource privilege.This little ramble isn't much, but hopefully it gives everyone a peek into what has prompted my research interests - or, in modern cultural slang, "what keeps me up at night". Rambles aside, it did inspire a lot of my previous research initiatives, and here are some of them:

Here were some other musings I had in the past regarding the traces of contact variation in sound systems and their sociocultural implications, including issues such as:

My goal is to one day incorporate insights from these domains into community-collaborative research that bridge understanding and co-creation between academia and local communities, especially in facilitating linguistic spaces and accessibility in language rights. If any of these interest you, please do drop me a quick line!

| PUBLICATIONS / MANUSCRIPTS

| CONFERENCE & GUEST PRESENTATIONS

| other research outputs

> YouTube A Myriad of Voices: Linguistic Diversity and Vitality in Malaysia (2020)

| Art, designs & illustrations

Showcasing: digital portrait art & cartoon illustrations, logo designs, event posters/leaflets/banners, publication covers, promotional photoshoots, product label/packaging/flyers

| Video editing & cinematography

| Musings, Writing & music

The reflective nature of 'musings' to me can be encapsulated in two forms. In writings - the logos, the condensation of ideations, the pursuit for clarity; and in music - the pathos, the expansive exploration of ambience, the introspection into our very own emotions.I have been trying to get myself back into writing my musings lately after hyper-focusing on academic writing over the past few years. I don't have much in stock, but if you'd like to pick a piece of my mind, please feel free to reach out to me and have a chat with me!I mainly compose non-vocal pieces that convey ambiences, taking inspiration from different genres such as Castlevania video game music, light orchestral pieces, and general lo-fi music. I'll link my SoundCloud here once it's been set up!

| Current & past positions

| Qualifications & skillsets

Thanks for stopping by! Take care.
- Michelle 2022.06.21

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