Faculty Member, School of English
Assistant Professor
About
Katherine is interested in topics of language and identity, multilingualism and transnationalism.
Her current research include (1) an ethnographic research tracing Indonesian Chinese diaspora across Indonesia, China and Hong Kong since the 1950's; (2) gender debates on Kong girls; and (3) continuing her long time passion on multilingual Hong Kong and bilingual returnees identity negotiation. She investigates how distinctive 'styles' (Irvine 2001) of code-switching relate to social categorization, and what roles language ideologies have played in the (re)construction and negotiation of group and individual identities. During fieldwork of that research, Katherine produced a sociolinguistic documentary film, 'Multilingual Hong Kong: Present 一 個 Project' , as a resource for raising public awareness on issues of bilingualism, bilingual education and language-related social discrimination.
Katherine was trained in both Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the University of Hong Kong. Her following research interests are connected closely with these two interdisciplinary approaches: social aspect of bilingualism, code-switching and language contact, Chinese, Indonesian Chinese diaspora, language ideologies, language and identity, standardization and prescriptivism in Cantonese, language discrimination, ethnography and video sociolinguistics.
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