Students of the Master of Arts in Global Communication Program
State of the World 2025
A research report by students of the Master of Arts in Global Communication Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Find the full version report PDF here
Introduction
by Programme Director Nishant Shah
Knowledge is a lived practice. The work of doing knowledge and the work that we make knowledge do require two different kinds of skillsets. In the Global Communications Masters Programme, at the School of Journalism and Communication, we take pride in equipping our students with a critical tool kit to understand, analyse, address, and repair some of the biggest challenges of our times through rigorous thinking, reading, learning, and research. Inspired by the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s commitment to transferring our academic knowledge to society, we inaugurated the dual elective course on ‘Future Pathways to Research’.
This elective helps students see the value of their research in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and their own position in the world as global communicators who use their skills and privilege to make positive social change. The course invites 5 Knowledge Partners representing different stakeholder groups in our society, to help the students work together at developing a research brief and producing knowledge that bears witness, identifies challenges, and make interventions through their communication research, in championing different SDGs.
The 3 groups of students this year, working under the theme of ‘The Present and Future of Coming Together’, partnered with inspiring knowledge partners who facilitated their access to different groups in civil society, government, private sector, and multi-lateral development agencies. Each group of students identified a challenge that is anchored in the local but has resonances with the global. The teams worked over the entire academic year to find communities and collectives that are committed to building stronger, cohesive, and inclusive societies. Their research involved critical literature review, policy and regulation engagement, historical overview, interviews with members of different communities, learning from practitioners and professionals, and producing a report that shows their skills and their commitment to being communicators ready to change the world.
In this first edition of the State of the World report, the sections bring together critical questions about global challenges that unfold uniquely in the locatedness of Hong Kong. A group working with asylum seekers, reminds us of the invisible communities that are so critical to social and cultural cohesion of our societies. In a world where we are all under the threat of different migrations – social, political, environmental, economic – it is important to change the narratives of who an asylum seeker is and how we imagine their lives, their presence, and their role in building a strong, cohesive society.
Another group of students focus on the question of livability. How do we build futures that are livable? How do we make these futures inclusive? Working on principles of design justice and participatory design, they look at the lived reality and materiality of life in the dense urban housing market of Hong Kong, to see how we can create more inclusive and bottom-up policies that help the most vulnerable communities impacted by the high costs of living and the housing markets. In their work they show how it is our civic duty to participate in the governance of our cities, and how we need to make spaces to imagine livability as more than just survival – imagining a rich life of social, cultural, and economic integration that opens up possibilities of creative and self-governed communities of care.
The third group of students work with Foreign Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong to understand how they navigate and build our city and their lives in it. Looking at their invisible labour, their quiet resilience, and the ways in which different community and shared practices guide their daily lives, the report helps us understand the interplay between collective and individual agencies and the need to build more community structures for groups that are otherwise easily overlooked or forgotten. Far from painting these FDHs as victims, the report shows the possibility of how they can organize, collectivise, and create wonderful opportunities of reimagining the city, the technologies of communication, and the need for dialogue across multiple groups that form the rich diversity of Hong Kong.
It is also noteworthy to see that most of the students, and the communities that they worked with, kept COVID-19 as their reference point for their research. This wasn’t a planned strategy, but it is evident that the experiences of the pandemic have shaped our collective ideas of who we are, who we connect with, and how we do it. The reports all show the richness of academic research, the vulnerability of lived reality, and how university researchers and future communications scholars can continue their research trajectories into areas beyond academia.
This report owes gratitude to many different people, collectives, organisations, and institutions who generously housed, shaped, inspired, and made this course and report possible. You will see all their names variously mentioned across the different sections of the report. As the Director of the MA in Global Communication Programme, I can only thank all of them, on behalf of the school, and the entire team of students and faculty, for giving us so much of their expertise, their time, their generous invitations and their critical insights. This programme is strengthened by the different people who have supported it and continue to inspire us to do more and help our students find their way as research practitioners, who shall build pathways to stronger futures through critical research and collective care.