Hong Kong Minority Youth and the Building of Translocal Community Cultural Wealth

Abstract

Poor academic achievement and other social problems faced by minority and migrant youth has been often explained and addressed through deficit ideologies which frame these subjects as linguistically and culturally deficient. As an alternative, this paper proposes understanding the realities and trajectories of these youth through the lens of community cultural wealth (CCW), which recognises familial, aspirational, navigational, and other forms of capital emerging from students’ communities. Drawing on four years of ethnographic field work in Hong Kong with ethnic minority youth (Nepalis, Pakistanis, Indians), we apply the concept of CCW to understand how our participants organise to negotiate and resist marginalization. We go beyond previous applications of CCW by: (1) paying attention not just to students’ thick communities, based on slow-moving notions of nation or ethnicity, but also to dynamic light communities based on shared niche practices; (2) highlighting translocal dimensions of CCW; (3) pointing to limitations of using metaphors of capital within contexts of neoliberalism.