Brian King has been teaching and researching in Hong Kong since 2012, and the city and society that have been deeply formative of his perspectives on healthcare communication. He is a critical sociolinguist working at the intersection of language, sex, gender, sexuality, health, and technology. His professional life is shaped by several responsibilities; He is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, a founding member of the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH), and Associate Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine.

 

​Dr. King’s research examines how language shapes identities, relationships, and forms of knowledge in settings such as healthcare communication, sexuality education, online interaction, and the social life of space and place across different geopolitical contexts. Dr. King works with interactional sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, linguistic anthropology, linguistic ethnography, and critical discourse studies to understand how talk and text negotiate embodiment, power, intimacy, and epistemic authority.

 

Dr. King is especially interested in decolonial and Southern perspectives, and in collaborative projects that take seriously the ethics of knowledge production in transcultural and workplace environments. His publications span critical discourse studies, applied linguistics, and professional and healthcare communication, and he is involved in international networks concerned with epistemic justice and linguistic diversity. Lately, his work is turning towards artificial intelligence, with a developing focus on the language-related impacts of AI in medicine, education, and public life through my role in the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. This continues a longstanding interest in how human language and emerging technologies shape one another over time.