RESEARCH projects

This project expands on the team's first CRF project on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on workplaces. Graduates are a vulnerable demographic group in the post-pandemic workforce, they are facing worsened mental health, changed workplace practices, and different employment opportunities. The project also examines new career opportunities in the Greater Bay Area (GBA). It investigates how graduates could be best supported in different career choices across the GBA.

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Our mixed-methods project draws on interview and survey data from graduates, employers and university staff about the impacts of COVID-19 and its aftermath on graduates' experiences. This data helps us to develop effective strategies to support graduates’ transitions. The project combines insights from sociolinguistics, psychology, and other relevant disciplines. The project will also engage participants at every stage of the project, from design to implementation and dissemination. The project involves local and global collaborations, with co-investigators from Hong Kong NGOs and business organisations, as well as researchers from universities in the United Kingdom. We also identified the skills and competencies that students are expected to have as they transition into the workforce during such a difficult time. 

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Findings from the project contribute to developing evidence-based support strategies and resources to assist graduates with successful workplace transitions. These resources will support the development of core competencies required in the post-COVID-19 workplaces, including digital, linguistic, interpersonal competencies and mental health resilience.​

This project brings together three years of collaborative corpus linguistic research on how biomedical science writes about intersex variations of innate sex characteristics. Drawing on the Intersex Research Corpus (IRC) — 368 research articles and approximately 1.3 million words drawn from PubMed and spanning 1950 to 2020 — the project traces how biomedical discourse changed before and after the 2006 'Chicago consensus' statement that renamed intersex as 'disorders of sex development'.

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Using multidimensional analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the project has identified four major discursive shifts: a sharp rise in the language of risk, danger, and anxiety; a genomic turn in which classical molecular biology gave way to clinical genomics and variant-based risk stratification; an expansion of clinical authority into gender identity and sexual orientation; and a transformation in the epistemic community of the field, as patient voices, critical scholars, and sports regulators entered a previously closed clinical discourse.

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The findings have direct implications for clinical practice, bioethics, and intersex human rights policy. The project is producing a series of journal articles and a monograph forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

This project examines how language and power shape the clinical communication surrounding intersex variations in Hong Kong. Drawing on interviews with twelve clinicians, the research analyses how doctors describe and explain innate sex characteristics to patients and their families. Using interactional sociolinguistics and stance-taking analysis, it traces how biopower operates through everyday clinical talk, linking micro-level discourse to macro-level structures of gender, ableism, racialization, and biological sex difference. 

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The work has resulted in a monograph published by Cambridge University Press — Language, Gender and Biopolitics: Meaning-Making and Intersex Variations in Healthcare (2026) — and two manuscripts currently under review with leading journals. One manuscript examines how clinicians construct parents as differently "educable" biopolitical managers of their children, with these constructions deeply entangled with social class and Hong Kong's postcolonial English/Cantonese language economy. The other interrogates how bodies with intersex variations are framed as "abnormal deceivers" in clinical discourse, with gender and biological sex operating as mutually reinforcing regulatory apparatuses.

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Together, these studies argue that gender remains analytically indispensable as both a system of power and a lived reality; it is essential for understanding the bioregulation of innate sex characteristics and the prospects for more liveable lives for intersex people.