After our great experience at our LGBT+ History Month Research Showcase, we knew we had to host another showcase for Asian Heritage Month.
After our great experience at our LGBT+ History Month Research Showcase (read all about it here!), we knew we had to host another showcase for Asian Heritage Month. These events are a great opportunity for postgraduate networking, research dissemination – as well as the development of presentation skills! In line with Asian Heritage Month, we invited postgraduates to share their research on anything relating to Asian Heritage, identities, rights, or histories. Read more about what research was shared below!
Ansar Ullah, ‘The Bengali Anti-Racist Movement of the 1970s-1980s: Explaining Mobilisation in East London’
“During the evening of 4 May 1978, Altab Ali, a 24-year-old Bengali leather garments worker, was brutally stabbed and murdered by three youths in a racially motivated attack on Adler Street, close to Whitechapel Road in London’s East End. Altab Ali’s death sent shockwaves through the Bengali community and there was an eruption of grief and a political awakening. The scale of the Bengali anti-racist movement was unprecedented, and the forging of alliances with anti-racist struggles across and beyond London was crucial in its subsequent mainstream political recognition. In their thousands Bengali clothing workers, tailors and restaurant workers took to the streets in marches, rallies and sit-downs demanding action to stop racist attacks. As a result, a mass anti-racist movement grew in the wake of Altab Ali’s death. From the previously held view of the Bengalis as victims of racism and as passive and fearful, a new generation of courageous determined Bengali radicalised youth leaders rose. Despite the historical weight of the protests in the 1970s–1980s there has been limited scholarly effort to understand how and why the Bengali anti-racist movement mobilised at such a scale and speed.
“This thesis was undertaken as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award in partnership with the Bishopsgate Institute and Tower Hamlets Local History Archive by a researcher who is part of the community he has been researching. Drawing upon numerous oral history interviews and substantial archival research, it asks: how and why did the Bengali anti-racist movement mobilise so quickly and in such numbers? In responding to that question, is centres the role of place as not only empirical focus but analytical device for understanding: the resources on which the movement drew (i.e. how they mobilised); the political subjectivities that were produced in so doing (i.e. why they mobilised); and the legacies for institutional politics in East London (i.e. the so what). In so doing, the thesis draws attention to the significance of place for social movement resources; the role of territory in forging political conflict and subjectivities that claim space; and the role of place in forging institutional legacies of radical, grassroots activism.”
Tong Zhao, ‘Emojis in text-based online counselling: The case in Contemporary China’
“With the prevalence of mental health challenges worldwide, counselling serves as a crucial intervention in addressing this significant public health issue. While emojis are widely used throughout society, they have newly entered the field of counselling, offering a means to bridge the limitations of text-based communication. Dresener and Herring (2010,2014) reconsider the association between emoticons (an earlier version of emojis) and their roles as emotional markers. They point out that emoticons often are perceived as a less face-threatening speech act. There has been a prevalent focus on online counselling within the Computer-mediated Communication (CMC) landscape. On the one hand, some raise concerns that online counselling might constrain the potential to build deeper therapeutic relationships (Williams, Bambling, King, & Abbott, 2009), alongside ethical risks or other risk management issues (Hoffman, 2020). On the other hand, research has also covered optimistic views such as emotional safety through distance (King et al., 2006) and the effectiveness of online counselling in a crisis like the pandemic (Hanley,2021; Supriyanto et al.,2020). Accounts to date mainly regard one domain over another and rarely consider the interdisciplinary perspective. This research aims to bridge the gap in the unique context of emojis in online text-based counselling by applying an interdisciplinary approach through systematical analysis using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and discursive psychology.
“Specifically, I explore how emojis contribute to the meaning-making process of self-presentation, operating within both linguistic and non-linguistic frameworks. Additionally, the research investigates the functions of emojis in the context of psychological defensive mechanisms, analysing their influence on the development of therapeutic relationships in the online counselling environment. This research seeks to provide fresh insights into the role of emojis as dynamic tools for text-based online counselling, offering novel perspectives regarding the unique socio-political context of contemporary China.”
We thank our great postgraduate researchers for sharing part of their work with us, this was a great and interesting showcase! We hope to host more research showcases in the future for our postgraduate community. To keep up to date with what the Students’ Union is doing for postgraduates right now, visit our Postgraduate Hub here! And for more information on Asian Heritage Month, please click here!