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The article engages with arrangements of time and space and how they conjoin to constitute a disability chronotope that combines with other textual elements to both expand and limit empathetic horizons in Still Human, a film about a physically impaired middle-aged man and his Pilipino foreign domestic helper (FDH), set largely within a Hong Kong public housing estate. The study distinguishes between the text's declarative and descriptive layers, albeit while recognizing the forced and perhaps violent nature of this division. Structuring the surface of the film are technical codes and a chronological, optimistic, and sometimes humorous overcoming narrative through which protagonists triumph over tragedy. However, the surface of the text is intermittently disturbed by descriptive layers, or figurative currents. Although this troubling content appears peripheral to, and on the margins of, the text, this underlying and seemingly extraneous content is a crucial supplement which may more effectively realize authorial intentions to disclose the protagonists' humanness and engender empathy than the more prominent technical codes that structure the text's surface. Such coexisting layers illustrate how texts are stratified and how the content of texts and the intentions of authors are haunted by undecidability.

This article explores events in and around a supermarket with a middle-aged man with learning impairments. While documenting their particularities, this article also deploys these events as prisms through which to reflect upon how place is implicated in disabling practice and how the disabling geographies that such practice shapes and is shaped by may be un/re/made. These events are made subject to two readings. In the first, although the supermarket seems merely a backdrop against which events take place, it combines with forms of governmentality in and with regard to place to form a product, or text, through which the normative order speaks. In the second, place is regarded as a dynamic process constituted by innumerable elements in constant motion. Because both these readings register the product and process of disabling geographies, this article attempts, albeit while being thwarted, to realise less disabling geographies through rehabilitating process and attending to the ‘thingness’ of place; actual and imaginative subversions, or reversals and deconstructions. These seek to disturb and trouble disabling geographies and the practice made possible therein.

The article deconstructs UK Channel 4's 2012 and 2016 Paralympic advertisements, illustrating how the structure and arrangement of signs combine to challenge and reinforce stereotypical attitudes about ability/disability. However, the focus extends beyond taken-for-granted and commonsensical boundaries of a "text" to contemplate how readers' readings (e.g. on weblogs, in newspapers, journals, books, etc.) in specific contingent contexts combine to produce paratext that authors meanings relating to ability and disability. Both the advertisements and the readings they engender produce ambiguous and complex meanings that seem to resist, or thwart, authorial intentions to produce positive representations and efforts to master, or govern, texts through binary oppositions. Such fragility and undecidability in the representations, readings, and the texts they combine to produce give them double-edged qualities. Although this makes them comparable to the pharmakon, namely a beneficial remedy and/or drug/poison, with regard to their likely impact upon a media landscape containing other portrayals of disability, the undecidability of the texts coincides with the dis/ability and dis/abled identities to which they refer.

This article explores the diverse semiotic landscapes which may be experienced as a consequence of apparently mundane rides taken upon the Shanghai metro. I first present, and then untangle, the id...

Based upon ethnographic research, this article explores undergraduate students' experiences at a normal university in Shanghai focusing on the types of identities and forms of sociality emerging therein. Although students’ symptoms of disappointment seem to indicate the power of university experiences to extinguish purposeful action, this article suggests they are associated with students' identity work, central to which are attempts to cope with disintegrations to school-related identities and efforts to construct alternate senses of self.

This article is primarily concerned with how government webpages in Hong Kong claiming to embrace social inclusion and provide services and support for persons with disabilities construct issues relating to disability. These texts are not read in isolation. Instead, they are considered in conjunction with discourse produced in several United Nations documents, especially the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, to which Hong Kong is a signatory. These documents appear to both proffer and retract social inclusion in ways that complicate, if not undermine entirely, their purportedly inclusionary intentions. This article also reflects upon commentary produced by university students at a public university in Hong Kong responding to government discourse. Such focus upon ‘non-disabled’ readers reveals how texts do more than merely mediate pre-existing messages. Instead, they constitute a “social location and organizer for the accomplishment of meaning”, thereby counting as “a form of social action” (Titchkosky, 2007, p. 27). Through the texts they conspire to make about disability, authors and readers become complicit in the production, maintenance, and reinforcement of non-disabled (or abled)/disabled identities and dis/ableist ideology in ways that implicate the entire population in exclusionary processes.

This case is drawn from reflection upon ethnographic research conducted during 12 months in Shanghai. When this project commenced, I was initially concerned with residents’ attitudes toward living in a socially accelerated environment. Later, however, I became intrigued with, and preoccupied by, texts circulating in the city which ostensibly insinuated supernatural characters into prominent downtown locations. In this case, I present an alternate account of the processes involved in constructing data from “field” to “page.” This case, which is different from those more systematic versions subsequently published in peer-reviewed journals, explores the opportunities and challenges associated with ethnography—as both process and product. Specifically, I first elaborate upon how the field has already been constructed and is not, therefore, “waiting to be discovered.” Then, I reflect upon the multifaceted, and often conflicting, material fieldwork produces. Finally, I explore how the “field” is no longer, if indeed it ever was, discrete and separate—both geographically and emotionally—from “real” life. Although intended to be exploratory rather than authoritative, and edifying rather than systematic, this case concludes by arguing that reflexivity, namely, critical reflection upon, and acknowledgement of, the biases affecting such matters as how researchers imagine and construct the field, should be recognized during all stages of ethnography, including the texts produced consequent to fieldwork. However, reflexivity should not be performed as an end in itself. Instead, reflexivity should facilitate insights into links between knowledge claims, personal experiences, and the sociocultural and discursive contexts in which ethnography is produced.

Using an autoethnographic approach, this paper focuses upon interactions between ‘Paul’ (a pseudonym), whose symptoms associated with ‘severe learning difficulties’ are such that he is positioned on the low-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, his carers and others, in spaces taken for granted to be ‘public’ in both the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. This paper examines how social discourses relating to disability filter into social interactions, ultimately constructing the symptoms they purport to represent. This paper concludes by highlighting how interactions might be viewed as enabling rather than disabling, as producing spaces for thinking about the human condition.

Despite the recent emergence of scholarship on various aspects of contemporary urban Chinese residential life, these accounts typically perpetuate a narrative that situates the anonymous and emotionally distant life in new, often high-rise, apartments in contrast to the hugely more intimate relationships in older, predominantly low-rise living spaces. This article, whilst acknowledging the meaningfulness of such a distinction, first seeks to add ethnographic richness to this division, showing how, at least in the case of a small area within Shanghai’s Luwan district, an old/new neighbourhood division is incapable of expressing the more complex, often ambivalent, ways in which people experience residential life, before proceeding to show how residents’ experiences often cross-cut what is, in large part, a discursive division rather than a physical demarcation of separate spaces. The article also explores the ways in which residents seek to cope with, as well as find security and comfort within, residential spaces that are changing. Permeating this article are various meanings associated with the term ‘ontological security’ that, broadly speaking, refers to the order and regularity, as well as sense of well-being, that people feel in their lives.

Several studies and interviews of the Chinese students studying in an international foundation program in Beijing are conducted to explain the ambivalence that exists in the students with regards to their experiences towards secondary education. The Chinese youth are shown to undergo various sufferings while undergoing their secondary education but consider all these sufferings to be positive and worth it at the end.