Study name: Locating London’s Chinatown: Everyday heritage, cultural identification and place-making in a global city
Research project lead: Xiao Ma
Project length: 2020–2024
Project overview
This PhD research aims to reconceptualise London’s Chinatown through critically examining the notion and practice of Chinatown heritage in global London by ethnographically investigating a series of heritage-making projects organised by China Exchange, a Chinatown-based independent charity and undertaken by a group of multi-ethnic Londoners. With a focus on the “simultaneity of unities and diversities” (Glick-Schiller and Schmidt, 2016) in the city-making practices by all city inhabitants, this study aims to demonstrate the cultural complexities of London Chinatown as a fully lived, practised, simultaneously real-and-imagined place with complex relationships with both the past and other places.
The majority of the existing studies on Chinatowns focus on people or their activities alone, neglecting the interactions between people and things in “the making of migrant worlds” (Wang, 2016). This research investigates London Chinatown from the perspective of materiality, namely, how people create meanings about Chinatown through materialised practices as part of heritage-making activities. Investigating the multiple levels of materiality associated with heritage-making offers an entry point to develop a more nuanced and grounded understanding of how the symbolic meanings of Chinatown are negotiated by London inhabitants, shed new light on the social embeddedness of the place, and challenge the homogenising portrait of Chinatown as a bounded urban space essentially containing an “ethnically other” Chinese community.
Project team
Supervisors: