Listening, Public Space and Sonic Practice: The Soundscape of Female New Immigrants in Hong Kong

Abstract

Sound is a primary mode of awareness and relationality, offering critical insight into how individuals inhabit space, negotiate identity, and navigate the routines of everyday life. This doctoral thesis explores the auditory experiences of female new immigrants in Hong Kong’s public spaces and their engagements with the city through sound-based practices. In this study, “Female New Immigrants” refers to women from mainland China who have settled in Hong Kong since the 1990s through various pathways such as family reunion, marriage, education, or employment. The term is widely used in Hong Kong public discourse and policy to describe this demographic in a culturally grounded and socially specific manner. Listening, as a situated and embodied act, carries deep emotional, cultural, and spatial resonances that illuminate both the visible and obscured structures of public space. In this research, we investigate the entanglements between sound, female migrants, and public space by adopting a sound-centred theoretical and methodological framework. Sound serves as the key epistemological and methodological medium, supported by feminist, sensory, and urban spatial perspectives. These frameworks support a fourfold research structure that links theory, fieldwork, artistic creation, and curatorial reflection.

First, we establish the theoretical and epistemological grounding of the project and outline the methodological trajectory that developed from early pandemic listening practices to collaborative soundwalks and spatial playback sessions. Through the practice-led process, we propose Feminist Sonic Practice (FSP) as both a conceptual and methodological framework for the research. Secondly, we conducted participatory soundwalks as both a method and an embodied sonic practice, in which female new immigrants engage with their everyday urban soundscapes through listening, walking, recording, and reflection. These practices reveal how sound mediates identity, memory, emotion, and spatial belonging in a post-migration context. Thirdly, this research explores artistic transformation within the FSP framework, in which fieldwork recordings and sonic knowledges were reconfigured into soundscape compositions and installations. This process advances listening not only as a method of documentation but as a feminist artistic gesture. Finally, the fourth layer centres on curatorial engagement, culminating in the Sonic Transitions collaborative exhibition. Featuring ten works by twelve migrant women artists, the exhibition activated sound as a collective platform for storytelling, public engagement, and spatial intervention, responding to the complex interweaving of gender and migration in contemporary urban space. Together, these layers articulate a practice-based, feminist approach to sound that reclaims voice, space, and narrative within the complexities of post-migration urban life.

This research proposes a practice-based framework of Feminist Sonic Practice, integrating embodied listening, sonic intervention, mediation, artistic translation, and curatorial engagement. Methodologically, it develops a participatory and practice-led approach that combines soundwalks, re-listening, and collaborative sound creation, thereby expanding the scope of sonic ethnography. By centring the auditory experiences of female new immigrants, the study offers new strategies for transforming personal experience into shared knowledge and for reframing public space through embodied and situated sonic practices. Overall, this research contributes to broader debates in urban soundscape studies and feminist geography by demonstrating how sound as both method and medium can reveal hidden spatial dynamics, challenge dominant narratives of the city, and reimagine public space from a gendered and relational perspective.

Date of Award	7 May 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Ryo IKESHIRO (Supervisor)