Going beyond known knowledge with ethnographers' reflexivity in a working-class neighbourhood of public housing estates in neoliberal Hong Kong

My PhD research explores the impacts of territorial stigmatisation on shaping working-class culture and identity in public housing estates in neoliberal Hong Kong. From 2015 to 2019, I gained access to Immortal (the nicknamed neighbourhood where my family had settled for four generations) and collected data from a group of public housing residents who shared similar views on and experiences of stigmatisation with me, by ways of group observations and individual interviews. However, when I intend to go beyond my known knowledge of the field where I have been a part of, I find ethnographers’ reflexivity is more useful and insightful than knowledge positionality, writes Jason Yan.