About
Our Vision
Her Expat Story is a project that aims to create a Hong Kong where the experiences of women expatriates of diverse backgrounds are seen, understood, and valued. Through ethnography and art, our project hopes to deepen understanding of gender and class in global mobility. By bringing together researchers, students, creative practitioners, NGOs, and citizens, we aim to challenge singular narratives of migration and foster a truly inclusive community.
Our Mission
To document professional and personal journeys of women expatriates, highlighting their diverse and unique stories.
To build a supportive community with and for these women, facilitating dialogue with locals through mentorship programs and collaborative arts-based workshops.
To transform their lived stories into accessible public knowledge, via websites, social media, a local exhibition, and written works, bridging academic and community audiences.
Project Milestones
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Outreach to expatriate women networks
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10 participants selected as core group
1. Invitations
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Ethnographic interviews & life histories
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Memory walks across Hong Kong
2. Collecting Stories
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Arts-based workshops with Thy Lab
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Photography, sketches, collages, video clips
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Public exhibition of creativity & belonging
4. Art Exhibition
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Mentor orientation sessions
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Small-group meetings with mentees
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Storytelling, career sharing, life lessons
3. Mentorship Project
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Publish academic paper on “precarious privilege”
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Contribution to debates on race, gender, mobility
5. Project Closeout
Research Ethics
This is a research study funded by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 24615524). It is reviewed and approved by the Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Board of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (No. SBRE‐22‐0451A, SBRE-25-0604).
To present our research participants’ stories truthfully and responsibly, we follow rigorous ethical guidelines in all steps of the project:
• Participation
This project is based on collaboration and dialogue, and participation is voluntary. Participants can skip questions, stop an interview, or withdraw from the project at any time without providing a reason. Rather than treating participants as subjects of research, we work with them as partners in documenting and sharing their experiences. We invite feedback throughout the research process, and participants can clarify, revise, or withdraw material they feel does not accurately reflect their experiences. Our goal is not only to understand people’s lives, but also to create a space where participants have a meaningful voice in how their stories are told.
• Privacy and anonymity
All names that appear on this website are pseudonyms. To protect our participants’ identities, we also use pseudonyms for companies and, in some cases, geographical locations. While all stories and quotes are authentic, some identifying details have been intentionally changed or omitted; for example, we don’t reveal participants’ actual age, job titles, and dates of migration journeys. Similarly, the migration map is more of an illustration of migration complexity than the actual representation of individual mobility: while the map is based on real trajectories, some locations have been approximated to protect privacy.
• Ongoing consent
In accordance with the American Anthropological Association, we understand consent not as a one-time agreement but an ongoing conversation. Before the first interview, we explain the project and obtain oral informed consent. We continue to discuss it at every step: follow-up interviews, memory walks, social media activities, workshop participation, exhibition. With permission, we record interviews, but participants can choose to pause or stop a recording at any time. We also share interview excerpts, stories, and other materials prepared for the website or social media with participants for review. No story or photograph is published without our participants’ approval. Everything that you can see on this website has been consulted with and approved by the people whose experiences it represents.