Wing Lam Michelle Chan

Research Topic

Everyday Intermediaries: Print Work and Print Culture in Industrial Hong Kong, c. 1950s-1970s

Supervisor: Jennifer Altehenger

I am interested in print culture, industrialisation, work, and growing commodification in post-war Hong Kong. By centring printed items (textual goods, usable items, packaging and branded ephemera), my doctoral project not only engages with print's changing role in media and communication, but also uses print’s materiality to link the experiences of workers, businesses, industry and consumers within a period of significant socio-economic change. On one level, I ask whether print and publishing workers' socio-political and occupational experiences affected the print they produced. Examining the 1960s, a time when actors increasingly construed graphic design and promotional packaging as forms of communication, I analyse design elements vis-a-vis wider industrial transitions. By examining smaller businesses alongside larger printers, I further seek to understand the varying scales of activity within industrial Hong Kong. To these ends, I use union files, industrial records, business archives, design ephemera, oral histories and newspapers. 

My DPhil study is funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and the Magdalen College Graduate Scholarship in History, and my work is supervised by Dr Jennifer Altehenger. Also at Oxford, I developed my interest in print culture beyond its textual dimension during my MSt in Global and Imperial History and my BA in History and Economics. My masters work probed tensions between Hong Kong Chinese businessmen and cultural production during the Interwar, and my undergraduate research investigated diglossia and political journalism in 1905 Hong Kong amidst a transnational boycott movement. My research thus adopts an integrated lens on production and consumption, highlighting everyday voices within Hong Kong's local and transborder contexts.