Congratulations to Holy Shum, our PhD candidate, and Prof. Tommy Tse for their exemplary paper, which has been recognised by The Academy of Hong Kong Studies as one of the outstanding papers for 2022-23. Their co-authored paper is entitled “Platforms, politics and precarity: Hong Kong television workers amid the new techno-nationalist media agenda” and was published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Through in-depth interviews with Hong Kong TV workers, this paper reinstitutes the techno-political to the analytical lens of Creative Labour Studies. The authors posit that the ebb and flow of Hong Kong’s TV industry and its creative labour process are not just guided by economic considerations under global media platformisation, but also uniquely entangled with its historical legacies, socio-technical contexts, and political and ideological framework. The pursuit of market-oriented monetary return and compliance with the nationalist agenda in the Hong Kong TV industry creates a context-specific techno-nationalist agenda, rendering interviewed workers unprecedentedly confused and disappointed at work. Such techno-politically driven work dissatisfactions are also largely distinct from those discussed in previous studies of Western and non-Western media and cultural work. However, changing techno-political conditions also enact a self-governed ‘ethical regime’ for TV workers in their professional practices and open up new creative opportunities.