Our Convenor Puja Kapai received the Faculty of Law’s Knowledge Exchange (KE) Award last year for her project ‘Plugging the Justice Gap for Minorities under the Law: Applied Intersectionality Research and Substantive Equality’. Her story was featured in the April 2018 issue of the KE newsletter:
‘People talk about gender-based discrimination or violence, or racial discrimination, but what my work highlights is that people are more than just a single identity holder. We inhabit multiple identities and when you locate and recognise the multifaceted identities all together in one person, that creates distinct vulnerability and disadvantage, which needs to be understood. We cannot develop effective laws or policies unless we can understand the populations we serve. I want to raise awareness about this across the societal, professional, governmental and non-governmental sectors.’
‘I’m gratified that there has been a change in culture. The government moved from saying there was no race discrimination problem in Hong Kong, to allocating resources to remedy what they now acknowledge as unacceptable patterns of racial marginalisation. NGOs are also now inspired to do their own research in this neglected area, monitor policies and call on the government to do better.’
Read the full story on the HKU Knowledge Exchange website.