Understanding campus-based intercultural social capital for minority university students in Hong Kong

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social capital accrued via cross-racial/ethnic networks plays an important role in the adjustment, persistence and success for minority groups of university students. Yet, few studies offered insight into how intercultural social capital impacts learning and socialising experiences among minority students in non-Western contexts. Drawing on interviews with minority university students in Hong Kong, this study canvassed their intercultural networking, its influences and institutional factors that conditioned its accessibility. Findings showed that participants garnered a full array of social capital in ethnic minority cliques, whereas their connections with institutional agents were more inclined to pastoral care rather than academic advising and mentor services. This study unearthed a campus environment wherein a monolithic Chinese/Cantonese culture and de facto racial/ethnic-segregation contributed to their restricted academic/social engagements with other counterparts and added to the manifestations of marginalisation in the literature that has been preoccupied with racial lines around the Black-White binary in Western contexts.