Expectation and Reality: Perspectives of Potential Migrants from Hong Kong and Hong Kong Migrants in the UK on the Hong Kong and British Education Systems

This study examines the potential of story completion as a decolonially attuned narrative method for researching migrants’ sensitive and politically contentious experiences. Story completion is a qualitative approach in which participants are invited to extend a researcher-designed story stem, enabling the indirect articulation of perspectives that may be constrained by surveillance, stigma or power asymmetries. Despite its relevance for contexts shaped by colonial legacies, racialisation and exclusion, story completion remains largely underutilised within migration studies. Focusing on digital story completion, this study critically assesses how three methodological features, anonymity, non-personal storytelling, and participants’ control over narrative content, can create conditions for epistemic safety and narrative agency. The discussion draws on illustrative research with prospective migrants from Hong Kong and Hong Kong migrants living in the UK, exploring their perspectives on the Hong Kong and British education systems. Through the stories produced, participants articulated critiques of national security education in Hong Kong, as well as experiences of othering and racism in the UK, accounts that are often silenced or difficult to access through conventional qualitative methods such as interviews or focus groups. By centring storytelling as a mode of knowledge production, this study positions story completion as a method that unsettles extractive research practices and challenges dominant regimes of voice and representation in migration research. We argue that digital story completion offers a promising, ethically responsive and underexplored methodological tool for engaging migrants’ situated knowledges, particularly in contexts where speaking directly may entail social, political or emotional risk.

Upcoming conference presentation: CESSMIR Conference (Sept 2026), The 2026 Taiwan Education Research Association (TERA) Confeerence & The World Education Research Association (WERA) Focal Meeting (Oct 2026).