Research

My research approaches language education through a critical, poststructuralist lens, drawing on Foucauldian accounts of power, knowledge and subjectivity. My doctoral work at Simon Fraser University examined how recent immigrants from China have their subjectivities reconstituted; the same critical orientation now grounds my work on teacher agency, translanguaging, and the ethical integration of generative AI into language and professional education.

Themes

Teacher agency in the age of generative AI

How do teachers exercise agency, and what counts as teacherness, when AI tools enter their classrooms? I use ethnographic and mixed-methods designs to follow pedagogical decision-making in practice.

Translanguaging, writing and assessment

Translingual approaches to academic writing, feedback and assessment for emerging multilingual writers, including plurilingual and AI-mediated assessment in EMI higher education.

Subjectivity, power and decolonial critique

Foucauldian and postcolonial work on how immigrant, teacher and researcher subjectivities are constituted, and on what decolonizing academic knowledge production asks of us in everyday interaction, desire and fear.

Teachers as developers of educational AI

A teacher-led, open-source approach to educational AI, developed in the Cambridge Elements volume Teachers as AI Developers and in the tools I build.

Approach

Narrative inquiry, collaborative ethnography, duoethnography and discourse analysis, consistent with a critical, poststructuralist epistemology, combined with teacher-perception data where it helps.

Collaborative projects

• Social Media Analytics Research Teams (SMART), The Education University of Hong Kong, team member (2024–)
• Theorizing Plurilingual Assessment, The Education University of Hong Kong, co-investigator (2023–)
• Critical Media Literacy in Teacher Education, SSHRC, co-investigator (2022–)

For the full list of publications, see Publications. Software projects are on the Development page.