One City One Book Hong Kong: A City-wide Community Reading Programme
- 2019
- Feature Story
- Centre for Popular Culture in the Humanities
我城我書/One City One Book Hong Kong began in January 2019, with an aim to build a sense of community and promote literacy by getting as many people as possible in Hong Kong to read and discuss one single book for a particular length of time. The book will remain the “one book” for one calendar year. This year, the “one book” is The Arrival, a wordless graphic novel by the Chinese Australian graphic novelist Shaun Tan. In the first half of 2019, more than 30 activities related to 我城我書/One City One Book Hong Kong were carried out: exhibition, academic seminars and workshops, storytelling sessions with marginalised group, elderly as well as parents. More than 3,000 people were involved in these events.
The initiative has provided much needed synergy within members’ research interests and these projects promise to yield quality publications, with an aim to transfer knowledge developed by colleagues at The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) that would synthesise research, knowledge transfer, and community service. This model for focused, synergistic community engagement has been successfully implemented worldwide for many years, and the project team is grateful to have been able to bring such a project to Hong Kong. While providing ample opportunities for research, 我城我書/One City One BookHong Kong is distinctive, however, in that it also aims to transfer knowledge developed by colleagues at EdUHK. In this way, the project aims to synthesise research, knowledge transfer, and community service, in a way that makes sense for colleagues inside and outside of the humanities. It aims, furthermore, to make EdUHK and Hong Kong a leader in public humanities projects in the region.
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Reading workshop at a local school
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Storytelling session by the One City One Book Student Ambassadors
Seminar conducted in a community bookstore
