In recent decades, the flow of migrants in the globalising world has increased (notwithstanding the lockdowns associated with the Covid-19 pandemic). As one of the most popular destinations for migrant workers, notably high-skilled professional female migrants from the Mainland, Hong Kong is home to more than two million Mainland Chinese immigrants. Some of them frequently post videos to share their thoughts and experiences in Hong Kong through Chinese social media to present themselves, generate income, and maintain relations to Mainland. This study attempts to explore: (1) what communicative practices are evident in videos blogs (vlogs) of Hong Kong based Mainland female vloggers; (2) how these practices are combined in relation to positioning and identity construction; and (3) how these practices contribute to translocal belonging of Hong Kong based Mainland female vloggers.

The study is broadly located within the tradition of linguistic ethnography. It will encompass three distinct facets. First, this study will employ a multimodal interactional analysis, focusing on online vlogs posted by four Hong Kong based Mainland female vloggers, accessible through the video-sharing platform Little Red Book. Second, this study will draw on computer-mediated discourse analysis within the comment sections associated with the aforementioned vlogs on the platform. Third, this study will incorporate a linguistics-informed narrative analysis of both vlogs and interviews with the four participants.

This study aims to make innovative contributions in several ways: (1) It addresses a relatively underexplored form of migration, namely skilled migration. (2) It focuses on the vlogging genre, an area that has not received extensive scholarly attention. (3) It concerns with identity construction in online communication within the context of a public forum. (4) It investigates a particular form of translocal communication, that being translocal broadcast communication.