Cultures of Masking

This TechCare project explores the sociocultural and politico-economic dimensions of a crucial technology of everyday life for managing the COVID-19 pandemic: masks. In the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, different public norms regarding mask wearing have emerged across cultures. While public health authorities around the world have issued guidelines noting that mask wearing would likely have beneficial public health effects, some societies may have greater difficulty adopting widespread mask wearing. Popular media reports have suggested many theories for why masks were quickly adopted in Asian countries, while other countries particularly in North America and Europe were slow to accept them. Theories range from cultural differences in perceptions of masks (“marker of modernity” versus “sign of disease”), to histories of mask adoption in response to air pollution, allergens, or pathogens. But while speculations are rife, actual research-based data about mask usage in the COVID-19 pandemic is thin. This research project aims to produce qualitative and quantitative evidence in order to answer important public questions about why, and whether, cultures differ in mask wearing attitudes.

The principal investigators for this project are Dr. Priscilla Song (Associate Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU) and Dr. Emma Buchtel (Associate Professor, Centre for Psychosocial Health & Department of Psychology, Education University of Hong Kong). They are working with co-investigators Dr. Izumi Nakayama (HKIHSS Research Officer Fellow, Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, HKU), Dr. Joseph Walline (Honorary Assistant Professor, Centre for the Humanities & Medicine, HKU), Dr. Chaoxiong Zhang (Postdoctoral Fellow, China Academy of Social Management/School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University), and research assistant Iqra Abbasi (Computing & Data Analytics Student, HKU) to employ an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach.

The project is funded by a Sin Wai-Kin Fellowship from the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong and Knowledge Transfer Funds from the Education University of Hong Kong. Click here for news updates about the Cultures of Masking project!