Quarantined between cultures: Overcoming communication challenges and building resilience among Chinese students residing in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic

This project aims to understand the communication challenges of Chinese university students studying in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chinese students comprise the UK's largest proportion of international students and are important to HEI's financial sustainability. The project will use principles from research in intercultural communication, health communication and media literacies to examine how Chinese students access and evaluate information, negotiate intercultural differences, and cope with COVID-19-related stigma, and how these processes affect their attitudes towards studying in the UK. It will adopt a participatory-research model, engaging participants in data collection/analysis, empowering them to communicate their findings to relevant parties and build resilience. The results will improve universities' ability to support international students and more broadly enhance our understanding of the problems faced by people residing in different cultures during pandemics. The unique participatory approach developed will be applicable to studying and supporting other multicultural/multilingual communities in the UK.