Affective journalism and identity: Community newspapers as emotional agents in Hong Kong

Situated within Hong Kong’s rapidly shifting sociopolitical context and complex identity landscape, this article examines how community newspapers produce community imaginaries in Hong Kong, focusing on the affective-discursive strategies through which grassroots journalism constructs community knowledge. Treating emotion as an epistemic infrastructure, this article draws on affective epistemology to examine how such strategies in two ideologically divergent community newspapers constitute distinct forms of community knowledge for readers. Through a comparative critical discourse analysis of one pro-democracy and one pro-establishment community newspaper, the analysis identifies two distinct affective strategies: an affective-participatory strategy that constitutes community as a self-determining collective subject, and an affective-governance strategy that constitutes community as a condition of harmony sustained through virtuous individuals and aligned institutions.