Hong Kong Studies Association Annual Conference 2026

Date: 11-12 June 2026 

Location: University of Surrey

Theme: (Un)Settling Hong Kong: Local, Global, and Glocal Futures

Summary

The Hong Kong Studies Association is pleased to announce its annual conference for 2026 with the theme (Un)Settling Hong Kong: Local, Global, and Glocal Futures. 

(Un)Settling Hong Kong asks how Hong Kong, the identities of Hongkongers, and Hong Kong Studies as a field are being reshaped amid rapidly changing conditions. Marking the fifth anniversary of the BN(O) scheme in the United Kingdom, the conference examines how the shift from migration to settlement transforms experiences of belonging, community, and cultural life for Hongkongers abroad. At the same time, the introduction of the National Security Law and intensifying integration with mainland China are remaking Hong Kong’s cultural, social, and imaginary landscapes, raising urgent questions not only about identity and culture but also about the wider future of Hong Kong research. This smaller Hong Kong Studies Association conference invites concise, empirically grounded, and/or conceptually innovative papers on how Hong Kong is remembered, lived, governed, represented, and studied today, across local, global, and (g)local contexts.

A number of panels will be organised by Hong Kong Studies Association special interest groups, and other panels will be open to individual paper submissions aligned with the themes below. 

Programme

[Day 1] 11 June

11:30-12:00 | Registration + Welcome refreshments [Lecture Block outside LTE]


12:00-12:30 | Opening remarks [LTE] 

12:30-14:00  |  Panel Sessions 1 

Theme 1: Settling, Belonging, and Hongkonger Lives [LTB] 

• Chair: Elaine CHUNG 

Categorisation, citizenship, and belonging: the census and representation of minoritised identities in official discourse in Hong Kong

• Keenan MANNING (University of British Columbia)

Diaspora Media’s Editorial Dilemma: Balancing Professional Ideology and Political Duty

• Galileo CHENG (Independent Journalist) 

Migration and Material Objects: The Quotidian Lived Experiences of Hong Kong Migrants in the UK

• Chung Hong YAN (University of Southampton) 

Translocal Hong Kong SIG [LTE]

• Chair: Eva Cheuk Yin LI

Cultivating Social Glue and Future Food System: Cultural Crops and Community Resilience in the BN(O) Migrant Experience

• Ricci YUE (University College London)

Living Well after Migration: Exploring Everyday Wellbeing among Hong Kong Migrants in the United Kingdom

• Asa CHOI (University College London)

Cultural identity’s plasticity in a context of political migration: Hongkongers resettling to London (UK) following the implementation of the National Security Law (2020) - an Ethnography 

• Johana BURLOUX (University of Westminster)

14:00-14:30 | Break and refreshments

14:15-15:45 | PHD panel [LTE]

Hong Kong Erotic Cinema: Li Han-Hsiang and the Cultural Politics of Fengue Films Hong Kong identity as psychoanalytic resistance against hegemonic insistence

• Wayne HA (King’s College London)

Displaying Diplomatic Agency: Discourse Theory and the Practices of Non-State Diplomacy 

• Darill LIEW (University of Surrey) 

A Question of Contagion: Sex Work, Public Health and Colonial Medicine in 19th Century Hong Kong 

• Ezra KÜCKEN (Trinity College Dublin)

Designing (G)local Solidarities: Participatory Action Research on Queer Trans-Border Mobilities and Civic Engagement in Hong Kong

• Ka Yi YEUNG (University of Leeds) 

Beyond Mental Illness: A Dual-Continua Examination of Mental Health Among Hong Kong Migrants in the UK

• Alvin HUI (University of Bristol)

16:00-16:15 | Break and refreshments

16:15-17:45 | Panel Sessions 2

Theme 1: Settling, Belonging, and Hongkonger Lives [LTE]  

• Chair: Terry AU-YEUNG 

Decision to Vote: Hong Kong Diasporic Citizenship in Wales

• Elaine CHUNG and Ka Long TUNG (Cardiff University)

Friendship Under Test: Disruptions of Friendships in Post-2019 Hong Kong

• Pricilla SHAM (University of Bristol)

Sounding Against Erasure: 'Glory to Hong Kong', Counter-Archiving, and the Politics of Minoritised Memory

• Damian Tak Yu CHEUNG (University of Edinburgh)

Global Hong Kong Cultures SIG [LTB]

• Chair: Malte KAEDING

Queer Cultural Politics in Post 2014 Hong Kong: Reconfiguring Queerness, Pop Culture, and Political Imagination

• Eva Cheuk Yin LI (King’s College London)

Rescaling Counterpublics: The “Transnationalization” of Hong Kong Independent Publishing 

• Kin Long TONG (University College London)

De/mobilisation and dis/hope? Post-2019 diaspora moral politics and its discontents in the UK

• Hannah POON (University of Amsterdam)

Cantonese Roots, Global Reach: Local Identity and Cultural Transformation in the Ip Man Biopics

• Wayne WONG (University of Sheffield)

17:45-18:00 | Best PhD Paper Award [LTE]

19:00 | Dinner

[Day 2]  12 June

9:00-9:30 | Registration and refreshments

9:30-11:30 | HKSA Keynote + Q&A [LTE]

Understanding transnational repression and co-optation through the Hong Kong diaspora case 

• Speaker: Eva PILS (Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg) with sharing by Ray WONG Toi-Yeung 

• Chair: Malte KAEDING

11:15-11:45 | Break and refreshments

11:45-13:15 | Panel Sessions 3 

Theme 3: Culture, Space, Design, and Trans-Border Orders [LTE] 

• Chair: Wayne WONG

Geopolitics of Mobility and the Making of Political Subjects: Hong Kong Students in Taiwan during the Late Cold War

• Chiao-Yuan Jo KO (University College London)

“I watched, helpless”: Xu Xi’s Literary Representation of Hong Kong’s Vanishing Spaces

• Marco SBREGLIA (Sapienza University of Rome and University of Silesia in Katowice)

Cost of Piracy:  Insurance, Risk Management, and Piracy Suppression in early 20th Century Hong Kong

• Ho Nam Dexter TSE (Trinity College Dublin)

Theme 2: Memory, Erasure, and (Not) Forgetting Hong Kong [LTB]

• Chair: Kin Long TONG

Resilience building through remaking the taste of the homeland among Hongkonger diaspora in the UK

• Lee CHENG (Anglia Ruskin University)

Critical scholarship and academic freedom: Quo Vadis?

• Paul MORRIS (UCL: IED)

What we talk about when we talk about the rule of law: Researching Hong Kong law in 2026

• Urania CHIU (Oxford Brookes University)

13:15 – 14:15 | Lunch and Reflections