Annual Conference 2025
The Hong Kong Studies Association (HKSA) is pleased to announce the call for paper (CfP) for its 2025 Annual Conference with the theme of (Re)envisioning Hong Kong(s), to be taking place at Cardiff University between the 13th and 14th of June.
What is ‘Hong Kong’? For nearly a century, Hong Kong has served as a geographic space for trans-local, -cultural, and -national encounters under the unique context of British colonialism and China’s One-country-two-system rule, shaping its place, people, and politics. Despite waves of emigration from the territory in the 1980s and 1990s, Hong Kong as a subject in the global context has often been subsumed or assimilated into broader categories or labels. However, this academic imagination of ‘Hong Kong’ falls short in the post-2019/post-National Security Law era, where an exodus of Hongkongers actively seeks agency, capacity, and influence, they are reimagining what it means to be "Hong Kong" or "Hongkonger" in new localities and trans-local contexts. This movement has sparked bottom-up attempts to revitalise Hong Kong's global cultural and intellectual presence, including its arts, languages, and ideas. It has also fostered new forms of social, cultural, educational, linguistic, and political engagement, creating dynamic landscapes across local, international, and virtual spaces.
In these complex contexts, Hong Kong can no longer be
encapsulated by a singular academic framework. Simultaneously, the emergence of
new Hong Kongs in diverse localities reveals and unsettles previously unnoticed
or unquestioned structures of both ‘Hong Kong’ and their new habitats. In light
of these developments, ‘Hong Kong’ may become a placeholder for subjects to
study, reproduce, and reimagine; lenses to uncover existing
social-cultural-political relationalities and structures within local, national,
and global contexts; and novel phenomena shaped by Hongkongers navigating their
new environments.
This year’s Hong Kong Studies Association Annual Conference, held over two days, aims to expand the horizons of Hong Kong Studies by examining the diverse and multifaceted concept of "Hong Kongs." The conference poses a central question: How can we innovate theories, methods, and practices to better understand, capture, and reimagine the subjects or subjectivities encompassed by the term "Hong Kong"—including but not limited to a place, a culture, a lived experience and/or a concept?
The conference
invites scholars, artists, independent researchers, and graduate students from
a variety of disciplines to critically engage in this pivotal question.
Alongside broadly defined sub-themes, we welcome any individual papers,
organized panels, and creative works that interrogate the central question. The
event will also feature keynote addresses, discussions on theoretical and
methodological approaches, and community-driven roundtables and workshops.
These elements emphasize the importance of collaborative knowledge production
and its transformative potential for the field of Hong Kong Studies.
The conference invites submissions of abstracts exploring the following topics and beyond:
Selected PhD speakers will be invited to submit their full papers (6000 words) by 26 May 2025. Each PhD paper will be matched with a discussant. PhD speakers will receive a travel subsidy of £50 and compete for the Best PhD paper award. The best two papers will be awarded a prize.
We welcome submissions from
academics at all stages of their career, as well as artists and practitioners.
We especially encourage submission from postgraduate students and early career
scholars, and papers that focus on or comparatively study the UK context.
Key Dates
Deadline for proposals: 3
March 2025
Notification of decision:
21 March 2025
Registration opens: 2 May
2025
Registration closes: 2 June
2025
Registration information
will be announced in due course.
Enquiries about the conference can be directed to conference.hksa@gmail.com.
This event is co-sponsored by the Hong Kong Studies Association (HKSA) and the British Academy.
This event is co-organised by Dr Elaine Chung, Ka Lung Tung and Dr Terry Au-Yeung of Cardiff University, Dr Malte Kaeding of the University of Surrey, Dr Sui-Ting Kong of Durham University and Dr Wayne Wong of the University of Sheffield.