Hong Kong Studies Association 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).
Date: 13 -14 June 2025
Background: 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.
Annual conference details
This year’s Hong Kong Studies Association Annual Conference, held over two days, between 13 -14 June 2025, 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.
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.
Key dates
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 20 March 2025 | Registration opens |
| 2 June 2025 | Registration closes |
This event is co-sponsored by the Hong Kong Studies Association and the British Academy.
This event is co-organised by Dr Elaine Chung, Ka Long 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.
Enquiries
Questions about the conference can be directed to conference.hksa@gmail.com.