Hong Kong Temporalities: Pasts, Presents, and Futures9.10.2026 {en}

21-22 January 2027 | Online

Download the call for abstracts HERE:
https://bit.ly/4hGfW8y

Organised by Hong Kong Studies, this two-day symposium invites papers from across the humanities and social sciences that explore time and temporality in relation to Hong Kong’s cultural, historical, technological, social and political imaginaries.

Hong Kong has long been a city peculiarly conscious of time. Its modern history has been narrated through beginnings and endings, leases and deadlines, arrivals and departures, anniversaries and countdowns. 1997 became an anticipated future long before it became history; 2047 likewise exists simultaneously as date, horizon, projection and cultural imaginary. Yet Hong Kong’s temporalities extend far beyond these emblematic dates. They can be found in memories of vanished places, family histories and memoirs, experiences of migration and exile, changing generations and languages, speculative and science-fictional futures, technological acceleration, artificial intelligence, and everyday experiences of waiting, repetition, anticipation and change.

The symposium asks: what forms of time have shaped Hong Kong and its cultural imagination? How are its pasts remembered, forgotten, recovered or reinvented? How do memoir, literature, cinema, art and popular culture create alternative relationships between past, present and future? What temporalities emerge through migration, diaspora, exile and return? How do generations inhabit historical time differently? What happens to experiences of time under conditions of rapid political, urban and technological transformation? How might artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies alter our understanding of memory, prediction, authorship and futurity? And what can science fiction and speculative practices tell us about Hong Kong futures that have been anticipated, deferred, foreclosed or not yet imagined?

We welcome papers addressing topics including, but not limited to, countdowns and deadlines; history and historiography; memory and forgetting; memoir and life writing; nostalgia and post-nostalgia; futurity and anticipation; science fiction and speculative fiction; utopia and dystopia; technology and technological change; artificial intelligence and algorithmic time; digital memory and archives; ageing and generational time; migration, diaspora, exile and return; colonial and postcolonial temporalities; urban transformation and disappearing spaces; everyday rhythms, waiting and repetition; acceleration and rupture; haunting, spectrality and afterlives; alternative histories and counterfutures; and temporality in literature, cinema, music, visual art, performance and popular culture.

By bringing these approaches into conversation, the symposium seeks to consider Hong Kong as a site of intersecting temporalities, where remembered pasts, contested presents and multiple possible futures continually reshape one another.

We invite contributions from scholars at all stages of their professional development, as well as independent scholars, writers, artists, filmmakers, critics, curators, educators, technologists, and other cultural practitioners whose work engages with Hong Kong and questions of temporality. In addition to traditional academic papers, the symposium welcomes short presentations or informal talks that approach Hong Kong temporalities through creative, professional, personal, or interdisciplinary perspectives.

Please submit an abstract of 300–500 words, along with a short third-person biography (approx. 150 words), compiled in a single Word document. Submissions should be sent to hkstudiesjournal[at]gmail.com by Friday 4 December 2026.

Following the symposium, selected papers (6,000–8,000 words) will be considered for publication in future issues of Hong Kong Studies (Open Journals Hub).

Further information at https://hks.ojhhk.com/EN/news/news35.shtml.

Source: Hong Kong Temporalities: Pasts, Presents, and Futures (CFP deadline: 4 Dec 2026; online symposium 21-22 Jan 2027), H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online „CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.“