From 25 July to 3 August 2026, the Digital Narratives Studio (DNS), School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), hosted the 2026 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School, Livable Futures: Asia as Worlding.

The Summer School was made possible through the support of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society and institutional partners: the Center for Cultural Studies at CUHK, the South Asia Initiative at CUHK, Cultural Studies Department at Lingnan University, the Division of Arts and Machine Creativity at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Hong Kong Baptist University.

The ten-day programme brought together 50 participants based across Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, as well as Europe and North America. The cohort included graduate students, independent researchers, early-career scholars, professors, artists, and filmmakers, each bringing different disciplinary backgrounds, creative practices, and lived experiences to the Summer School.

This range of backgrounds gave the conversations their particular energy. A question emerging from one location often found unexpected resonance in another, while exchanges across disciplines and practices opened new ways of approaching participants’ own work. Through these conversations, Inter-Asia was experienced as an ongoing process of learning across differences and building connections between people, places, and ideas.

Participants of the 2026 IACS Summer School at CUHK

At a time when overlapping crises have made survival appear to be the only imaginable horizon, the Summer School asked how we might create conditions in which individuals and communities can live, thrive, and flourish. Moving through three interconnected strands: Technologies, Narratives, and Care, the programme combined faculty lectures, participant-led panels, workshops, performances, collective reflection, and engagement with Hong Kong as a site of learning. Throughout the programme livability emerged as an ongoing practice of making and maintaining the worlds we inhabit together.

Reimagining Technologies

#AlgorithmicCuration #GenerativeAI #Untranslatability #DigitalWellbeing #Human–Non-humanRelations

The first symposium examined how technologies organise culture, labour, knowledge, and everyday life. Discussions moved across algorithmic curation, generative AI, archives, creative labour, digital wellbeing, and relationships between humans, machines, and other forms of life. These conversations drew attention to the values and assumptions embedded in technological systems, as well as the uneven possibilities and constraints they produce.

Through faculty inputs, participant panels, and practice-based workshops, technology became a site for both critique and imagination. Participants explored how dominant accounts of technological progress might be questioned, how overlooked histories and knowledge systems might offer alternative points of departure, and how technologies could be understood through their relations with care, culture, and collective life. Reimagining technology, in this sense, meant opening it to different histories, methods, and possible futures.

Narrating Otherwise

#World-making #Memory #Belonging #CollectiveImagination

Participants visiting Chungking Mansions during a field trip led by Lisa Leung

The Narratives symposium approached storytelling as a practice through which realities are named, contested, and remade. Conversations explored how narratives carry memory, shape belonging, organise collective imagination, and make certain futures appear possible while obscuring others. Participant presentations brought together work on literature, film, performance, archives, migration, identity, and social movements, creating connections across different cultural and geographical contexts.

Narrative inquiry also travelled beyond conventional presentation formats and classroom spaces. During a field trip to Chungking Mansions, participants encountered questions of migration, racialised belonging, and minority life through the everyday textures and layered histories of Hong Kong. Elsewhere, speculative and collaborative exercises invited participants to work through prompts, games, performances, and low-fi materials. Together, these activities approached narration as a method of encounter and experimentation, through which livability could be explored, rehearsed, and felt.

Participants experimenting through speculative and collaborative exercises

Practising Care

#Intimacy #Maintenance #Mutuality #Responsibility #CollectivePractice

The final symposium approached care as a political, intellectual, and everyday practice of remaining in relation. Discussions examined care through intimacy, pedagogy, visual culture, archives, disability, artistic participation, and the often-invisible labour involved in sustaining people, communities, and institutions.

Across faculty sessions and participant presentations, care emerged as a complex and sometimes ambivalent practice. Participants examined how it is shaped by institutions and social relations, as well as how it can sustain collective responsibility under difficult conditions. These discussions also resonated with the experience of the Summer School itself. When typhoon weather arrived early in the programme, participants staying on campus supported one another and helped the organising team adjust. Such moments brought further attention to the relationships through which communities are sustained.

Worlding Together

Across ten days, the Summer School formed a collaborative intellectual community in which conversations continued through workshops, field visits, shared meals, and informal exchanges. Faculty remained closely involved throughout the programme, joining participant panels and feedback sessions as well as tea breaks between sessions and symposium dinners. These more informal moments gave participants time to continue conversations, exchange experiences, and get to know one another across different career stages and fields of practice.

The programme did not seek to arrive at a single definition of livability. Instead, it created space for participants to develop a shared vocabulary for thinking about how futures are composed through technologies, narratives, and relations of care. We extend our sincere gratitude to the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society, our institutional partners, the faculty, participants, organising team, and administrative colleagues whose generosity, labour, and care made this collective process of worlding possible.