The IACS Summer School 2026 brings together 50 participants from across Asia and beyond, forming a vibrant and interdisciplinary community. Spanning the themes of Narratives, Technologies, and Care, the cohort includes postgraduate students, early-career researchers, and practitioners working across the humanities, social sciences, and creative industries.

Participants are affiliated with institutions in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, India, the Philippines, and further afield, reflecting diverse academic traditions and lived contexts. This diversity fosters a dynamic environment for critical dialogue, collaborative exploration, and the exchange of perspectives on digital cultures, infrastructures, and practices.

Nur Rasyiqah Abu Hassan

Visiting Research Fellow/Dr.

Oxford Brookes University

I view liveability as a negotiated process where communities assert their right to the urban space and belonging. My work investigates the narratives surrounding heritage, cultural identity and belonging that shape the experience of liveability in multicultural societies, with particular attention to the interplay between community discourse and urban policy.

Arjumand Ara

Assistant Professor of English

Bhaskar Engineering College

My research, through its examination of homonationalism, seeks to present the possibility of realising worlds where liveability for one minority does not come at the cost of the prospering of the others.

Chor See Chan

PhD candidate in Humanities and Social Sciences

Ahmedabad University

By studying the everyday food practices of the Kolkata Chinese community, which is caught in the whirlwind of geopolitical tensions, I attempt to unpack the notion of Chineseness and problematize the discourse on local identity, redeeming our imagination of a livable future from the state's dominant narratives.

Rouf Ahmad Dar

Assistant Professor

GITAM University, Bengaluru

Livability for me means the making of a world that is way more inclusive than the one that we live in. My work engages with livability by investigating how discursive formations supplant our lived reality with hegemonic understandings.

Do Hyeon Lim

MA graduate

Sungkyunkwan University

My research examines how Lee Hyori’s 2003 hit “10 Minutes” offered a powerful narrative of “sexy” female agency that helped shape a localized Korean form of post-feminism and continues to inform contemporary K-pop femininity. Within the framework of “Livable Futures,” I read these star images and audience responses as contested narratives of what a “livable” life and career can look like for young women in early 2000s Korea and beyond.

Yenbo Kuo

PhD candidate

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Livable for whom? And how is it created? This is the question I attempt to critically consider in my own research on U.S. military presence in Taiwan.

Yuxin Pan

PhD student

Hong Kong Baptist University

As a mainland Chinese scriptwriter and a PhD researcher in Hong Kong, my work on the precarious lives of female freelancers has taught me that livability is always a question of whose stories get told, for it's in the narratives not yet heard that new possibilities for living, changing, and embracing take shape.

Ananya Roy

PhD candidate

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Livability is not about saving the world, but about learning how to remain with it—damaged, entangled, and still becoming.

Raymon Ritumban

Instructor

Ateneo de Manila University

Livability compels us to apprehend the apparatuses that scaffold our precarities. Narratives like Kim Soom's One Left make them legible.

Saswot Shankar Shrestha

MA student

The Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID)

Queer resistance is a powerful force that exists at the intersections of the past and the future. My work weaves together the narratives of Nepali trans and queer resistance to unveil how queer liveable futures are rendered possible.

Jingwen Wang

MPhil Student

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

I approach “livability” as a narrative practice grounded in alternative imagination that seeks to move beyond involution amid pervasive burnout in East Asian societies. Focusing on Dreamcore, my work explores how Chinese Gen Z’s recapture of millennial futurist imaginaries mobilizes nostalgic practices to sustain affective connection under conditions of social atomization and information fragmentation.

Areerat Worawongwasu

PhD Student

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Livability is the radical labor of worlding. My work revitalizes suppressed narratives of resistance to generatively refuse the horizon of colonial-capitalist hegemony and chart futures of collective liberation.

Merve Yahşi

PhD Candidate

Koç University Center for Asian Studies (KUASIA)

My research focuses on cultural flows between East and West Asia, in particular how culinary practices, narratives, and know-how connect Japan and Türkiye. I approach livability as a concept continuously shaped by these geosocial connections and processes of meaning-making, in which diverse actors produce, circulate, and reinterpret culinary practices and narratives.

Jinghui Issac Li

Teaching Assistant

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Livability for queers may begin where the normative clock ends, in hours that don’t demand we be useful or awake. While bedrooms can feel confining, nightclubs open into a flickering threshold where sleepless bodies find each other.

Chi-Hin Mak

PhD Student

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Livability is defined by how a society reconciles with its historical memories to create a sustainable present. My recent work explores how Cold War legacies in Hong Kong and Taiwan continue to shape the lived experiences and 'livable' possibilities of contemporary urban life.

María Javiera Errazuriz Contreras

PhD Candidate

National Chung Hsing University

To build livable futures, we need to tell the stories of our ecosystems through diverse voices and formats, not only those authorized by power.

Van Ma

Co-Founding Member

Project Incubator For Young Social Entrepreneurs (PISE)

For the past six years, I have worked at PISE, a youth initiative that supports high school students by providing training and resources to help them develop social projects aimed at addressing community issues. I have observed both the successes and challenges faced by civil society in Vietnam, particularly before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. My research capstone at Fulbright University Vietnam explores how government regulations impacted the operations of civil society during COVID-19 and how leaders adapted to guide their organizations through this period.

#TECHNOLOGIES

Cheng Chen

PhD Candidate

National University of Singapore

Livability emerges through participatory co-creation, where identities as a community remain liminal, let's not rush to exclusion or forced inclusion

Jiayu Chen

PhD Student

National University of Singapore

In my research, livability is a co-constitutive process, emerging through the situated relations between ageing bodies, emerging technologies, and cultural imaginaries.

Shinjini Chowdhury

Communications specialist for social impact

India's denotified tribe communities are invisible to the socio-political eye. Invisibilisation is also a narrative - one of collective neglect of the most vulnerable. What are the ways that women of these tribes internalise, question, accept and live their narratives of deprivation, cultural memory, and existence? What can make the future liveable for them?

John Peter Chua

Film Director

YATU Film Productions

Whether in my work as a Chinese Filipino filmmaker-researcher creating short films in Philippine Hokkien, or as a son working toward my family’s future, livability and care remain at the center of what I do. I approach both art and life as practices that sustain more livable futures for my family and community.

Lamia Putri Damayanti

PhD Researcher

University of Amsterdam

Coming from a disaster-prone background, I view livability as the radical act of imagining a better future—one where we define that 'betterness' for ourselves. This aligns with my current work exploring media as a tool for documenting how digital platforms become sites for communal repair and an 'infrastructure of care’

Nikhil God

PhD Scholar

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Livability exists somewhere in the middle between abject realities and imaginative possibilities, my work forages the visual commons to mark that very middle.

Udita Gowdety

Computational Media Artist & Design Researcher

Manipal Academy of Higher Education

Livability, for me, is the stubborn hope encoded in every act of making: that the worlds we imagine at the edges of the analog and the digital might yet become the worlds we inhabit. To me, it's what happens when we refuse to let technology outpace our humanity, and when we slow down enough to let the human and the machine teach each other how to care.

Minoh Kim

Individual Researcher

Livability is the conditions that enable platform workers to sustain a life with dignity, safety, fairness, and togetherness; my study examines how these conditions are constructed and contested through union-led labor activism on Youtube.

Treepon Kirdnark

Lecturer

Mahidol University International College

I conceptualize livability as an act of questioning and reclaiming narrative legitimacy from dominant powers. Given that communication technologies, particularly platforms, increasingly dominate the field of meaning, this project on minorities and media argues that intervention with digitally mediated narratives is more pivotal than ever. Rather than dismiss communication technologies as afterthoughts, we must now recognize them as constitutive of livability.

Shitong Sun

MPhil Student

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

We think, we critique, and we reflect; through these, we make the attunement of our bodies to a fast-changing world possible.

Booyoung Park

Ph.D. Candidate

Ewha Womans University

The existence of lesbian mothers is both a prism that critiques Korea's heteronormative reproductive and familial order, and a practice that intimates we can live differently, here and now.

Fen-Ni Yu

PhD student

National Tsing Hua University

Livability, for me, is a perceptual imagining for real, grasped through ethnographic encounters with technologies of imagination under capitalism. Attending to the frictional articulation of Chinese modernity across global circuits—from historical realism to contemporary IP forms like Pop Mart—I explore how livability is continuously made, felt, and negotiated in practice.

THU TRANG DANG

Postgraduate Research Student

City University of Hong Kong

Through my study of Vietnam’s V-Pop producer–fan co-creation ecosystem, I show how digitally native fans perform participation, translation, and cultural mediation as ‘invisible labor’ that compensates for structural gaps in a precarious industry. In this context, livability is not given but collectively produced, emerging as an infrastructure of care that enables local artists and cultural identity to endure and grow.

Keyi Chen

Master’s Student

Shanghai University

Care is relational, yet its possibilities are shaped by how public life is organized. Drawing on research with students experiencing emotional distress in a Chinese vocational school, I ask why care does not easily take shape even where systems of support are in place.

Qiyi Huang

MA Student

The New School for Social Research

Making the future livable means spatializing time itself—turning the 'not yet' into collective rehearsals of liberation.

Nithya Shree K

PhD. Scholar & Adjunct Faculty

Alliance University

My research explores how cinema is not merely a representation but practice of imagining as a shared space for worlding livable future and I analyze how cinema translates care into labor for specific figures - tribes, animals, aliens, robots, superhumans in the name of making the future world more livable.

Honghui Liu

PhD student

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

To me, livability is a form of self-preservation, the insistence that what is fragile should be made visible, speakable, and held in relation to others. In my work, I examine how female stand-up comedians navigate a traditionally male-dominated industry and make their careers more livable and sustainable.

QihangLiu

Master’s Student

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Livability is not only about infrastructure or consumption, but about the capacity to foster and sustain human connection through mutual aid, care, and shared culture. My research examines how creative workers in China use co-living to resist uncertainty and cultivate micro-level livability.

Rui Liu

Ph.D. candidate

National Taiwan University

When protecting a tree, we protect life.” This truth is central to everyday tree protection movements. Livability is not only about people, but also about how humans and the more-than-human world live together and care for each other.

Zihan Loo

PhD candidate

UC Berkeley

When we measure livability, what is the calculus for live-ness? What is the potential of extending it to include more-than-human conduct and to consider the network of nonhuman and inhuman forms of life?

Adrian Mendizabal

University Researcher

UPFI Film Archives & Library

Livability is not only built in the present; it is remembered into being. Through the convergence of archives and cinema, we reclaim silenced pasts to imagine futures worth inhabiting.

Nurul Muthmainnah

Programmer & Researcher

Musyawarah Arsip

Livability takes form as a collective everyday process through hanging out, sharing resources, and practices that sustain closeness, where togetherness becomes both a space of healing and a method for advancing artistic practices.

Siripat Naknam

Phd Student

Mahidol University

While the world seeks healing and care, who heals the healers and cares for the carers? Livability is not a retreat package—it is the commoning of care across more-than-one worlds, built on the invisible hands of local workers whose labour holds multiple worlds together in the making.

Ya Shu

MPhil Student

The University of Hong Kong

Livability is an enduring resilience of "dwelling in motion" where travelers weave the past and present into an affective palimpsest. My research explores how these entangled feelings, care, and narratives generated during travel—as a deep engagement with multiple cultures—transform heterogeneous geographies into inhabitable futures.

Gabriela Laras Dewi Swastika

PhD Student

The National University of Singapore

I am currently investigating the family as a site of agency, reflecting on how kinship and the household cultivate livability at the intersecting trajectory of ecology, food assemblage, and everyday politics. My work henceforth traces the care tactics to understand how families in Yogyakarta’s urban kampongs perform the labor of homemaking situated within conjuncture and ecological landscapes.

Roxanne Yu Xian Tan

PhD Student

National University of Singapore

Access to welfare is predicated on administrative legibility, a digitally entrenched taxonomy through which the state delivers the promise of a liveable future. Yet when liveability itself is held hostage to the technical reliability and political disposition of surveillance systems, the infrastructure of care simultaneously forecloses the futures it claims to sustain.

Yueqian Wu

PhD candidate

Lingnan University

Livability is not only about the environments we inhabit, but also about how we make sense of our emotional lives. In my work on older women’s intimate relationships in urban China, reflecting on their lived experiences becomes a way of caring for a livable future.

Wei Jie Benedict Ng

PhD student

National University of Singapore

To make music is an act of care for, and with the world. In my work, I ask how we can build ecosystems that cultivate more liveable worlds through music.

Beatrix Pang

Initiator and Practitioner

Queer Reads Library

Livability, to me, is built through acts of collective care—where archiving and publishing become living practices that hold, nurture, and circulate marginalized and alternative histories and futures. In this way, a livable future in Asia emerges not from institutions alone, but from grassroots, queer, and communal knowledge-making that sustains more inclusive worlds.”

Irish Joy Deocampo

Assistant Professor

University of the Philippines-Diliman

How might learning environments function as sites where livability is collectively invented, through care, imagination, and relational experimentation? My current project is keen on answering this question and situating it within the feminist classroom that serves as a laboratory of feminist worlding. Here, livability becomes a relentless insistence that embodied, affective, and relational values such as joy, care and hope should be central in maintaining and sustaining human and more-than-human worlds.

Christine Vicera

PhD Student

National University of Singapore

Livability is not a given: it involves the quiet, yet radical labor of care. In thinking-with those who carry out the invisible "maintenance work" to carve out spaces of livability amidst precarity, my work understands livability as ecological, attending to the relational infrastructures that sustain life-making.

Ruomin Huang

Freelance writer and independent researcher

Social sciences, in essence, is to find the answer of the question within yourself.