Image credit: the Chinese University of Hong Kong–

Image credit: the Chinese University of Hong Kong

25 July – 3 August 2026
School of Journalism & Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The 2026 IACS Summer School will be hosted by the Digital Narratives Studio, School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in partnership with The Center for Cultural Studies, at CUHK, and the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University.

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Livable futures: Asia as worlding

The future has become an emergency. We live amid collapsing climates, datafied borders, disinformation wars, and infrastructures stretched thin by carelessness and extraction. Crisis has hardened into habit, and the only horizon offered to us is survival. Livable Futures begins with the refusal of this horizon. It insists that the work of imagining and sustaining life cannot be deferred. To live — now — is to act within uncertainty, to build forms of relation, repair, and imagination that make the present inhabitable.

Livability, as we frame it here, is not a condition but a mode of worlding: an ongoing act of making and maintaining the worlds we inhabit. To speak of livable futures is to ask how worlds are built, by whom, and for whom – and how they might be otherwise. This turn to Asia as Worlding, builds on Asia as Method, that has been a foundational thinking block of the 25 years of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. It is an invitation to think of Inter-Asia connections creating new possibilities of cohabitation and collaboration. Worlding allows us to situate theory, art, activism, and pedagogy as entangled labours in the making of shared futures.

The 2026 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Summer School invites its participants to inhabit this question: How do we conceive of livability as a critique and as an invitation to build futures that go beyond the threshold of survival and allow for conditions where communities thrive, live, and flourish even in the face of crises?

Hong Kong, as the site for imagining livable futures offers a profound position that weaves together multiple temporalities and geographies of transition. Located in a moment of uncertainty, and contesting with different practices of defining social, political, economic, and ecological futures, it becomes a lived example of how we imagine and build futures worth living in. The school invites the participants to engage with the lived reality of the city, through its history, current transformations, and the layered texture of life as it unfolds at the intersections of care, technology, and narratives of being.  

This Summer School is structured as a ten-day collaborative exploration of livability as critique and composition. It is designed as a slow, immersive movement from reflection to practice, from theory to world-making. Each day builds on the last — moving through three symposia on Narratives, Technologies, and Care, interspersed with practice-based labs that translate ideas into shared acts of composition.

Participant engagement is at the heart of this summer school. Alongside a fantastic faculty, the participants will participate in three mini symposia, each structured around a specific theme. The participants will present their research ideas through creative and conversational formats, rehearse their arguments for feedback from peers and faculty, and get to show case their work in conversation with different experts. Each participant will identify at least 1 theme in their own practice that they will extend to the theme of the symposium.

Narratives

“What keeps us alive is the stubborn will to narrate—to tell even the worst stories, so that the next time, someone might listen differently.”

— Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi,” in Breast Stories (1997)

Narratives are where worlding begins. To tell a story is to assert that life matters — that what has been silenced or broken can still be spoken and reimagined. In the face of systems that fragment and erase, narration becomes a form of survival, but also of invention. Stories make worlds: they hold memory, translate experience, and sketch the outlines of what might yet be possible. Within the framework of Livable Futures, narratives are acts of composition and care. They connect scattered voices across geographies and disciplines, weaving an Inter-Asia tapestry of shared questions: How do we live together after catastrophe? What kinds of futures can language hold? To narrate, here, is to world otherwise — to make the future audible in the present.

Technologies

“To think the future is not to predict but to compose: cosmotechnics asks how we might compose a future in which technology belongs to the multiplicity of worlds.”

— Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016)

Technologies shape how we live, but they also reveal what we value. They are not neutral tools; they are architectures of possibility. In the age of algorithmic governance and planetary infrastructure, Livable Futures calls for a rethinking of technology not as progress, but as world-making — a way of building relations with ethical attention and plural imagination. Across Asia, where digital systems, urban experiments, and ecological responses evolve unevenly, the challenge is to imagine cosmotechnics — ways of making and maintaining technology that reflect the diversity of worlds we inhabit. Livable technologies are those that do not dominate the future, but allow it to grow.

Care

“Care is not a soft practice; it is the hard work of staying in relation when systems are designed to pull us apart.”

— Jac SM Kee, Numun Fund Manifesto (2020)

Care is the affective and ethical ground of worlding. It is not sentiment or service; it is persistence — the daily, difficult labour of remaining connected in times of disconnection. Care sustains the infrastructures of survival: it binds the social, the emotional, and the political. To care is to recognize interdependence, to act from the understanding that one’s well-being is entangled with others’. Within the framework of this Summer School, care is also a method of pedagogy and practice: to think, teach, and organize in ways that hold space for difference without fragmentation. Against systems built on extraction and speed, care slows us down — asking how we might live together with dignity, patience, and courage. If the future is to be livable, it must be worlded through care — an ethics that endures.

Who can apply?
The IACS Summer School expands the idea of learning and learners by inviting advanced Masters Students, Graduate Level Researchers, Researchers in collectives and non-academic think tanks, Artists, Practitioners, and Professionals invested in producing Inter-Asia knowledge and frameworks, responding to collective questions and working with lived Inter-Asia experiences. There is no age limit, and no restrictions or mandates on institutional affiliation or positions. Preference will be given to those who have longer histories of IACS engagement or commitment to build on these connections. Participants from previous IACS conferences and summer school are especially invited to apply.

Mode of participation: In-person only
Primary Language: English
Expected Number of Participants: 40

Timeline
Application deadline: 7 January
First round admissions: 15 January
Registration deadline: 20 February
Second round admissions (from waitlist): 1 March
Second round registration deadline: 21 March
Invitation letters and logistics information: 15 April

Registration fees
The IACS Summer School works on differential registration fees to accommodate for participants coming from different geo-economic backgrounds.

Working professional / practitioners: 400 USD
Student from economically advanced countries: 300 USD
Students from low and mid-income countries: 150 USD
Local students: 75 USD (accommodation not provided)

Registration fees include tuition, a twin-shared accommodation in University college on campus for 10 nights, organised group visits for the school, breakfast, lunch and some meals. The participants will have to arrange for their own international and local travel costs (including flights, visas, local transportation), as well as some meals and local expenses.

Scholarships
IACS has very few scholarships for exceptional cases, where we can waive registration fees for applicants who do not have access to institutional or personal funding. We will not be able to provide travel stipends or extra living costs to any participant.

Application Procedure
To apply, please fill in the following form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/FA64u3Xmib?origin=lprLink

If you have any inquiries, please email com-dns@cuhk.edu.hk

For the most updated information, please visit the website of our Summer School host: https://digitalnarratives.com.cuhk.edu.hk/articles/2026-iacs-summer-school