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 liveable futures is to ask how worlds are built, by whom, and for whom — and how they might be otherwise. This turn from Asia as method to Asia as worlding marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society as an invitation to think beyond knowledge as comparison, toward knowledge as cohabitation and composition. Worlding allows us to situate theory, art, activism, and pedagogy as entangled labours in the making of shared futures. Livability does not promise safety or comfort. It names a shared practice of composition — of creating conditions where individuals and communities can endure, connect, and thrive even in exhaustion. It asks how we might inhabit the broken infrastructures of our times differently: how to turn technologies into gestures of care, stories into spaces of solidarity, and networks into collective acts of repair. This Summer School takes liveability as both question and method. It proposes that the future is not something we await but something we world — a collective act of imagining, negotiating, and composing in the cracks of what already exists.
Dates: 25th July – 3rd August 2026.
Venue: School of Journalism & Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Primary Language: English
If you have any inquiries, please email: com-dns@cuhk.edu.hk
More information of IACS Summer School: https://digitalnarratives.com.cuhk.edu.hk/articles/2026-iacs-summer-school