【by Joseph LI Cho-kiu, June 2025】
On May 23, 2025—the same day the Trump administration revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students (Epstein 2025), a still-unfolding event at the time of writing—a group of Hong Kong-based scholars were in Mong Kok discussing how to structure a new bachelor’s program in public humanities at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
This undergraduate program, likely the first of its kind globally, emerged from a restructuring that merged two existing programs—cultural studies and cultural management—into one. While the merger might be initiated by CUHK with neoliberalist management concerns, the university also seized the moment to propose public humanities as a new umbrella term (Pang and Li 2025). Much of the original curricula was retained, allowing students to concentrate on either cultural studies or cultural management. If the two earlier programs emphasized critical theories and reflexive practices of diversities, the new program suggests that, grounded in that commitment, students should also learn to explore connections, collaborations, communities, and/or the commons—what we call the public.
Emergence
Public humanities initially emerged in North America (e.g., Smulyan 2020) over the past decade and have begun to spread to other parts of the world. In the past two years, a new journal on public humanities was launched in the Anglophone world, and the first edited volume on public humanities in the Sinophone world was also published (Chen 2023). Another important sign of the development of public humanities is the World Humanities Report (2024). In the report, a group of humanities scholars from around the world put forth ten policy recommendations, including one to “advance the public humanities.” We may expect continuing discussions on how public humanities take shape in different contexts.
One reason for the emergence of public humanities is the growing critique of the university’s role and the value of the humanities within it. For instance, in Japan, Shunya Yohismi (2022; 2024) proposed that a “post-university” vision is needed to rethink what the university can do in cultivating future citizens. For Judith Butler (2022), public humanities have the potential to reorient universities away from sheer instrumentality and profitability. According to Butler:
The task is to demonstrate the distinctive contribution that the humanities can make to all fields of knowledge by preserving values that are irreducible to both instrumentality and profitability. The public humanities stand the best chance of accomplishing this task since they not only show what the humanities have to offer the public sphere but also how various publics shape the humanities within the university.
This task, as Butler frames it, will likely be revisited and reinterpreted in different settings as public humanities continue to evolve. As Edward Said (1982) reminded us, the transfer of concepts and theories is a highly complex process. Jeffrey R. Wilson (2019), one of the founding editors of the journal Public Humanities, points out that “historicizing presentism”—analyzing historically situated efforts to presentize the past—is one of the main driving forces behind public humanities. While the world shares certain historical conditions to be presentized (e.g., the trajectory of ongoing illiberalization), different places are entangled in different senses of urgency, shaped by their affective economies. CUHK’s new public humanities program, while resonating with global conversations, must also attend to the particular public culture it inhabits.
Grounding
Hong Kong has borne its geo-complexities within a rapidly shifting global landscape of culture, economy, and politics. As a Special Administrative Region of China, formerly under British colonial rule, the city has undergone a dramatic transformation: from a (colonial) modernity once seen as exemplary—or as a “satellite modernity” (Ma 2010)—under global (neo)liberal hegemony, benefiting from collaborative modernities, to a place increasingly trapped in competing modernities within a multipolar world. It is now frequently portrayed as falling behind, needing to “catch up” with evolving national and international standards across domains ranging from values like freedom and security to infrastructures, technologies, and popular culture. Many citizens experience persistent judgment—both from external observers and internally—suggesting that the city is no longer free, secure, or advanced in comparison to national, regional, and global developments. Some citizens, occupied with a nostalgic mood, look for a “retrotopia” from the past (Bauman 2017).
At the same time, new forms of public experience—what Raymond Williams (1965: 64, 177) would call an emergent “structure of feeling” where a new reading public might grow—are proliferating: the mutual-help ethos of precarious citizens shaped by a shrinking economy and intensified securitization of social, cultural, and political life, especially the “caring inquiry” (Chow 2025) and various new subjectivities on culture and politics (Lai 2024; Pang 2024; Harrington 2025) emerging after a period of extensive political contention (Cheng and Yuen 2025) and a “decade of mass protest” worldwide (Bevin 2023); alternative, creative, and resilient ways of living in villages (Mak 2024) and on outer islands (Ho 2025); cross-border movements and connections—for commuting, leisure, cultural transformations, and other purposes—between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the Greater Bay Area (Waters and Leung 2022; Meulbroek, Peck, and Zhang 2022), and the rest of China and Asia; and Hong Kong communities outside Hong Kong, whose transcontinental and transnational connections and disconnections with the city are shaped by complex entanglements of class, gender, language, race, generations (Chan and To 2025), and diverse forms of locality, mobility, affect, and techno-cultural practice (Tong 2025). We should also consider Hong Kong as a part of the world, sharing similar concerns over environment, technology, aging, public health, urban-rural relations, food, emotion, etc.
Given these structural shifts and emergent experiences, fundamental questions arise about the meaning of publicness: What kinds of connections, communications, communities, and/or commons are being formed—and dissolved? Who counts as a member of the public, and who does not? How do we interpret the many voices and silences that claim to speak for “the public”? To what extent do different publics and non-publics represent, serve, or contest power? What do power and powerlessness mean across different sites and networks? And how might these public experiences and imaginations be understood in relation to traditions and modernities in China, East and Southeast Asia, and/or the Global East, Global North, and Global South?
These questions are too complex for straightforward or Manichean binary answers. Offering such responses would risk closing down the very imagination, experimentation, and connection that public humanities seek to cultivate. Public humanities matter not because they offer false hope or universal solutions, but because—amidst uncertainties beyond individual control—they invite us to read, think, and write seriously with the public world. They help us make sense of ourselves and others, and to consider what actions or inactions we might need to take or hold—for the self, and for others—for the public good. As the world becomes increasingly multipolar and uncertain in the post-(neo)liberal age, and as precarity and suffering become more widespread, we must continue to ask fundamental questions about cultures, societies, and their humanities and nonhumanities.
Practices
In this Hong Kong topic, seven contributors—some based at CUHK, others deeply engaged with Hong Kong’s public culture—offer reflections on public humanities and the city as a site where the field is landing, unfolding, or being reimagined. Though these essays were written independently, without prior meetings or workshops, I find it meaningful to group them in two parts, echoing Butler’s earlier reminder: public humanities must ask (1) what the humanities can offer the public sphere, and (2) how various (micro)publics shape the production of humanities knowledge.
The topic begins with Ka-ming Wu’s reflections on public scholarship before the term “public humanities” gained currency, especially the legacy of the public anthropologists who influenced her. The next two essays explore different forms of public intellectualism in Hong Kong: Enoch Tam revisits the grassroots activism of intellectuals in post-handover Hong Kong, while Lucas Wong examines the strategies adopted by exiled scholars navigating the platform economy. The second part turns to how scholars’ bodies and communities are reshaped through public engagement. Ka-Wei Pang emphasizes the role of engaged listening, while Mei-ting Li reflects on her research and participation in queer fandom as an aca-fan—both showing how publicness is lived and embodied. Clayton Lo and Benny Lim, working respectively with communities of disabilities and aging in Hong Kong, share the concerns, challenges, and achievements of their own and their communities’ ongoing work.
As the world grows more illiberal and undemocratic, the need for public dialogue—grounded in humanities thought—is more urgent than ever. Such dialogue is vital for cultivating care, connection, imagination, safety, critical reflection, freedom, and other shared values across our overlapping lifeworlds. This Hong Kong topic humbly hopes to offer a beginning—for those interested in grounding public humanities in Hong Kong, and for others reflecting on how to ground public humanities in their own cultures and societies across Asia and beyond.
AUTHOR
Joseph LI Cho-kiu is Research Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is involved in developing the Public Humanities programme offered by the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies. His research interests include public humanities in Asian contexts, public affect, transformative tourism, ordinary heritage, and decoloniality in the Cold War. His writings have appeared in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Radical History Review, global-e, Critical Asia Archives: Events and Theories, Modern China Studies, Hong Kong Studies, Local Discourses, and other publications. He also contributes social and cultural commentaries to media outlets such as Mingpao, City Magazine, and Sample.
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