[KS] Call for Papers_2026 Situations International Conference

[ituations S]

Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon

2026 Situations International Conference

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, October 22-23, 2026
Submission Due: Aug. 1, 2026

The contemporary global landscape is increasingly defined by a profound
erosion of traditional boundaries, precipitating a multi-dimensional
“crisis of sovereignty” that challenges the autonomy of the individual, the
state, and the biosphere. While 20th-century discourse on sovereignty often
centered on the modern/postcolonial nation-state and democratic civil
rights, the 21st century confronts us with the collapse of these
legal-political frameworks. Our reliance on complex technologies and
precarious ecological systems threatens to displace the human subject
beyond conventional borders. Within this landscape, sovereignty appears
less as a stable political form than as a volatile assemblage distributed
across infrastructures, ecological systems, data regimes and bodies.

The conference title invokes the pharmakon—both poison and remedy—as a
framework for understanding contemporary crises of sovereignty.
Technologies that promise optimization simultaneously generate new forms of
dispossession, while ecological systems that sustain life are transformed
into sites of toxicity and extractive exploitation. The human subject, once
imagined as the sovereign center of modern politics, increasingly appears
as a contingent element within technological and ecological networks.
Across Asia in particular, these contradictions manifest in striking ways.
Rapid technological innovation coexists with environmental sacrifice and
precarious labor regimes, producing toxic ecologies and bare life
economies. Industrial pollution, extractive development, and climate
instability make survival itself precarious. Migrant workers and digital
laborers may appear as indispensable to national economies while being
rendered socially or politically disposable. At the same time, digital
infrastructures—platform economies, biometric surveillance systems, and
algorithmic governance—reconfigure the organization of rights, labor, and
mobility. Within such regimes, sovereignty becomes fragmented and
conditional, mediated through data flows, ecological precarity, and
technological systems.

At stake is not only the future of the nation-state, but also the evolving
relationship between human life, technological systems, and planetary
environments. Our conference therefore invites scholars to explore how
sovereignty is being reconfigured across intersecting domains of
environment, technology, and political economy. By foregrounding Asia as
both a site of technological experimentation and ecological vulnerability,
we aim to situate theoretical discussions of sovereignty within concrete
geopolitical and cultural contexts.

Our topic areas include, but are not limited to:


   - Toxic Ecologies
   - Ecological Sovereignty
   - Bare Life Economies
   - Necro-Economics
   - Migrant Labor Regimes
   - Post/transhuman Subjectivities
   - Algorithmic Governance & AI the Human Competitor
   - Digital Labor
   - Platform Necropolitics & Intimacies
   - The Pharmakon as a Framework for Thinking Technology, Ecology, and
   Power
   -

Early inquiries with 200-word abstracts are appreciated.

We invite you to submit your 4,000-word Chicago-style conference
presentation, with its abstract, 5-6 keywords and a 100-word bio, by August
1, 2026 (the acceptance of the presentation will be decided based on the
4,000-word paper).

Each invited participant is then expected to turn his or her conference
presentation into a finished 6,000-word paper for possible inclusion in a
future issue of the SCOPUS-indexed journal, Situations: Cultural Studies in
the Asian Context.

All inquiries and submissions should be sent to situations at yonsei.ac.kr.

Submissions should follow the Chicago Manual of Style (18th ed.), using
only endnotes.

Cohosted by Department of Comparative Literature, HKU, and Department of
English BK 21 Project, Yonsei University
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