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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:
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@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
