Speaker:
Emily Yu Zong, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Discussants:
Kwai-Cheung Lo, Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room MBG07, G/F, Main Building, HKU
In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong questions the coloniality of modern freedom by examining migration as an ecological process. Through a translocal analysis of migration literature and film across Australia, North America, and China, she shows how these works reimagine freedom not simply as individual assimilation but as unruly and collaborative survival with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology. Moving environmental ethics beyond individual morality, Zong advances a worldmaking method of planetarity from below—attending to everyday, situated, and borderland ecological “doing” and “commoning” that widen cracks in modern colonial systems to reveal a migrant cosmopolitics beyond human exceptionalism.
Emily Yu Zong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on Asian diasporic literature, environmental humanities, media theory, and science and technology studies. She is the author of Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2026 – visit the UMP website for a 30% discount – code UMWEB30) and co-editor of Decolonial Asian Diasporic Ecocriticism, a forthcoming special issue of ARIEL.
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