26-27 November 2026: Workshop on Law and the Humanities in Asia
HKU Faculty of Law and HKU Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies
Registration closed
From: Miss Dickenson L. Eden, Portraits of the Princes and People of India (1844)
Call for papers
Over the past decade, there has been increasing scholarship on law and the humanities in Asia. From Marco Wan’s edited collection of essays published in 2019 on Law and the Humanities in China, to Kevin Tan and Michael Ng’s edited volume in 2022 on Constitutional Foundings in Northeast Asia, to Sabarish Suresh and Rajgopal Saikumar’s forthcoming special issue on Law and Literature in South Asia – with innumerable individual and collective studies in between, from Japan to Singapore to India – it seems timely to reflect on this work from a pan-Asian perspective. If we think with Takeuchi Yoshimi and Chen Kuan-Hsing in terms of “Asia as method”, for example – taking the idea of Asia “as an imaginary anchoring point” for the study of law as well as a “method of engagement” amongst legal scholars – might this open up “alternative horizons and perspectives” while enabling “new forms of intellectual alliance to be built and new solidarities forged”? (Chen, 2010: 2, 212) Is there something, or many things, that is distinctive about the work of law and the humanities in this region, both as an academic subject and as a political project? To the extent that countries across Asia have shared histories of colonial rule, anticolonial struggle, and postcolonial governance, but also an immense diversity of experiences, cultures, knowledges, and laws, how might this have shaped the kinds of questions that are being asked and examined?
The purpose of this Workshop is not to impose conceptual coherence on the field or an overarching identity on the region, but rather to pose “law and the humanities in Asia” as a question that might open novel lines of enquiry while joining and strengthening a network of scholars. The intention, as such, is for this to lead in two directions: in the short term, to publication of a collection of articles in a special journal issue on this theme; and in the longer term, to the establishment of a forum for further meetings, conversations and collaborations.
For the Workshop, participants are invited to contribute a paper on how their own work, or the work of another scholar, is shaped by its location in Asia. This could be a matter of an inherited tradition, an object of study, a method of enquiry, or a reflexive attunement to place. Whatever it is that “locates” the work in Asia, the question is how this contributes to its shape or substance. We encourage exploratory ideas papers as well as more developed contributions. Each paper will have 10 minutes.