Conferencing as environing with care: Organising an environmental humanities symposium in Hong Kong

Through collective writing, three researchers from Hong Kong will critically reflect on and examine their experiences organising an Environmental Humanities (EH) symposium in May 2024. Titled ‘A Gathered Dialogue: Eco-afterlives and Slow Hope,’ the symposium foregrounds the interconnection between and valence of ‘eco’ and ‘afterlives’ and their spatial, temporal and material dimensions situated in Hong Kong’s socio-ecological systems with a proposition of commoning, reconciliation and hope in this troubled time. Alternative to most international lineups of past conferences in the city, the symposium was unconventionally rooted in the emerging Hong Kong EH scholarship and the desire to foster dialogues with local and regional Asian ecologies. This article focuses on the conception of the conference and its organisational process as a critical environing process with care, encompassing reflections on EH epistemology, eco-production and collaborations with local NGOs. Throughout the organisation, we also encountered unexpected complexities that propelled us to meditate on being academics and doing academic work and related ethics. This article asks: What is an ethical mode of conference and conferencing? How to conduct conferencing with care and situated knowledge? How might we bridge the knowing and doing in academia? Copyright © 2025 Addleton Academic Publishers. All rights reserved.