Introduction: Commoning as unthinkable politics: Hong Kong against hard times

This Special Issue aims to address the entanglements among community economy, cultural aesthetics, sustainable alternatives, and enclosures in Hong Kong’s sociopolitical landscape. In this introductory essay, we engage with Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons and explore the surge of interest in the politics and practices of the commons in response to ongoing socio-ecological crises. By revisiting Ostrom’s framework and critiquing existing scholarship, we seek commoning as a political praxis informed by a cultural political economy perspective. Drawing on Wendy Harcourt’s idea of the politics of the commons as ‘the art of the impossible’, we seek to explore collective practices of social repair and radical dialectics of the commons. More specifically, we draw inspiration from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s idea of the ‘undercommons’ to resist place, representation, and subjectification in the face of capital accumulation, so as to contribute to the reimagining of radical subjectivities and solidarities in inter-Asian cultural studies through a commoning battle that seeks to rebuild and recreate grounded projects and practices of subject-making. Copyright © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.