2026 Situations International Conference

Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon

Conference Dates: 22-23 Oct, 2026
Time:
9:00AM-4:50PM (22 Oct)
9:00AM-1:00PM (23 Oct)
Venue: CRT-4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

Registration: https://hku.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bEqJRCGQ6IYTjOS

Organized by The Department of Comparative Literature, HKU, and Department of English BK 21 Project, Yonsei University; the 2026 Situations International Conference is titled, "Sovereignties in Crisis: Human, Environment, Technology, and the Pharmakon".

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.

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