Situating Care in Sustainable High-technological Urban Farming

Given the escalating effects of climate change, intense urbanisation and population growth, there is a rising concern about sustainable food provisioning. Amidst overlapping uncertainties and challenges, high-technological, vertical, and controlled farming in the urban area is increasingly positioned as a future-proof, local, food source untethered by the climate. Situated in the interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, this project brings the insights and approaches of the humanities into productive dialogue with agrotechnology and environmental science to examine this emerging and important farming landscape, with a specific focus on Hong Kong. Grounded in ethnographic findings, the project will develop an innovative conceptual approach—”care ecology”—to account for, assess, and intervene in the contested narratives and practices of urban farming, and their multispecies consequences. Ultimately, the project seeks to offer a critical social and cultural understanding of the subject to enhance the readiness for a wider seeding of urban (high-technological) farming and build towards sustainable food future. More broadly, the empirical and conceptual development will advance understandings in entangled human-environment-technology relations in a climate changing world. 

2024-2026 Principal Investigator, Early Career Scheme, Hong Kong Research Grants Council, HKSAR (RGC28603524), HKD 554,208.

Environment Narratives and Sustainable Urbanism

This interdisciplinary pilot project explores the complex human-environment-urban relations and sustainable urban solutions in the overlapping contexts of urbanisation and environmental degradation. In drawing material, cultural and technological narratives into conversation, it asks: how might various modes of environmental narratives intra-act and co-shape the futures of cities? What kind of possibilities of world-making might open up if we foreground a more-than-human perspective to rethink shared responsibilities in a climate-changing world? What alternative possibilities may emerge through a kind of “sustainable becoming” grounded in ecological practices (Braidotti, 2006)?

2024 Principal Investigator, Department of Literature and Cultural Studies, Faculty Start-up Research Grant. The Education University of Hong Kong, HKD 150,000.

Eco-garden-Lab: Gardens and Environmental Humanities (2023-2024 Co-Investigator)

Featured event: “Garden Futurity” Roundtable Colloquium (Co-convened with Kelly Tse)

The 2024 “Garden Futurity” Virtual Roundtable Colloquium, to be held on 3rd December foregrounds the garden, capaciously defined, as a vibrant ecological and aesthetic space of theory and praxis, connecting ecologies, societies, and more-than-human worlds in the face of climate change and geopolitical uncertainty. How might viewing the garden through a more-than-human lens challenge the entrenched asymmetrical social, cultural, and techno-scientific power relations? How might the garden foster the community’s sense of rooting? What alternative frameworks may (re)constitute gardens for a more regenerative future? We are immensely privileged and grateful to bring together eco-philosophers, multispecies anthropologist, ecologist, literary scholars, historians, climate change researchers, and art practitioners to respond to these complex and critical questions.

Registration: https://forms.gle/knvs6LUHNFYBtqV77.
Date: 3 December, 2024
Time (GMT+8):
Panel 1: 2PM – 3:50PM, Garden as Multispecies Figuration
Panel 2: 4:20PM – 6PM, The Poetics and Politics of the (urban) garden
Panel 3: 7:30PM – 9:10PM, Repair and Restoration: gardening as world-making