Organised by Hong Kong Studies, this two-day symposium invites papers from across the humanities and social sciences that examine the idea and function of the archive—understood in the broadest terms—in relation to Hong Kong’s cultural, historical, and spatial imaginaries. From official state repositories and institutional holdings to ephemeral, vernacular, or community-based practices of collecting and remembering, the archive has long figured as a site where power, identity, and cultural memory are negotiated.

While Hong Kong has often been described through the lenses of displacement and erasure, it also remains a city of remarkable reinvention and creative resilience. In light of recent transformations—spatial, political, and epistemological—the archive emerges as a record of what has been lost and a generative site for imagining what may yet come. We ask: what roles do archives play in preserving or reframing Hong Kong’s pasts and futures? How do artists, writers, educators, curators, activists, and others engage with the archive as form, method, or provocation? And how might we understand “archiving” not solely as an institutional practice but also as an everyday, affective, and often hopeful negotiation with the present?