2022 Bernard H.K. Luk Memorial Lecture in Hong Kong Studies

This event is being presented in-person and will be simultaneously livestreamed.

The York Centre for Asian Research, York University, is pleased to host the Fifth Bernard H. K. Luk Memorial Lecture in Hong Kong Studies. Professor Ching Kwan Lee’s talk sketches three intellectual approaches to developing Hong Kong Studies as a globally relevant and significant field of knowledge. Using recent studies as examples, she illustrates the epistemic possibilities of construing (1) Hong Kong as a case, (2) Hong Kong outside in and (3) Hong Kong as global assemblage. As knowledge production is always and necessarily embedded in historical and social contexts, what kinds of politics and praxis express, enable, and repress this emerging field?

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and former Chung Sze-Yuen Professor of Social Science and Chair Professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2019–21). She is the author of three multiple award-winning monographs on China which form a trilogy of Chinese capitalism through the lens of labor and working class experiences, including Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (2007), and The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (2017). Her most recent co-edited volumes are Hong Kong: Global China's Restive Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2022), Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell University Press, 2019), and The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (University of California Press, 2019). She has recently launched the "Global Hong Kong Studies@UC" Program with scholars at various UC campuses with the goal to understand the global and theoretical relevance, connection, and context of Hong Kong’s past and present.

The 2022 lecture is co-sponsored by the Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library at the University of Toronto and co-presented with the East Asian Studies Program at York University.

A beloved teacher and colleague, Professor Bernard H. K. Luk (1946–2016) was an internationally recognized authority on the history of Hong Kong. Endowed by Professor Luk’s friend and former student, the Honourable Dr Vivienne Poy, the Bernard H. K. Luk Memorial Lecture in Hong Kong Studies was created in honour of his work. Organized by a group of Hong Kong scholars at York University, the lectures and accompanying events focus on Hong Kong as a distinct society, its influence on the wider world or the experiences of the Hong Kong diaspora.

Host or Publisher York Centre for Asian Research, York University