Call for Papers: The 10th UK-China Alliance for the Humanities in Higher Education Conference

We invite abstracts for short presentations at the 2026 UKCHA conference, to be held at SOAS on 3–4 November 2026, on the theme “Future Horizons: Area Studies and Global Connectivity in the Humanities.”

How might we rethink “areas” if we begin not with borders, but with connectivity? Across history, trade routes, empires, migrations, and intellectual exchanges have shaped both the lived experience and the imaginative construction of regions. Today, digital infrastructures and transnational networks intensify these processes, reorganising how regions are perceived, represented, and contested. Connectivity can be generative or destructive; it binds worlds together even as it produces new hierarchies and conflicts. If global connectivity names the forces that continually remake regions, the humanities render these transformations intelligible through interpretive, linguistic, and historical forms of inquiry. Bringing Area Studies into dialogue with global connectivity invites renewed humanistic reflections on how regions have been formed, how Area Studies are mediated in the present, and how they might be imagined differently in the future.
 

We invite proposals that engage with the following thematic strands:

• Deconstructing Digital Orientalism: Algorithmic Bias and the Afterlives of European Empire and Colonial Legacy
• Methodological Futures in Area Studies
• Technoscapes and Global Imaginary of Region
• Transnational Public Sphere and Reconfigurations of Area Studies: Circulations, Intersections, Contact Hubs
• New Forms of Global Connectivity and Collaboration: AI and Transnationality

We warmly welcome submissions from all, including students and scholars irrespective of affiliation with the UKCHA alliance. 

Submissions

Please submit abstracts to Dr Xiaoning Lu, xl1@soas.ac.uk  by 5pm (UK time) on 15 June 2026. 

Please entitle your email “2026 UKCHA Conference proposal”. 

Your submission should include:

• The title and an abstract of no more than 250 words addressing one of the strands outlined above or the conference theme
• A 100-word biography that includes your name, university affiliation and position
• Your email address

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