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Flip through the Folder here.
I am one of the organisers of the Queer Feminist Approaches to Media, Art & Resistance Reading Group, an interdisciplinary initiative funded by the Research Institute for the Humanities, Faculty of Arts, CUHK. Together with Ka Ying Wong, Tian Yang, Jamie Wing Tung Tse, Aaron Lam Kwok Yam, and Xu Yijie, we created critical conversations across cultural studies, fine arts, and history.
The reading group brought together postgraduate researchers interested in queer feminism, digital media, science and technology studies, artistic practice, and climate justice. Our goal was simple: to think across disciplines and explore how culture, technology, and power shape the world we live in, while imagining more just and creative futures.
Together, we read and discussed books including:
We believe that knwoledge should not stop at academic discussion. We extended our conversations into public engagement through The Multifaceted Identity and Lives of Migrants in Hong Kong, a public event that concluded the reading group.
The event brought together Ms. Shiela Tebia-Bonifacio, Chairperson of GABRIELA Hong Kong, and Ms. Johannie Tong, Community Relations Officer of Mission for Migrant Workers (MFMW), to discuss migrant workers’ experiences and labour-rights advocacy in Hong Kong.
By connecting academic discussions with community voices and lived experiences, the event created an opportunity to reflect on migration, labour, gender, and social justice beyond the university.
Through this reading group, we build friendship, support network for research, artistic practice, and social engagement. The project reflects our broader commitment to building critical conversations across disciplines, communities, and forms of knowledge.
I am part of the organising team behind the Critical AI Reading Group, an interdisciplinary initiative exploring the cultural, political, and social dimensions of AI.
The group was initiated by Gabriel Antonio Solis, a Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at CUHK, after participating in the Digital Feminisms in Asia Symposium I convened and organised. Gabriel invited me and Maari Sugawara (School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong) to join him in building a reading group for critical conversations on AI. The group is supported by Prof. Xuenan Cao’s Generative AI Research Project and Prof. Jia Tan’s Digital Feminisms in Asia Project, both Research Institute for the Humanities funded research projects at CUHK.
As a researcher working on digital culture, platform studies, critical AI studies and queer feminism, I see the reading group as an important opportunity for thinking beyond the hype of AI. Rather than treating AI as a purely technical issue, we also look at how AI is shaped by power, labour, culture, and politics.
Together, we invited researchers and students from different disciplines into conversation around some of the most influential works in critical AI studies, including:
For me, critical AI research is about understanding both the technological logic and the social worlds that technologies produce and reinforce. Through this reading group, my friends and I help build an interdisciplinary community where people can engage critically with AI, challenge dominant narratives, and imagine alternative technological futures.
I am part of the organising collective behind Feminist Dream Walking (FDW), a feminist initiative and an annual gender festival in Hong Kong. Invited by feminist organisers and community workers Jacinta Gun and Felicia Sze-to, I joined a team of community organisers to create spaces for feminist exchange.
In 2025, we organised a Feminism101 workshop and a public conference with more than 150 participants. In 2026, we experimented with a more decentralised format, including a feminist drink party, a Feminism101 workshop, and a camp.
As an academic, my contribution focuses on transforming feminist knowledge into accessible and creative public engagement. Rather than relying on lectures alone, I use creative methods to encourage dialogue and collective making.
For both editions of FDW, I helped design and facilitate Feminism 101, a workshop for people with different levels of familiarity with feminist ideas.
In 2025, I gave a short introduction to key feminist concepts and co-designed a series of activities that encouraged discussion and reflection. A recap of the workshop can be viewed here.
In 2026, my team and I moved towards more creative methods and facilitation. Using collaborative mapping and cut-out poetry, we created opportunities for participants to share experiences and explore different strands of feminism together through making.
These workshops reflect my broader interest in creative approaches to public humanities, where knowledge is not only taught but also produced through everyday conversation and collective practices.
One of my main contributions to FDW was initiating two self-publishing projects to document and share the collective’s work. Created without institutional funding, these publications were made through voluntary efforts, shared resources, and a commitment to public knowledge.
The Feminism 101 Folder documents our workshop in 2025 through photographs, workshop materials, and collaborative translations of excerpts from Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks. Flip through the Folder here.
Instead of producing a polished publication, we chose a simple folder format. The design reflects the unfinished, collective, and low-budget nature of grassroots feminist organising. We assembled it together after the workshop as a way to reflect on the experience and continue the conversation.
This zine documents the wider 2025 Feminist Dream Walking festival, including both the Feminism 101 workshop and the public conference.
None of us had previous experience in zine publishing. Making the zine involved learning by doing: reflecting on our experiences and deciding what stories we wanted to share. We eventually produced 100 printed copies. Each copy was bound with a hanging string, a small gesture that symbolised our hope of creating new connections with people, ideas, and communities.
For me, Feminist Dream Walking is not only a festival. It is an experiment in creative practice and public knowledge making. Through workshops, conversations, and self-publishing, I work with others to explore how feminist ideas can move beyond the university . It is a project grounded in our friendship, voluntary labour, and the belief that knowledge grows with people.
In Nov 2025, I convened the Digital Feminisms in Asia: Cultural Studies Postgraduate Symposium, a conference and creative workshop organised under the Digital Feminisms in Asia interdisciplinary research project.
The symposium brought together emerging researchers, artists, and activists to explore how media and digital technologies shape feminist politics across different Asian contexts. At a time when anti-feminist and anti-gender movements are gaining visibility around the world, I wanted to create a space for critical dialogue on digital feminisms in Asia.
I invited Prof. Feng-Mei Heberer (New York University), author of Asians on Demand: Mediating Race in Video Art and Activism, to deliver the keynote lecture, ‘Against On-Demandness and Objective Neutrality: Feminist Media from the Asian Diaspora’. I also brought together early-career researchers working at the intersections of media, technology, and feminisms across Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, and India. Their work was discussed by Prof. Lucetta Kam (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Prof. Ling Han (The Chinese University of Hong Kong).
The symposium welcomed more than 100 members of the public, creating opportunities for exchange across disciplines, institutions, and contexts.
Before the symposium, I invited Charis Poon, feminist zine maker, designer, and Teaching Fellow at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, to facilitate a creative workshop for presenters.
Rather than simply sharing research findings, participants worked together to reflect on what it means to research digital feminisms across six Asian contexts. Through discussion, drawing, mapping, and zine-making, we translated academic ideas into creative forms and produced two collaborative creative outputs.
Research does not only happen in conference rooms. After the symposium, I invited queer feminist artist and activist Holok Chen to lead a walking tour of the Yau Tsim Mong district.
The tour explored the intersections of gender, race, migration, and urban development in everyday city spaces. By moving beyond the university campus, participants were able to connect discussions of digital feminisms with the social and material realities of Hong Kong.
This symposium was more than an academic event. It was an experiment in bringing together research, creative practice, and public engagement. By connecting scholars, artists, activists, and students across Asia, I sought to create a space for collective learning and to imagine new feminist approaches to media and technology in a rapidly changing digital world.
In April 2026, I was invited as a Visiting Guest Researcher at the Centre for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen, Norway, through the AI STORIES project, funded by the ERC Advanced Grant AI STORIES (G.A. ID: 101142306).
As part of the project, I analysed 150 GPT-4-generated stories set in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. Using qualitative coding, thematic analysis, and contextual comparison, I examined how AI constructs narratives across different East Asian contexts. The analysis focused on narrative arcs, forms of conflict, character gender, and professional roles.
This work contributed to a human-annotated dataset that offers insight into the patterns, assumptions, and cultural representations found in AI-generated storytelling. Alongside this research, I delivered a lecture on queer feminist approaches to synthetic arts and AI-generated culture.
We recently published the annotation dataset here:
Hagen, E. M. S., Rizvi, Z., Rettberg, J. W., Wong, K. H., John, J. C., Bodor, N. N., Efimova, V., & Witte, J. (2026). Metadata about AI-generated stories: Expert, human annotation relating to conflict, character gender and profession (Version 1.0) [Dataset]. DataverseNO.
https://doi.org/10.18710/KQSFOT
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