Cultural Typhoon 2025

Date: November 8 (Sat) – 9 (Sun), 2025

* A pre-conference Opening Eve Gathering and a post-conference Urban Walk will be held on November 7 (Fri) and November 10 (Mon), respectively. Further details will be announced at a later date.

Venue: College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Theme

交風　Typhoons 
叉颱　Entwined

* The conference theme weaves together visual play and layered meaning. Beginning with the character 颱 tái for “typhoon” and reading counterclockwise, it forms the phrase “typhoon crossroads.” When read top to bottom from the right, 風颱交叉 hong-thai kau-tshà carries the rhythm of Taiwanese Taigi, evoking the resonance of local voices and the motion of knowledge rooted in place. This design not only symbolizes the entangled flows of culture and geography across East Asia, but also reflects Cultural Typhoon’s core ethos: emergence from the margins, and connection through difference.

Manifesto 

​​Crosswinds, Currents, Converge! 
巻き起これ　渦巻く風よ　響き合え
文化際會，唯我颱尊，急急如風令！

Once an overseas student and still a scholar within this society, I speak—with the privilege to withhold nothing and inherit everything—charting what I carry not as something suppressed, but as a passage I choose to walk into the story of Cultural Typhoon.

Since its inception at Waseda University in 2003, Cultural Typhoon has never sought to become a rigid academic institution. Instead, it has evolved through spontaneous networks and exchanges, taking place in different locations each year. Without fixed structures or funding, the conference has sustained itself through the enthusiasm and dedication of its participants. Over time, it became more than an annual gathering; by the tenth Hiroshima conference, it had taken shape as the Association for Cultural Typhoon (Cultural Studies Gakkai). The Cultural Typhoon has now endured for over two decades, bearing witness to shifting terrains of academic and cultural practice.

In its early years, a group of young Asian scholars—many of whom had engaged with the Pacific Asia Cultural Studies Forum in Britain—returned to Japan to teach. Yet, they found themselves questioning the rigid hierarchies and authoritative structures embedded within traditional academic institutions. Seeking new forms of knowledge exchange, they positioned Cultural Typhoon as an open, decentralised space that blurred the boundaries between scholarship, social movements, and cultural practice. Their approach drew deeply from critical theory—especially the work of Stuart Hall, whose scholarship challenged the Eurocentric foundations of cultural studies—alongside postcolonial and feminist thinkers who critiqued the (gendered) structures of power.

Against this backdrop, Cultural Typhoon has developed a multiplicity of perspectives, fostering critical engagement with cultural and political dynamics across Japan and East Asia. Today, it is no longer merely an academic conference but a living, evolving phenomenon—where voices intersect, collide, and generate new possibilities.

In recent years, one recurring vision has surfaced among our organisers: to become, quite literally, a typhoon—sweeping across the islands and coastlines of the East Asian Pacific Rim. Whether reaching islands, peninsulas, or sprawling port cities, this storm carries over twenty years of accumulated force, spiralling outwards. Where will it gather momentum next? How might it alter the ways we think, connect, and act? In this respect, we propose that the next chapter of Cultural Typhoon begins in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s southern port city.

Taiwan stands in the wake of layered, postcolonial histories—where the past lingers, not to be enshrined or erased, but to be held just long enough to cross. The island along the East Asian Pacific Rim has long been caught in shifting currents—of trade, migration, and political upheaval. Not just complex, but woven through with memory, desire, and dissonance. Taiwan and Japan watch each other across the sea, while China’s coastal regions and the Korean Peninsula remain tied to these maritime and overland routes, forming deep and often fraught entanglements. Meanwhile, the cities and harbours along these coastlines stretch inland, linking territories through complex, transregional networks. Across history and into the present, between the local and the global, between remembering and forgetting, cultural flows continue to interweave.

As one of Taiwan’s principal ports, Kaohsiung has long been a focal point of commerce and cultural exchange. At its heart, the site now known as Formosa Boulevard is a popular tourist attraction, yet it once stood at the crossroads of Taiwan’s democratic movements—a space of resistance and transformation. In recent years, Kaohsiung has become part of what is now known as the “S Corridor” of semiconductor production, securing its position on the global economic map amidst intensifying U.S.-Taiwan strategic alignment and supply chain integration. This evolving trajectory reflects not only domestic developments, but also the complex entanglements of U.S. geopolitical strategy, economic leverage, and soft power projection across the region. Yet the city’s trajectory is not defined by industry alone. Neoliberal restructuring, geopolitical tensions, migration, labour struggles, and shifting cultural identities continue to reshape its landscape in ways that are both visible and obscured.

Decades of urban renewal and gentrification have left their mark. The city has hosted the World Games, while former military sites have been reimagined as cultural and athletic hubs, including the Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts and the National Sports Training Center. Yet even amid these transformations, deeper tensions persist: histories of displacement, industrial shifts, and struggles over cultural, linguistic, and artistic expression. The interplay between literature, the arts, and sports continues to shape the city’s evolving identity, while urban development generates ongoing frictions. In many ways, Kaohsiung stands as a microcosm of East Asia’s cultural and political flux.

Across these shifting tides, people continue to move—crossing borders, traversing physical and digital landscapes. Identities slip and collide, at times embraced, at times rejected. Some voices are amplified; others are drowned out, rendered inaudible. Some drift passively; others push against the currents, seeking new routes, new spaces of articulation.

In this tangled web of histories and futures, mediascapes fracture and reform; networks of information are severed and reconfigured. Alternative cultures take root in the gaps and crevices of dominant narratives, challenging the boundaries of power and carving out spaces for expression where none existed before. What persists through translation, misinterpretation, or resonance? Where do we drift, and how do we connect? Can we reimagine new cultures and societies through these shifting channels?

Islands adrift, channels entwined—a phrase that encapsulates the drifting trajectories and interwoven connections that have carried Cultural Typhoon from Britain to Japan, and now to Taiwan. Cultural Typhoon 2025 Kaohsiung invites scholars, artists, and activists to join in critical dialogue on movement, connection, and transformation. We welcome research presentations, performances, workshops, and creative projects that explore the tensions of being “adrift” and the possibilities of becoming “entwined.” Join us as this storm gathers strength—spiralling across Asia and toward new horizons.

Po-Lung Huang

Chair, Executive Committee of Cultural Typhoon 2025

Call for Papers

We are excited to open the call for proposals for Cultural Typhoon 2025 in Kaohsiung. We welcome submissions for individual presentations, group panels, and project works (including exhibitions, performances, and alternative formats). Proposals may draw on a wide range of themes. Examples include but are not limited to the following:

Urban Space & Mobility

• Remapping the Port City: Gentrification, Memory, and Resistance
• Streets in Transition: Post-Disaster Narratives and Spatial Politics
• Street Currents: Culture, Resistance, and Urban Belonging

Culture, Media & Representation

• Voices After #MeToo: Feminist Movements and Their Echoes in East Asia
• Trolls, Memes, Misogyny: Gender Backlash in Online Discourse
• Rhymes Across Borders: East Asian Rap and the Politics of Voice

Feminism and Intersectionality

• Gender Justice and Social Movements through an Intersectional Lens
• Care and Solidarity: Gendered Practices in the Post-Pandemic Era
• Bodies, Choice, and Autonomy: Voices Against Structures of Power

Post/Colonial Afterlives and Decolonial Practices

• Decolonizing Museums: Rethinking Display, Ownership, and Narrative
• Echoes of Empire: Memory and the Unconscious in Postwar Spaces
• Living Memories, Resistance to Racism: Indigenous Voices and Local Histories

Sport, Body & Power

• Bodies on Display: Nationalism, Sports, and Spectacle
• Breaking the Rules: Gender, Institutions, and Athletic Narratives
• From Street to Stadium: Skateboarding, Breaking, and the Sportification of Subcultures

Society, Economy & Politics

• Silicon Currents: Semiconductor Supply Chains and Tech Geopolitics
• Precarious Connections: Migration, Labor, and Cultural Visibility
• Soft Power, Hard Boundaries: Cultural Diplomacy and Regional Tensions

Language, Education & Literacy

• Language as Battleground: Multilingualism, Education, and Power
• Decentering the Academy: Knowledge Hierarchies and Institutional Critique
• Writing the Self: Literacy, Identity, and Digital Expression

Wildcard: Cultural Typhoon Mode

• Everywhere and Nowhere: Digital Nomads and the Future of Work and Place
• Fieldnotes from Nowhere: Drifting Researchers and Ethnographic Repositioning
• Echoes from the Margins: Archiving Silence, Emotion, and Cultural Memory

We also welcome proposals that fall outside of these examples. Let your ideas drift, collide, and entwine—just like the storm we are.

Details regarding the call for papers will be announced in mid-April via our official website, social media channels, and the members’ mailing list. Information on application procedures, deadlines, participation fees and so forth will follow—please stay tuned.