Prof. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren and I ran an intensive 2-week undergraduate summer research fellowship in 2024 focused on undertaking transdisciplinary research around the theme of water and sustainability through Bruno Latour’s concept of Critical Zones.

The research fellowship, participated by 20 students, covered transdisciplinary research theories, methodologies, rationales, and impact, practices, interventions, & cultural assumptions around water and Hong Kong, and creative and critical ways of reading, viewing, sharing, and writing. Topics and activities included:

• Concepts of alignment, translatability, complementarities, creative tensions, social knowledge.
• Dispositions as a researcher: learning to look, record, interpret, integrate ideas.
• Embassy of the North Sea and the agency of objects/ non-human, including water as a force of change.
• Methodologies around walking, multisensory maps, autoethnographies, design+make, close readings and textual analysis, speculative design, multimedia experimentations. 
• Fieldtrip to the HKU Swire Institute of Marine Science (SWIRE).

By the end of the fellowship, students produced original and diverse research papers, using concepts such as ecocriticism, ecoanxiety, rhythmanalysis, and telecoupling, and exploring dirigibles, houseboats, water lines, coastal reclaimation, and swimming pools.

Afterwards, a group of the students also presented their research in academic conferences and organised a student-led transdisciplinary research conference titled Transdisciplinary Academic Conference for Emerging Scholars (TRACES) held at HKU on 28 June 2025.