Survival Epistemologies: Hong Kong

This article proposes survival epistemologies to name fragile, situated, and improvisational ways of knowing that take shape under repression. Centring Hong Kong as a site of ongoing crisis, I argue that when abstraction loses traction, theory emerges through constrained practices that provincialise generalisability and reorient method toward situated relations. Treating Hong Kong as an epistemic site rather than an object, I trace four scenes in independent publishing – rupture (zines), duration (indie bookshops), depth (hyperlocal writing), and reweaving (diasporic publishing) – to show how knowledge is kept alive through provisional infrastructures of care, refusal, and endurance. Survival epistemologies circulate not by scale but by resonance: they travel across contexts through recognition and method rather than universality. In this frame, authorship becomes encounter-making – amplifying situated practices and rendering their unfinished possibilities legible. The article contributes to postcolonial, decolonial, and feminist debates by offering a vocabulary for how theory persists and moves amid censorship, precarity, and fragmentation.