Bio

Emily Yu Zong (cited name: Zong, Emily Yu) works across environmental humanities, critical migration studies, and posthumanist theory to examine how migrant and diasporic cultural imaginations reshape understandings of climate change and planetary social thought. Drawing on both scholarly analysis and creative practice, she engages how literature, film, and new media technologies contribute to collaborative survival with the more-than-human earth.

Her work is informed by lived experience across Australia, China, and Hong Kong and attends to the crossovers and tensions between colonial powers, Indigenous knowledges, and migrant placemaking. Across these contexts, she develops a research agenda centered on feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial thought and the expansion of migrant cosmopolitics and hybrid ecologies as pathways to multispecies flourishing.

She is the author of Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2026) and co-editor of a double special issue on Decolonial Asian Diasporic Ecocriticism, forthcoming in Ariel (2026, 57: 3-4). Her work has appeared in journals including Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Journal of Australian Studies, LIT, Journal of Intercultural Studies, as well as the edited volume, The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel.

Alongside her academic research, she develops practice-based projects that bring together environmental storytelling, health humanities, and sensory and immersive media. Her exhibitions and collaborative works include Waterborne 水生 (2022), a climate art exhibition and publication on water and ocean waste; Bovine Calling 喚 / 幻牛 (2023), a virtual reality film and exhibition on free-foaming cows and water buffalo in Hong Kong; Thus, Soil 故土 (2024), an exhibition exploring soil poetics and ecological affect, and Healing Atmospheres (2026), a virtual reality film developed in collaboration with healthcare practitioners that explores sensory environments of care and disability.

She is currently working on two projects: one on the decolonial blue humanities in ocean literature and media, and another on weather and heat imaginations among migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong in the context of climate adaptation.