Our festival theme in 2026 is Crossroads: a place of discovery, encounter and change. It is a theme shared by Being Human Festival centres across the globe, and one that Hong Kong knows intimately.

Hong Kong is itself a crossroads — a city where trade routes, cultures, and ways of life have long converged, and where the ancient and the contemporary exist, restlessly, side by side. It is a natural home for Being Human Festival, a global celebration of humanities research held across cities from London to Melbourne to North Carolina, which this year comes to Hong Kong for the first time.

To stand at a crossroads is never a neutral act. It is where different histories brush up against each other, where knowledge travels and changes in the travelling, where communities shape and are shaped by the ideas, objects, and practices that pass through them. Hong Kong knows this well; as a city that has absorbed and transformed everything that has moved through it, and sent it on its way changed.

A crossroads is also where worlds meet that don’t usually meet. A scholar and a neighbourhood. A craft tradition and a curious stranger. A poem and the moment it finds its reader. A recipe, a memory, and a new place. A contemplative practice and a new technology — perhaps even an artificial intelligence that asks us what it means to be human. It is where something is passed on, or changed, or discovered. It asks us to pause, and to pay attention.

This year, our events span the city and the senses: workshops, walks, conversations, performances, and shared meals. Whatever form they take, they share a common curiosity about the places where human lives, ideas, and knowledge intersect, and what becomes possible there.

Being Human Festival at HKU welcomes you to the crossroads.

Being Human Festival was founded in the UK in 2014 with the aim of highlighting an alternative vision of the humanities. Since then, the festival has drawn together the most exciting and inspiring work in the humanities research field to present thousands of creative and collaborative public events that inspire, inform and extend our contemporary thinking and imagination. Learn more about Being Human Festival in the UK.