Contemporary literature and the arts have taken a community turn. Across diverse cultural contexts, writers and artists conduct fieldwork, interview local residents, participate in social movements, and create works through communities to which they may—or may not—belong. For some, living and working with a community opens up new possibilities for imagining collective life with others, whether another social group, a marginalized population, or even more-than-human beings. For others, fieldwork becomes a journey of return, leading them to an ancestral homeland or to unfamiliar parts of their own city or country. How do these artistic engagements with community imagine alternatives to existing social and political structures? How should we understand the ambigious practice that is called community-building? What do literature and the arts leave behind in communities, and vice versa?

Thinking through community not only revitalizes longstanding humanistic debates about representation and authenticity; it also invites us to understand literature and the arts themselves as social forms that intersect with communities. Caroline Levine argues that forms organize not only literary and artistic works but also the social world itself. While Levine foregrounds forms such as wholes, hierarchies, and networks, we ask: how have these and other forms structured cultural production, and communities across different contexts? If we revisit Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction between community and society, grounded in personal social relations and impersonal social arrangements respectively, where does the community ends and the societal structure emerged?

In Sinophone communities, initiatives such as Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society (Shanghai), Wall-less Kindergarten (Hainan), and Qiantai OSF (Guangdong) have brought together artists, community members, and activists to co-create arts and address  social issues. From Lee Wai Yi's community-engaged practice in Hong Kong to Wu Ming-yi's environmental activism in Taiwan, Sinophone writers have explored what literature can do in the face of social inequality and ecological crisis. For the Global Chinese art circles, self-organization has emerged as an important mode of practice, enabling artists to build communities beyond the "centers."

While this panel takes Sinophone and Global Asian studies as one point of departure, we welcome contributions from scholars working across the Global South, diaspora studies, and other cultural traditions. We invite papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Community-based literature and the arts
• Contingent communities: spectatorship, fandom, happenings, and ephemeral publics
• Enduring communities: citizenship, the nation-state, locality, and their transformations
• Activism and social movements
• Speculative, experimental, and utopian imaginations of collective life
• Multispecies communities
• ethics of community-engaged research and artistic practice
• labor, care, and mutual aid