Is the 2019 Water Revolution a lesson of emancipatory education? A Rancièrean invitation

Abstract

This paper starts with an apparently provocative question – can we call the 2019 Water Revolution in Hong Kong a lesson of emancipatory education which awakens students’ critical consciousness and brings the postcolonial regime into democratic renewal? The mass social unrest, which was initially triggered by a controversial extradition legislation, has prompted local journalism and political discourse to speak of ‘the failure of education’: an outmoded form of citizenship education, lack of Chinese History as a core subject, radicalisation in school, regression in science and technology education, to name just few examples of crisis talk. Our discussion explores this question through the philosophical lens of Jacques Rancière. In Rancière’s understanding, ‘emancipation’ occurs in the ephemeral moments of subjectification in which individuals resist existing identity positions in the ‘police’ order, but speak on their own terms through ‘dissensual’ responses, under the supposition of ‘equality’ of ‘intelligence’. Episodes of the movement may look defiant but are not the rare moments of ‘dissensus’ in which people are unshackled from the prevalent distribution of the sensible. An example from this movement that borders on what Rancière means by ‘emancipation’ is the redistribution of chemistry knowledge about tear gas on a social media platform, which is initiated and crowdfunded by a group of anonymous postgraduate science students and circulated by a chemistry tutor from a private tuition school.

Keywords:

• Dissensus
• emancipation
• Rancière
• Water Revolution

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by author(s).

Notes

1 Fanny Law, the former permanent secretary for education, in a radio interview, said that some young girls offered free sex to frontline protesters, even though her comment is ridiculed as ‘fake news’ without ‘fact checking’. ‘I think we have confirmed that this is a true case. I am so sad for these young girls who have been misled into offering free sex. …There is evidence. That is the daughter of a friend's friend. That's second-hand knowledge, but it's direct, it's real. Okay? Direct and it's real. And the girl actually wrote a piece.’ (Chiverton & Rowse, 2019)

2 Sophia Chan, the Secretary for Food and Health told the Legislative Council that ‘we have conducted internal studies on whether tear gas will produce dioxin or cyanide. We found no evidence based on existing research and academic literature that tear gas will generate dioxin.’ (Hong Kong Free Press, 2019)

3 The name is suspected to be made up of two codes, HKG and ETV. HKG is the IATA station code of the Hong Kong International Airport. ETV stands for Educational Television (Hong Kong), which began in 1972 and is a series of educational television programmes jointly produced by Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) and the now erstwhile Education Department (EDB). The name of this civil society group on Facebook partly suggests a sense of nostalgia for the past in the 1990s when ETV was known to be part of the collective memory of the city’s colonial past.

4 Known as the ‘godfather of chemistry’ among secondary school students, Dr K. Kwong is a well-known chemistry tutor from a private tutorial chain called Modern Education. His teaching notes are widely known to be very relevant to students for their public examinations. During the movement, he made several comments on the Hong Kong government’s method of handling the protest and tear gas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Henry Kwok

Mr Henry Kwok is a PhD candidate in the Griffith Institute for Educational Research at Griffith University, Australia. He is former a Senior Lecturer in Sociology of Education at the Open University of Hong Kong. He graduated from the University of Hong Kong and the University of Cambridge. His research interests include critical policy studies, the politics of curriculum and education reform, and the use of social theory in educational research.

Stephen Heimans

Dr Stephen Heimans is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership at the University of Queensland, Australia, and an adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Griffith Institute for Educational Research, Griffith University. His work focuses on the relations between the purposes, policies and practices of education, participatory design-based research and social justice.

Parlo Singh

Prof Parlo Singh is a Research Professor and Senior Academic Fellow at Griffith University, Australia. Her research work focuses on issues of educational equity and social justice. Specifically, she is interested in research partnership work that assists students from disadvantaged communities to gain access to complex forms of knowledge. Of particular significance is work that challenges the re-production of social inequity via schooling systems through complex sociological theorising.