Activist ecologies of study in the learning city: deformalisations of educational life

ABSTRACT

The combined impacts of COVID-19 and global climate change are destabilising the infrastructures and future prospects of formal educational systems, with schools and universities struggling to adapt to conditions of radical precarity. At the same time, activist movements are generating alter-educational platforms that reappropriate the learning infrastructures of cities as mobile architectures of pedagogical resistance. Building on Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons, this paper discusses transnational examples of radical pedagogies that engage the city as an ecology of deformalised study. We highlight examples from Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown regime, emphasising how informal study enabled community-led responses to crisis at city-scale. We then turn to urban ecologies of study arising from contemporary activist movements, drawing connections between protest movements in Hong Kong and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘war machine’. This leads to a speculative re-imagining of alternative educational values and futures within a milieu of activist study, care, and resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• study
• Moten
• undercommons
• universities
• learning cities
• Hong Kong
• Deleuze and Guattari

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 It is important to note that the concepts of ‘study’ and the ‘undercommons’ developed by Moten (2018) and Harney and Moten (2013) emerge from and within a milieu of black studies, and with specific reference to the radical and visionary work of black scholars, artists, musicians, and writers. Our extension of Moten and Harney’s terms of study to consider lockdown events in Melbourne and activist pedagogies in Hong Kong is not an attempt to divorce theseconcepts from black studies, nor to stake a claim within any particular cultural or intellectual territory. Rather, and in keeping with Moten’s stated aspirations for the radical inclusivity of his terms, we are committed to a relational ethics which foregrounds the pedagogical power of the informal, the opaque, and the fugitive within diversely situated ecologies of study. Moten (2018) exemplifies the generous inclusivity of his terms in this way:

It is so obvious (particularly after the recent lessons of Lindon Barrett, Herman Bennett, Daphne Brooks, Nahum Chandler, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Brent Edwards, Saidiya Hartman, and Sharon Holland, among others) that blackness has always emerged as nothing other than the richest possible combination of dispersion and permeability in and as the mass improvisation and protection of the very idea of the human … Ultimately, the paraontological force that is transmitted in the long chain of life-and-death performances with which black studies is concerned is horribly misunderstood if it is understood as exclusive. Everyone whom blackness claims, which is to say everyone, can claim blackness … In this regard, black studies might best be described as a location habitually lost and found within a moving tendency … Cause and need converge in the bent school or marginal church in which we flock together to be in the name of being otherwise. (Moten, 2018, pp. 159–200)

2 Further, since the return to China, Hong Kong’s formal education curricula have been indoctrinated with nationalistic and authoritarian capitalistic ideologies. Citizens are ‘taught’ to be patriotic to the mother-state, and comply to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong government. For instance, the proposed introduction of a Chinese Moral and Education curriculum in primary and secondary schools in 2012 sparked citywide protests in Hong Kong, and was eventually withdrawn. However, the National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong in June 2020 has informed a new national security curriculum to be instated throughout the city’s kindergartens, primary and secondary schools in 2021 (Davidson, 2021).

3 Citizens in Hong Kong were protesting against the Extradition Law Amendment Bill, which would be applied to Hong Kong citizens, foreign residents, and people passing through the city, for fear that the law would be used to extradite political/civil rights activists, critics, journalists and dissidents to Mainland China, where they would be secretly trailed and published in a fundamentally different legal system (See Li, 2019, for more).

4 Hong Kong activists’ use of makeshift counter-technologies can be understood within a larger international movement against ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2019). Krejsler (2020, p. 11) describes the following list of counter-technologies currently being mobilised by activists worldwide:

LED privacy visors to impede facial-recognition cameras, 3D-printed prosthetic masks to confound facial recognition, quilted coats that block radio waves. There is the ‘Backslash Tool Kit,’ a series of functional devices designed for use during protests and riots – a smart bandana for embedding hidden messages and public keys, independently networked wearable devices, personal black-box devices to register law enforcement abuse. (p. 11)

5 Through their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) frequently refer to ‘the East’ as a paragon of the various characteristics of the war machine. They describe the history of the war machine in the East as orientated toward the continuous abolition of the State, as contrasted with the ‘revolutionary’ history of the West where State power is taken and re-instated by another regime. In their discussion of metallurgy as a nomad science of the war machine, they describe the pivotal invention of the saber during the Ch’in and Han dynasties of the Chinese empire. And, in discussing the differences between striated and smooth space, they compare the games of chess and Go, both of which are traced to origins in China. While chess pieces are coded to an ‘internal nature and intrinsic properties’ that determine their capacities within a State apparatus, Go pieces are ‘simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function’ (p. 352). As anonymous pieces of a ‘nonsubjectified machine assemblage’, Go aligns closely with the war machine as an assemblage that draws any number of elements into its movements: ‘a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant’ (p. 353).

6 Wide-spread anger over police violence in Hong Kong has called attention from international academic community. In 2019 a joint petition condemning police brutality and urging universities to deny police entry to campuses, in support of freedom of assembly and academic freedom, was co-signed by over 3,700 academics (Hong Kong Watch, 2019).

7 Since the Chinese handover Hong Kong has been remade in the image of a capitalist ‘smart city’. Through a top-down authoritarian approach, the government has worked to brand Hong Kong as a smart city through building infrastructures to support the development of STEM education, for example the Science Park and Design Institute are two publicly funded institutions that target to produce job-ready candidates for STEM industries (www.smartcity.gov.hk). The Innovation and Technology Bureau published two editions of Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong in December 2017 and 2020 respectively, announcing over 130 of initiatives to develop: Smart Mobility, Smart Living, Smart Environment, Smart People, Smart Government and Smart Economy, framed in urban strategist Boyd Cohen’s (2012) Smart City Wheel. In both versions of the blueprint, the authority aimed to ‘have more students selecting STEM as their education and professional careers’ as a goal in nurturing Smart People (Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint, 2017; Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint 2.0, 2020).