Abstract:
In this paper we discuss a series of alter-educational initiatives and social activist movements that are variously deformalising, rewilding, and subverting the boundaries between formal educational systems and the city at large. We draw on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s (2013) conceptualisation of ‘study’ to theorise a range of radical pedagogical practices currently emerging in the 'undercommons' of cities across the world. This includes a critical discussion of literature associated with public pedagogy and the ‘learning city’, while exploring how Moten and Harney’s notion of study disrupts, overspills, and surrounds conventational conceptualisations of informal learning and pedagogy within these fields. Drawing on examples from Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, we discuss how informal social movements mobilised responses to a public housing crisis without recourse to State policy and logistical management. We then turn to urban pedagogies of resistance arising from contemporary activist movements, focusing on the youth-led ‘Be Water’ protest movements in the city of Hong Kong. Through accounts of extended sieges of university campuses by police, we describe how the tactics of Hong Kong activists share many key charecteristics with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) historical account of the ‘war machine’ in their ‘Treatise on Nomadology’. In approaching activism as a practice of deformalised study, we describe how Hong Kong protestors have created ‘smooth spaces’ in the fabric of the city through a ‘pedagogical war machine’ that gathers micropolitical forces, affects, desires, and infrastructures as it moves. Connecting international examples that depart radically from neo-liberal configurations of 'learning city' and ‘smart city’ policy agendas, our analysis leads to a speculative re-imagining of the shifting values and futures of education within an increasingly deformalised milieu of activist study and pedagogical resistance.ReferencesDeleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. NY: Minor Compositions.