This first 2024 UP—Reader presents an excerpt from the Urgent Pedagogies Issue #3: Modalities, originally published in 2021, where Michael Leung shares research and self-initiated actions that react on the struggle of rural villages under the dominance of urbanization in Hong Kong. The methodology reveals the heritage of the rural everydaylife, and sustains the care practices inherent among elderly people and children.

From the Archive re-surfaces pieces that have previously been published as part of Urgent Pedagogies Issues.

Part-time Pedagogies: Introducing Three Places for Emancipatory Learning timeline, watercolour painting by Michael Leung, 2018 [1]

Villager pedagogies and backpack organisers in Hong Kong

Michael Leung

“For now and in the myriad message groups and activities that have come from the Land School we persist, as “backpack organisers” who use whatever tools, methods and strategies that we can when facing unjust dispossession and destruction of everyday life.”

It is already the end of January 2021 and one year since the outbreak of COVID-19. This morning the Hong Kong government ended an “ambush” lockdown, a 4 am spontaneously-announced 48-hour confinement in the neighbourhood of Jordan in Hong Kong—five blocks away from where I write. Writing about urgent pedagogies, recognises the biopolitical entanglements that have created the current muted situation where critique, practice and emancipation can be interpreted as dissent and sedition.

This essay continues on from the ideas in a former text entitled, Part-time Pedagogies: Introducing Three Places for Emancipatory Learning, an essay and timeline painting published online by non-profit arts institution Asia Art Archive. It builds on my part-time university affiliations and daily practice—acknowledging the precarities, privilege and potentialities of part-time lecturing—and shares how an alternative and radical pedagogy can keep growing in the Hong Kong context, amidst the ongoing pandemic, the evolving anti-extradition bill movement (since June 2019) and under the all-encompassing national security law (imposed in June 2020).

The aforementioned timeline painting illustrates two jackfruits, one unpeeled in 2017 and another peeled in 2018. The latter jackfruit is near a yellow banner and looks right going beyond the page. The yellow banner, in its original form, is around 1.7 metres wide and made by Wang Chau villager Ms. Cheng for the 2018 Wang Chau Jackfruit Festival. The annual festival started in 2017 and was conceived in a meeting between villagers, the Wang Chau Green Belt Concern Group and land protectors from a previous land resistance in Ma Shi Po Village in Fanling, Hong Kong (2016). [2]

The inaugural jackfruit festival came after three years of resisting the Hong Kong government’s development plan in converting three greenbelt villages in Wang Chau—home to 500 people, 1,057 trees and multispecies inhabitants—into nine public housing blocks to accommodate 4,000 units (significantly reduced from the originally proposed 17,000 units).

The “strategic” three phases of development and various government, developer, rural committee and gangster relations are described in (self-)published texts entitled, Flowers (Soil and Stones, Souls and Songs), The Emergence of the Jackfruit Woman and Wang Chau Village: (Non-)Indigenous Wisdom, Amidst Eviction.[3] The texts share my relationship and solidarity with the village and all its inhabitants since meeting them in February 2017.