Literacies remaking public places: the Umbrella Movement of Hong Kong, 2014

Abstract

We approach Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, also known as Occupy Central, encountered in two days in November 2014 as an exemplar of literacy as placemaking. As a contemporary city-based resistance movement, the creation and subsequent resemiotization of literacy artefacts was an important element of spatialized practice in asserting a new and dynamic sense of citizenship. In their collaborative design, shared commitment to certain values and expressions of political resistance these occupation sites may be read as an instantiation of Goodsell's (2003) concept of public space. The initial research site of engagement gave rise to a dataset of photographs that the authors examined together as discourses in place (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), informed by cultural knowledge of Hong Kong. Selecting two photographs, we broaden out beyond the linguistic features of texts to consider processes of creative semiotic remediation. We suggest that in such placemaking activities the Umbrella Movement activists embodied Giroux's (1992) concept of literacy as emancipatory practice. Finally we make suggestions as to how this study might be connected to a critical pedagogy of place (Mills & Comber, 2013)