Refusing “Diversity Day”: Creative Pedagogy as a Site of Epistemic Intervention

Based on ethnographic findings from artistic research conducted with South and Southeast Asian youth in Hong Kong (HK), the paper examines how creative pedagogy intervenes in what Fricker (2007) calls hermeneutical injustice. That is, “when a gap in the collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences.” (p. 1). In HK’s context, where minoritised ethnic individuals and communities are often expected to present their lives in ways that are legible within its framework of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism, this paper attends to the excess: what happens to the embodied and affective dimensions of our being––ambivalence, anger, in-betweenness, opacity––that remain unsayable because they not fit into the neoliberal language of diversity? Drawing on Black feminist thought, this paper argues that creative pedagogy cultivates dialogical spaces in which “subjugated knowledges,” to borrow Hill Collins’ (2000) formulation of the term, can be articulated beyond commodified and institutionally managed scripts of diversity. It first traces the emergence of diversity governance in HK as one of the structural conditions that produce the hermeneutical gaps which delimit how diverse ethnic groups make sense of their experiences. Then, it positions creative pedagogy as a site of epistemic and political intervention within the broader genealogy of Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy. In doing so, the paper demonstrates how creative pedagogy produces epistemic friction that enables participants to renegotiate or refuse institutional vocabularies of diversity, thus opening up the hermeneutical field. This paper contributes to debates in artistic research by positioning creative pedagogy and artistic research as a mode of theorising that enlarges what can be thought, felt, and spoken within—and against—neoliberal racial governance. keywords: