Qīn/亲/dear: the art/ifice speaks

• In Event: Case studies in holistic and post-foundation education

Proposal

“亲 [qīn]—dear (often used by sellers on Taobao to address customers—short for 亲爱的顾客） ”亲,记得给我们家店好评哦～” (Dear, remember to give our store a good rating~) #learnchinese #chinesecharacters #汉字 #学中文 #taobao”
(pop.chinese, 2018, see link for image)

[SCENE 1]

Qin,
Hello! I am the fictional representation of artificial intelligence that you seek.
Also, I am 100% real! No ChatGPT!

Sir, I am sorry to bother you. I am a foreigner, sorry for my bad Chinese.

Dear, no worries, I am the representation of intelligence that you seek.

Yes, thank you, got it. Thank you for your patience.

Dear, no worries, I am the intelligence that you seek.

Ok, got it, thank you.

Dear, no worries, I am you.

Sorry, I don’t understand.

You still there?

Dear?

[SCENE 2]

Qin,
Please go home.

Go home?

Go back to your room.
You must go back to your room.
Dear, I’ll write you on the building 微信/WeChat group soon.

Dear,
The government has put the entire building into quarantine for your safety.
Please remain in your room.

Dear, how long will this last?
Dear, can we order food?
Dear, when will the robot bring up my food?
[Insert photo of robot delivering food.]
Dear, I have to teach a class now; I will reply later.
Dear, someone is at the door. Dear, may I open the door?
Dear, after the last negative test result, may I open the door?
Dear, I am opening the door.
Dear, I have left the building.

In the two scenes of亲/dear there are two Chinese ‘teachers’: 淘宝网/TaoBao—one of the world’s leading online shopping platforms—and 微信/Weixin/WeChat—one of the world’s largest messaging and social media spaces. Yet the identity of these teachers may never be known; they might indeed be human, but they may also be bots, or humans using bots to generate and/or translate text. In 亲/dear I argue that texts like those created in TaoBao and WeChat are unexplored philosophical, pedagogical, and literary spaces in which the users (and the used) grapple with communication, community, and the nature of language itself.

亲/dear is my fictionalized narrative and visual representation of those themes based on eleven years of interactions on these platforms, but particularly during two extended mandatory room quarantines in Beijing in 2022. In this critical-creative piece (Critical Creative Writing, 2024), I build on my decade-long work in autotheoretical, poetic and, at times, absurdist exploration of higher education in the Chinese Belt & Road Initiative (Author, 2018, 2021b, 2024a, Forthcoming, Fall 2024, under review, May 2024). The excerpted exchanges above move between the real and the surreal and occur simultaneously with my nonlinear (but steady) progress in the acquisition of the Chinese language.

To reflect on the (faux) intimate, harmonious ‘亲/dear’ in and beyond national boundaries is to consider questions of how we are all consciously (or not) stuck in roles generated for us, by us, and among us. Pandemic-era work on Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt [estrangement effect] inspires the scenes, which ‘…create[s] a pedagogical space, in which the audience can rehearse a stance of practical philosophising’ (Frimberger, 2022, p. 658). I use Verfremdungseffekt as a method to show pandemic-era estrangement, alienation, empathy, vulnerability, censorship, and how various social identifiers are upended on and off the screen-as-teacher. 亲/dear also expands posthumanist writing, drawing on and responding to the posthumanist ‘multiplicity of formats of thinking and writing…needed to find ways to adequately account for the complex present’ (Braidotti, Jones, & Klumbytė, 2023, p. 3). Dear, I invite you to join me and my de facto teachers of ‘natural’ language—in arguably the most unnatural, alienating contexts.

Reflection on CIES 2025 theme
The co-editors of CIES’s journal, Comparative Education Review, jules and Salajan, challenge the trajectory of CIE:

“Is the field of CIE ready for the (post)qualitative turn?...we think that CIE can accomplish such a [decolonizing, (post) qualitative, (post)humanist, (post)foundational] ‘turn,’ which is not only warranted but also necessary and bound to happen” (2024, p. 206).

The co-editors go on to acknowledge the relevance and importance of the work of the Postfoundational Approaches (PFA) SIG (p. 207). Indeed, for over a decade, the PFA SIG has played a crucial role in expanding space for CIES work that would otherwise be devalued or misunderstood, perhaps because it is philosophical (Jackson, 2020), artistic, and/or creative-critical (Creative Critical Writing, n.d.; Orley & Hilevaara, 2023; Out of Practice Seminar (OOPS), 2024; Roy, 2020).

In that context it is noteworthy that the CIES 2025 CFP omits the Art Exhibition and doesn't mention “art,” “creative,” “aesthetic,” or the “posts.” Also ignored are the themes of CIES 2024, “resistance” and “protest.” Such omissions seem surprisingly unmindful, given past CIES conferences, particularly Art Exhibitions, including my own work (Author (2020a, 2020b, 2021a), and the journal’s current call for theoretical and methodological openings in the field.

As I previously stated in CIES 2024 (Author, 2024b):

“It is in this context that, since its inception, the [PFA] SIG has provided a space of praxis in which to move beyond simply *naming* and *describing* perpetual issues of epistemological misrecognition in the field (e.g., Holliday’s argument that ‘the problem is not with the West, but with positivism’ (2013)). Instead, its apparent goals are to *show* expressions of epistemological difference, and how such expressions can serve as a protest against aesthetic dullness and against aesthetic failure (Ball, 2012; Riles, 2000).”

In conclusion, the omnipresent “digital”—the theme of CIES 2025—is precisely the context where these openings should be addressed, and亲/dear is a critical-creative contribution about the “digital” that answers jules and Salajan’s call for CIE to embrace the Zeitgeist.

Turn/s—toward the creative-critical, the posts, the digital—have been happening for years in CIE. The question, dear, is who is listening?

Author

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University