Post-it, Milk Tea, Mini-Stonehenge: Multimodal Analysis of Protest Artifacts in 2019–2020 Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Movement

• In Event: Toward Critical Multimodality: Exploring Theory, Research, and Practice in Transformative Educational Spaces

Abstract

The anti-extradition law protest in Hong Kong since mid-2019 that snowballed into a large-scale social movement has resulted in, among other things, neologisms like “freedom hi” and “popo.” In this workshop at AERA 2022, I would explore how protest artefacts manifested in multimodal forms, which include not only artful expressions but also creativity manifested in offensive language, mini road blockades, dessert names, and vegetarian food, in the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong during 2019-2020.

The session would attempt to answer the question, “How is multimodality employed in protest artefacts made for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong since 2019?” I have adopted the multimodal concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and the translanguaging theory to interpret the modes and semiotic resources used in creating the protest artefacts in recent protest movements in Hong Kong. SFL is chosen as the analytical tool to analyse multimodal artefacts of all kinds, including but not limited to “print and digital texts”, “videos and three-dimensional objects and sites”, “popular media”, and “art and crafts” (Jewitt et al., 2016, p. 8). Systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis (SF-MDA) is adopted in my study “to understand and describe the functions of different semiotic resources as systems of meaning and to analyse the meanings that arise when semiotic choices combine in multimodal phenomena over space and time” (Jewitt et al., 2016, p. 8). “Translanguaging…includes all meaning-making modes” (García & Wei, 2014, p. 29). As such, I would apply concepts from the translanguaging theory to investigate how the protest artefacts make meaning through the purposeful use of linguistic, artistic, digital, graphic and other related signs in a complex multilingual context like Hong Kong. The analysis of the protest artefacts as “signs” would also be used to study the role language(s) plays/play in the “multimodal nature of communication” (p. 28) that can be found in the local civil activist movement. I will present images, songs, and other modes of protest artefacts.

Various forms of protest art have been discussed in T. V. Reed’s (2019) book The Art of Protest, which focuses on the variety of art forms used in (mostly) U.S.-based civil rights movements. Following Reed’s (2019) line of discussion on the use of protest art in various civil rights movements in the U.S. and other countries, I believe the multimodal acts and practices shown in the local protest movement are the (still living) proof of Hongkongers’ creativity and resilience in their struggle against their perceived totalitarian state power. Hopefully, an enriched understanding of the multimodal artefacts that emerged from the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protest can help educators who are interested in language, democracy, and social justice education to explore the potential of trans-semiotic multimodal analysis and translanguaging for designing culturally relevant and engaging curricula.

Author

• Jason Manbo Ho, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology