Learning in a time of crisis: Reimagining global policing in the literary classroom

The year 2020 was difficult for much of the world; yet in Hong Kong, one might say that 2020 began in 2019. That summer saw mass protests, followed by conflicts between protesters and police when the Hong Kong Police Force began withdrawing legally-obtained permissions to gather.(1) By November 2019, universities in Hong Kong went online as campuses transformed into medieval-like fortresses, some of them even becoming battlegrounds between activists and police. The pandemic began in January 2020, followed by mass arrests and a canceled election. In the midst of so much change, university teachers faced difficult questions about how to teach students who might be traumatized by the weekly, sometimes even daily, transformations of their city. Then, on June 30, 2020, the Chinese legislature in Beijing passed the National Security Law (NSL) without input from the Hong Kong Legislative Council. The NSL prohibits secession, subversion, terrorism, and “collusion with foreign forces” that might “endanger national security.” As a result, it posed security issues for online and hybrid learning, particularly in more “sensitive” subjects.