Jacqueline T. Y. Liu

Research interests

My research sits at the intersection of aesthetics, political culture, and democratic theory, informed by the perspective and experience of Hong Kong and its diasporas.

I am a political theorist by training, with proficiencies in visual, archival, and ethnographic methods of inquiry, afforded by my work experiences in visual culture and graduate coursework in comparative politics and anthropology. My work seeks to explore and offer an empirically grounded approach to theorizing the epistemic dimensions of democracy and diasporic politics.

Aesthetics

Worlds

Sensory perception

Knowledge and judgment

Democratic Theory

Populism

Disagreement

Affective (de)polarization

Political Culture

The everyday

Social construction of reality

Social imaginaries

Works in progress

Aspects of Worldmaking

The concept of worldmaking has been widely taken up in recent years by political theorists in theorizing anticolonial projects, especially in historical accounts that seek to recover emancipatory aspects of unrealized visions. This paper engages in a critical inquiry into why the concept has been attractive to theorists in their interpretations and recovery of the past. In particular, it seeks to examine the analytical commitments underlying theorists’ use of the concept. Through an analysis of the work by Adom Getachew, Gary Wilder, and Begüm Adalet, I argue that worldmaking functions most powerfully as a comparative point of reference, illuminating aspects of revolutionary thought as exceeding the apparent frames of nation-building, scale-making, and self-making. Foregrounding the prominent role of meaning in the analytical framework of worldmaking, the paper probes the possibility of a bottom-up understanding of worldmaking that takes place in everyday interactions, where shared worlds are reproduced or remade by quotidian actors in conjunction to efforts by revolutionary leaders.

Hong Kong’s Regime Cleavage: A Critical Juncture Approach

In expansion of existing frameworks of cleavages in understanding social divisions that underpin electoral competition, political scientists have suggested the concept of regime cleavages in capturing the partisan conflict over constitutional democracy in the United States. This paper draws on these insights to examine the process of democratization in Hong Kong, especially how perceived regime differences underpinned the city’s axes of electoral competition since its first direct election. By adopting a critical juncture approach, this paper argues that the institutional design of “One Country, Two Systems” as codified in the Basic Law created the terms under which the government, political parties, and civil society contested over the shape and possibilities of democracy in the form of a reactive sequence. Hong Kong presents a unique case for understanding the evolution of a regime cleavage as a result of state-society interactions under a subnational setting, embedded in competing acts of constitutional meaning-making by various groups over questions of democracy, trust, and sovereignty.