From Expansive Learning to Enunciatory Learning: Activist-Educators’ Work for a Deeper Democracy in South Korea

This study examines the work of activist-educators in South Korea striving to deepen democracy by teaching democratic citizenship within a hybrid national context shaped by coloniality, neoliberalism, and Cold War legacies. Based on ethnographic fieldwork across three organizations, this research critiques the developmental assumptions of Engeström's expansive learning, which insufficiently captures the ambivalence and hybridity that characterize these activists’ efforts. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theory, this study proposes a new approach called “enunciatory learning,” which emphasizes the navigation of ambivalence, transcendence of fixed signifiers, and consideration of the double temporality in pedagogical processes. This approach captures the work of activist-educators, who create in-between spaces that challenge homogeneous notions of democracy and citizenship, thus fostering alternative identifications and participatory practices. This study argues for the importance of undertaking continuous but nuanced efforts to disentangle hybridity as valuable steps toward transformative democratic alternatives in contexts marked by cultural and political complexities.