Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) is a professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, and professor emeritus at the Université de Paris, VIII. He has cast a long shadow over the fields of politics, aesthetics, and education, well beyond the borders of France, in particular, and across the Anglo-American world. Yet the overarching political project of Rancière does not, however, only consist of these three categories independently but is constituted by their entanglement; as for Rancière, aesthetics and politics are intrinsically linked, and “true” education must be emancipatory, an objective that demands equality not as an end but as a point of departure.

Rancière has published numerous books including The Nights of Labour: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France; The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation;  The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, On the Shores of Politics; Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy; Short Voyages to the Land of the People; The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible; The Philosopher and his Poor; The Future of the Image; Hatred of Democracy; The Aesthetic Unconscious; The Emancipated Spectator; The Politics of Literature; Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double; Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics; Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art and Béla Tarr, the Time After.

In May 2013, Rancière visited China for the first time, at the invitation of Professor Lu Xinghua. During his sixteen day visit, Rancière conducted research, and gave multiple lectures in Beijing, Shanghai, Yiwu, Hangzhou, and Chongqing. Among these was a public lecture at China Academy of Art, titled Equality as Method where he proposed equality as the premise and method for class struggle, education, and aesthetic practice. He also visited a special exhibition of faculty and student work organized by the School of Intermedia Art, and participated in discussions and exchanges.