The Common Place: Virtual Exchange and Social Justice

Envision yourself sitting in an audience filled with 500 women. The buzzing vibration of community, the joy, the laughter… The celebration of being a woman.

Envision sitting in the audience with these women connected through a common bond. Woman. Human. Parent. Anything where you can connect. These sisters, these friends, these people have been asked the simple question… to stand if they’ve ever been sexually assaulted or violated. Imagine the pain, the grief, the relief and the appreciation that you can identify with someone in that room. That someone understands the dark truth about your journey. The grief, the guilt, growth and transformation. #MeToo. 

This movement leveraged community resources, worldwide to bring attention to the issues facing victims of sexual assault through technology and digital community spaces to dialogue and design collaborative solutions. “What did we want, justice… when did we want it…now!” The idea that predators could go free without consequence was enough to unify voices to affect change. 

One of our very basic and vulnerable needs is to belong to community. Finding this in the most tender places of common bond is empowering.

Recent events have created an uproar that has been bubbling to the surface for as long as we’ve considered the United States to be a ‘unified nation.’ The pockets of disagreement, indifference, disinterest, hate, limited understanding… It seems that the collective empowerment of one group disempowers another. For example, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has been met with a number of different variations to include, #AllLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, #unbornbabieslivesmatter? #refugeelifematters? #humansatheusborderslivesmatter? … This is bigger than race relations in the United States. It is uncertainty avoidance, which gauges our level of comfort as community members with uncertainty and the unknown of what will happen next.

Tackling relevant issues that are in favor of one group disrupts the comfort of another which means, you’d rather cozy up in front of a burning fire and wait for it to fizzle instead of being exposed to the sun with no SPF because it will burn you. The 'knowingness' of being burnt and feeling the pain of your choices is less attractive but sunlight offers Vitamin D which is good for mental health and overall well-being.

The United States as a collective has so often turned a blind eye to the health of our national community, doing just enough to maintain a balance, easily dismantled when the core agreements of our nation are broken in favor of one over the other – breaking trust and invading boundaries, violating the security of peace. It brings me back to that room with 500 women exposing the truth of their journey and seeking to feel the ease of mutual understanding. 

COVID-19 displayed implicit bias towards East Asians; the visible fear of Amy Cooper walking her dog in Central Park radiated the implicit bias that exists toward Blackness. The death of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and the uncovering of unmet justice for Breyonna Taylor is shining the Light in the corners of every household watching, globally. Protests for the unjust murdering of Black Americans have been recorded in England, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Spain, Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Australia and more… The world is watching, and it matters. Access to technology has made the world smaller. In 2016, the World Economic Forum projected a rate of connectivity by the world’s population of about 96% where in 2016, it was 46% connected. This is a level of world engagement that is unknown. To organize and mobilize around issues of social justice is easier and more expansive. Generating understanding for others beyond their ability to conceive and relate to is critical.

Global citizenship or cosmopolitanism emphasizes the need for individuals to conceive of a political and cultural entity, larger than their own homeland that encompasses all human beings on a global scale. It fosters a positive attitude toward difference, a desire to construct broad allegiances, equal and peaceful global communities of citizens who should be able to communicate across cultural and social boundaries forming solidarity (Ribeiro, 2001). Its inclusive drive is most evident in moments of world crisis or other modes of membership to existing sociopolitical and cultural communities (Ribeiro, 2001). Global citizenship is based around collective responsibility to solve complex problems in the world through civic engagement and cross-collaboration (Abdi, 2015).

We have a task then, of educating for global community engagement in its institutionalized and historically normalized categories and even more for global social justice as a citizen with undeniable basic rights irrespective of geographic location (Abdi, 2015). National perspectives continue to remain as social identity shifts by niche interest in the digital space (Schwab, 2016). This perspective is relevant to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and the collective effort required to affect change in the seventeen thematic areas before 2030. Goals 3, 4, 10, 16 and 17 are related to raising awareness around justice for George Floyd. They are as follows:

Goal 3: Good Health & Well-Being

Goal 4: Quality Education

Goal 10: Reduced Inequality

Goal 16: Peace & Justice

Goal 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goals

Collaborative learning is a critical element to modern learning, promoting innovation, perspective taking and intercultural competency development. Virtual exchange also known as collaborative online international learning offers peer to peer learning opportunities for students to interact, develop projects and solve problems. Most importantly, it develops community and a social network of peers across the world to connect with and share, which creates a sense of belonging and empathy through humanity. Why is it that some individuals can identify very personally with the case of George Floyd and others personalize it very differently? Until we seek to understand each other through our commonalities -- there will be division. In the larger context on the status of world affairs, this is counterproductive.

Virtual exchange programs are a critical educational tool for developing mutual understanding and global competency building. They have been shown to promote learning across four dimensions: investigating the world, recognizing different perspectives, communicating ideas and civically engaging through cross-collaboration (Asia Society, 2005). Providing simulated environments creates experiential learning opportunities which may administer country and cultural context with individuals from around the world. Digital presence provides the channels for enriching opportunities and provides the virtual community where people can belong.