Critical Citizenship

Traveling abroad as an Allegheny student entails a one-credit course called Experiential Learning 300, in which students reflect upon their experiences by responding to readings and a professor's questions in a collective blog and commenting on other students abroad and their ideas and experiences. This course inspired me to create my own blog. For our first assignment (well, second; ironically I missed the first one), we read Vanessa Andreotti's "Soft versus Critical Global Citizenship Education" and compared our current educational programs to the ideas presented in her article about learning as a global citizen:

In my program, I am taking two culture classes while exploring Spanish culture every day. My anthropology class has just begun, however we have been discussing the role of an anthropologist and his or her goals and obstacles. My professor told us his favorite sentence: An anthropologist is not a tourist. Linguistic immersion, for example, is necessary in understanding a culture. We have discussed participative observation as a component of anthropology, in which a person must enter into the local lifestyle, observing while participating in the culture's customs.

Living in Spain these past five weeks, I have experienced these obstacles and have aimed to immerse myself in the language, converse with locals, avoid acting like a tourist (by treating Sevilla as a vacation destination rather than my temporary home and place of study), and learning and practicing the customs (like kissing each cheek to greet, for example, or eating meat). It is important to me that I do these things and all I can in order to understand Spanish and Sevillan culture. However, to understand these cultures, I must make reference to my own; this can be harmful though if not treated carefully. As Vanessa Andreotti quotes in her article, "Spivak affirms that the colonial power changes the subaltern’s perception of self and reality and legitimises its cultural supremacy in the (epistemic) violence of creating an ‘inferior’ other and naturalising these constructs." In comparing one's culture to another, especially coming from a Western society or a superpower like the United States, it is easy to fall into the trap of ranking aspects of the new culture as better or worse.

Locally, this creates barriers in understanding humanity, even those with whom one is living. This disallows us to form relationships with people from other cultures, creating a disconnect that manifests into worldly misunderstanding. Globally, these faulty relationships form the basis of our universal progress. When some culture feels a superior morality to help the rest of the world, they "run the risk of (indirectly and unintentionally) reproducing the systems of belief and practices that harm those they want to support." As citizens of the world, it is vital that we recognize our moral obligation to humanity as a whole, thinking critically about the consequences of our interactions and the ways in which we can better our relations with other cultures in order to truly understand one another.