Introduction to special section: Inequitable Ruptures, Rupturing Inequity: Theorizing COVID-19 and racial injustice impacts on International Service Learning pedagogy, frameworks and policies

Abstract

This introduction to the special section, argues that this pandemic time has been one of ruptures which unveiled ongoing and intersecting social pandemics such as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and ableism in the context of the COVID-19 global health pandemic (Brand, 2020). We proposed three ruptures as moments for imagining - and doing – otherwise: (i) the Black Lives Matter movement and increased mainstream attention to racial inequity, (ii) COVID-19 and new imaginings of travel, mobility, and safety (iii) mutual aid as increasingly necessary in a pandemic and as a possible relational way forward. We take these ruptures as a starting point for re-imagining learning and movement as relational. This introduction takes up a contextualization and conceptualization of the field of GSL, an overview of the critical literature in this space, and introduces the two articles in the special section. It ends with the hope that the grapplings and reckonings in this section will help scholars and practitioners think through this present moment and re-orient GSL in more just and equitable ways.

Reflexivity and Relationality in Global Service Learning

“…I have been sitting a lot with this history of internationalism in Nicaragua (Helm, 2014;van Ommen, 2016) and how strategic and structured visits by internationals were by the Sandinistas. I have thought a bit about it in the context of GSL (MacDonald & Vorstermans, 2022), but I think really grappling with the complexities of histories in place (including settler colonialism where our universities stand), centering hosts, and carefully refusing reform is a way forward.…”