Something that has been on my mind recently is scale. Everyone in this program appreciates community, as it is the Detroit Community Based Research Program. We are all immersing ourselves in specific communities in Detroit at our various jobs. This is the smallest scale you can get, working down at the very local level. One of my majors at school is International Studies, and I am interested in working abroad for at least part of my life. I have often considered International Studies as the opposite of working locally, especially if I was doing policy work and not on the ground. Yet recently I have been reconsidering my opinion of working abroad. I was pondering the question, should I stay in my lane? Should I try to do the work that I want to do, namely with food security and environmental justice, in my hometown of New York? I do not think that this is necessarily the only way though.
While it is important for people to understand the communities they are working with, which is easier when you are from that community, it is not the only way. Learning about new places and people to the extent that you can work with them is possible. After all, that is what I am doing right now in Detroit. Yet to me the difference that I have been realizing more and more here is the type of learning that you have to do. Knowing statistics and facts about a community, their plights and their successes, is not enough. There are things you can only realize and know from being there. Off topic, but this can be seen in the current Democratic Party’s failures. Clinton and her team underestimated how disconnected the majority of the middle of the country was feeling because they didn’t go… why didn’t they campaign in Wisconsin? I don’t know but that could have changed all of our lives. Anyway, this just proved that there are some things you can only learn from being there. In one of my classes this year, one of the owners of Food Field, a Detroit urban farm, came and talked to us. Him and his co-owner are both white, so they faced an uphill battle of appearing like the typical gentrifier when they bought Detroit land in the Boston-Edison neighborhood. He said that the only way that they got their neighbors to actually trust and appreciate their work was by staying around and being there for years. Now, people in their community will call their cells if the farmers aren’t there but there are people on the land, that’s how much the community cares. All this to say, I still want to work abroad and I believe that it’s very possible to work outside your community as long as you respect what was there before you and your role and are intentional about everything you do.
Hey Sophia,
I really appreciated your sentiments about actually BEING somewhere to understand it, and how making that decision to be physically present in a certain place can change outcomes in such huge ways. I never knew you wanted to work abroad in the future, and in my own personal opinion, I can only say one thing : do it. I think a lot of people feel conflicted about leaving ‘home’ because they start to question if they shouldn’t just be doing what they want to do in the exact place where they were born and raised, bringing in the whole ‘giving back to my country/community’ aspect of things. I watched a TED talk by Taiye Selasi (which I think you’d appreciate) titled “Don’t ask me where I’m from, ask where I’m a local”. The gist of the whole talk was : home isn’t a place, and your nation shouldn’t just be a geographical spot on the map. I call so many places in this world my home, simply because I now realize that home is where you leave a little bit of your soul in. If we’re all so focused on our own little self-constructed spaces within borders that are nothing more than bricks upon bricks, we’re never going to realize that the world is our home, and we should be free to roam, and free to make home a better place for the other people who share this home – our family.
*breaks into spontaneous, off-key rendition of Kumbaya*
Hey Sophia,
I’ve had similar sentiments in regards to doing policy work whether in Detroit or internationally. Personally, there’s no fault in doing either, but I also think there’s also a benefit in working more locally. It’s something I’ve heard a lot, especially since the 2016 election, that we should work at being involved in our communities so that they can go against the state and federal government, and that if the federal or state government passes and unfair law, the city could pass a law against it. But you could also do both local and international at different points in your life, as they are both equally important.