Reciprocity in a Moment of Unraveling

by Faith Valencia-Forrester, Associate Professor, Charles Sturt University, Australia

In community-based global learning, we often describe reciprocity as a practice of mutual recognition: the willingness to see and be seen, to listen and be changed, to understand that our wellbeing is bound up with the wellbeing of others. It is a deceptively simple ethic with profoundly political implications.

Watching the current moment in the United States, it is hard not to miss how fragile that ethic has become. Public life feels saturated with contempt rather than curiosity, suspicion rather than trust. Voices that once argued for pluralism now argue for exclusion. Difference is treated as threat rather than opportunity. Power is increasingly pursued without regard for accountability, shared rules, or shared futures. Reciprocity, the core mechanism of our democratic life, is seemingly being replaced in many spheres by extraction, performance, and winner-takes-all logic.

As someone writing from outside the United States, the emotional impact of this has been unexpectedly heavy. Many of us grew up understanding America, for all its contradictions, as a kind of democratic lighthouse: imperfect but bright, flawed but aspirational. We looked to the United States as a place where rights were defended, where dissent was protected, and where pluralism was not just tolerated but argued for. To watch that light dim is disorienting. It is not simply a political concern; it is a grief. Because when a lighthouse goes dark, those beyond the shore feel it too.

At some point recently, I realised I was asking questions about America to an AI machine. Not policy questions but existential ones: When does a democracy know it has entered danger? What makes a country swing back toward care? How long does unraveling last? Why did the US rise up for George Floyd and has not for Renee Good, or a pregnant Black woman killed by police in Ohio earlier this year? It was less about information than about witnessing , trying to metabolise grief, distance, and bewilderment in a moment when so many are unsure whom to ask or how to feel.  The AI’s responses were kinder, and more hopeful,  than the evaluations filling my screens. 

For those of us who work across borders, communities, and institutions, this is not merely a national crisis. It is a global pedagogical one. When reciprocity erodes in powerful nations, it reshapes what is possible in international collaboration, knowledge production, and civil society partnerships. It undermines the cultural conditions required for humility, for learning across difference, and for recognising our interdependence at a time when planetary challenges demand exactly that.

But reciprocity is not just an ideal,  it is a practice. And practices can be renewed.

Within the Collaborative, we see quieter countercurrents: students seeking meaningful connection rather than performance; faculty designing projects premised on care rather than competition; international partners insisting on shared governance and co-creation. These are small but significant acts of democratic imagination. They remind us that reciprocity is learned, rehearsed, and defended, not assumed.

If the U.S. is in a moment of democratic unraveling, then community-based global learning offers one of the few pedagogical spaces capable of rehearsing the opposite: interdependence, mutual recognition, and responsibility beyond the self. It is not a solution to the crisis, but it is one of the places where a different future can be practiced.

Reciprocity was never just about being polite. It is about building the cultural conditions under which democracy. and global learning, can survive.