Now that you’ve engaged with our introductory resources, you know Professor Roy suggests mediating between the hubris of benevolence and the paralysis of cynicism, and that our lives are tied up with global poverty – from what we choose to buy to how we choose to behave civically. Roy says, “We have a role to play everyday, whether in local communities or across national borders, in making and unmaking a world of inequality. To imagine ourselves as saviors of the poor is foolish, but to imagine ourselves as voiceless and powerless is equally foolish.” 

This assessment informs the construction of Interdependence, Global Solidarities, and Local Actions. We have a role to play, but who are “we”, what role is that, and what ideas, methods, and skills might be helpful to support the various different roles that individuals among us can take in advancing more just, inclusive, sustainable communities? The modules we have organized here each offer mechanisms to deepen our thinking and skills in relation to those questions. We offer brief summaries here to share a road map of what is to come: 

Module 1: Acting for just, inclusive, sustainable communities: The necessity of global inquiry, global thinking, and global understanding – This module, where you’re currently reading, explores identity, imagination, and lenses of inquiry, with a specific focus on how they prevent or enable our capacities to understand and embrace our interdependencies. It is an introduction to the lens of cosmopolitanism, coupled with an example of global thinking: thinking that considers local issues through analysis of global structures, histories, and ongoing processes. This module also introduces the concept of (local and global) civil society, along with different strategies inside of it. Civil society advances the work of values-based social change. A key point in global thinking is understanding that we – me writing and you reading – are part of the phenomena we seek to investigate. The next two modules therefore support learners’ capacities to engage in ongoing critical reflection regarding personal identity, power, and positionality – across varied cultures, contexts, and communities around the world.  

Module 2: Developing, Understanding, and Strengthening Cultural Humility – The module on cultural humility advances a concept utilized across the fields of education, medicine, and social work, through which individuals are encouraged to critically understand their own cultural assumptions (a lifelong, continuously adapting, and challenging process), the cultural context in which they hope to operate successfully, and the ways in which institutional structures of power and privilege need to be reimagined to be more inclusive of all ways of being. 

Module 3: Disruption, critical reflection, and adaptive leadership – Critical reflection is a specific approach to reflective activity that grows from a particular, counter-normative theoretical tradition. This module will deepen your understanding of critical reflection, provide you with some tools to engage it on your own and with others, and demonstrate connections between critical reflection and pluralistic, leaderful, adaptive leadership during times of change. 

Module 4: Building blocks of understanding: global health and global development – This module serves as a brief introduction to the fields of global health and global development, including the orientations and basic methods at their core. While advanced study is possible in each of these fields, our goal with the modules contained here is to support everyone’s capacity to move toward stronger global civic literacy, across all fields. We therefore share this basic introduction to global thinking and understanding that supports our shared health and just, inclusive, sustainable development. 

Module 5: Working with and learning from: an overview of participatory methods and public scholarship – The questions making continuous appearances throughout the resources shared above include: Who am I, where am I located, and how do those answers position me to contribute to positive social change? Because many of the learners who will use these resources are students and community activists who frequently partner with educational institutions, we include this overview of participatory methods and public scholarship. Across numerous disciplines, participatory methods and public scholarship provide researchers with methods for systematically cooperating with partners concerned with current, pressing justice issues. The methods inform ethical approaches to question co-construction, methods co-construction, cooperative analysis, shared writing, and shared approaches to dissemination that are relevant to the justice challenges at hand. Public scholarship is a fundamental building block in leveraging educational institutions as civil society networks committed to co-creating just, inclusive, sustainable communities. 

Module 6: Fair Trade Learning: Educational Exchange for Positive Social Change – Rooted in historically marginalized communities’ desires and interests when partnering with educational institutions to advance learning about social change, Fair Trade Learning (FTL), is an approach to partnership that advances community-driven desires, capital consciousness, transparency, and ongoing collaboration toward positive social change. This module provides learners, teachers, community organizers and administrators with the overview and tools necessary to advance FTL values and commitments throughout partnerships. 

Module 7: Read Six Lenses for Peering into a Pandemic – and Ourselves and consider whether you’d like to take an exit ramp from these modules to join Solidarity and Storytelling across Difference, a free Omprakash online experience developed because of the Pandemic.

Module 8+: (Philly Region-Specific) – Social Change, Local Actions, and Global Forces in Philadelphia While numerous of the examples above will have connections to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and networks that pass through both, this module will provide a deeper dive into the specifics of organizations, institutions, individuals, assets, challenges, and desires that inform justice, inclusivity, and sustainability work in the Philadelphia region. 

How these modules interact with each other will become increasingly clear as you move forward, but before we dive into Module 2 on cultural humility, we’d like to jump into three more questions that frequently circulate near discussions of global citizenship:

1. What does global citizenship have to do with local community-building?
2. How is global citizenship enacted – how are these values advanced?
3. Does global citizenship, which focuses on embracing the equal moral worth of all people, excessively privilege the human species, and inadvertently ignore an essential element of interdependence – our shared ecology?

Next: What does global citizenship have to do with local community-building?