Based on its brochures, UNC prides itself on its global engagement. Study abroad programs, service trips and research are the three ways in which UNC students are encouraged to travel globally. Some of our full-ride merit scholarships pay for their first-year students for them to specifically have a global experience. There are endless scholarships and grants geared toward getting students out of our country into another one.
Yet we caution students who are traveling abroad this summer — particularly those engaging in service — to take a self-critical approach to their work and to ensure they embark on a genuine interrogation of their identity and culture before, during and after they bring it to another community. Without this approach, we often recreate and perpetuate many of the same inequities we often seek to eradicate.
We acknowledge global engagement can be enlightening for all parties. Experiencing cross-cultural interactions can help foster personal growth. Also, global communities can face inequity as well; we do have some responsibility in alleviating them.
But traveling globally is a privilege. Few of us have ever left the confines of America. Even those of you who have experienced global engagement before, you have been shaped by our American culture. When one travels abroad, we carry that with us.
Global service in particular can be problematic because the notion of “helping” connotes some level of differential power between the “helper” and “helpee.” Thus, when traveling abroad, that position of power may lead to you imposing your own values system and culture upon a population unknowingly.
Have realistic expectations about what can be achieved in a singular summer. Even a lifetime spent in a particular culture is insufficient to truly understand its depth. Two months in a country abroad certainly isn’t.
Yet we don’t mean to promote an extreme cultural relativist perspective in which we ignore our own values and allow inequity to occur globally because we simply attribute it to “another culture.” This type of moral relativism can be dehumanizing at times, as making value judgments is an inherent part of our humanity. However, before we embark on any kind of moral judgements that are implied in our global work, we must take a deep look into our own.
Ask yourself: “Am I going abroad to do ‘good,’ or am I going abroad for me?” If you have genuine investment in doing “good,” then it mandates that you explore issues of ethics, race, nationality, culture, power, economic development and identity with rigor. A global engagement without a significant emphasis on critical self-reflection will be inadequate and will end up doing more harm than the aforementioned “good.”
Take advantage of resources at UNC to prepare yourself for a successful trip. Attending workshops through Center for Global Initiatives, talking to globally minded professors and reading the necessary literature can all be steps to ensure you become a more-informed, critically thinking advocate.
