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Why We Were Formed
“If we are going to Africa to study, there is a belief that we will share our knowledge with folks on the ground. But how many times do we think we will also learn from the locals? Anytime you are not giving yourself the time to think you can learn from the people in your host country, that’s when the experience becomes unequal.”
Eric Opoku Agyemang
The Global Reciprocity Network started as a collaboration between eight people — five educators and activists from the Global South and three from the University of Washington in the Global North. We formed in 2017 to solve problems caused by political, economic, colonial, racial and other inequalities in international education and global partnerships. Collectively, we are trying to figure out how to do good work in an unequal world.
To do this, we start by centering voices from the Global South. Our collaboration includes researchers, instructors, and program staff participating in host countries’ study abroad programs. These individuals facilitate the access of students and faculty to the intellectual, cultural, and political life of the host nation. They are also often involved in grassroots political and community activism around land rights, gender rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and youth empowerment. Their work extends the reach of our network and includes transnational collaborations outside of higher education.
In current models of collaboration, Western institutions do not often acknowledge Global South collaborators as leaders and significant contributors to knowledge creation. As a result, U.S.-based students do not fully learn how to collaborate and support Global South residents, and Global South residents are limited in how they can develop relationships with their global partners. We aim to take reciprocity seriously between faculty, staff, students, and research collaborators abroad.
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Collaborating More Equitably in an Unequal World
“When we began the Mexico program, we met many potential collaborators. One person we met looked me up and down and asked, ‘Tell me, why should I, a queer trans activist in Mexico say yes to this collaboration with you, a representative from a powerful US university?’ She was skeptical of us, and had experienced much pain and exclusion from a Global North machinery that often thieves the stories of Global South people for their own benefit.”
Anu Taranath
To find solutions to problems we face as educators, we share stories about how we grapple with difference in our own contexts and positionalities. In doing so, we develop a more robust and nuanced understanding of how we are situated in conversations about liberation, justice, historic harm, and possible new futures. This approach helps us incorporate what we share more effectively into our daily work.
Our work helps fill a connection gap in collaboration between higher education institutions in the Global North and organizations and individuals in the Global South. To generate new directions in equitable collaboration, we organize events, teach students, and direct study abroad programs together. To collaborate more equitably and understand barriers to transnational partnerships, we work together to produce research, nonfiction writing, and podcasts to move our conversations deeper into our communities.
Let’s Reframe Our Relationships
“We [in the Global South] always open our doors and windows to donors, volunteers and students from the Global North. To ensure that we have ethical partnerships, we must first understand where our partners are coming from as well as their motives and interests. We need to know who benefits from these collaborations and how they benefit.”
Oppong Nyantakyi
The Global Reciprocity Network is responding to the need in higher education for new transnational collaborative strategies that challenge the rising forms of difference, displacement, and violence taking shape under our current system of global capitalism.
Many study abroad programs take for granted — and often exacerbate — existing power relations between the Global North and Global South. At the same time, many programs don’t examine how questions of race and difference travel between domestic and transnational contexts. We hope to contribute to a more robust critique of these issues. We challenge the academy to recognize different forms of expertise and knowledge production.