Migrating pedagogy in American universities: cultivating moral imagination and social justice

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ORCID

Omar Swartz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7295-3340

Notes

1 We recognize that this is not a blanket statement for all immigrant students. From our experience with our students, though, this is how they feel.

2 As part of his responsibilities, Doak oversaw the Immigration and Nationalization Service and was responsible for many raids and deportations in the 1930s.

3 Difficulties for students are particularly acute on our urban campus that serves primarily first-generation college students with strong minority and low social economic class backgrounds as well as contested sexual and gender orientations, and so are among the more vulnerable members of society.

4 While discussing migrants in the previous sentence, we are struck by how much what we wrote applies to our domestic African American and Chicano/a populations who often live in material and social conditions approximating that of the world’s most impoverished nations (McElwee, 2014).

5 An infamous example of this occurred in 1986 when the U.S. lost against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice, which held their “secret” Contra war on the Sandinista Government illegal. It ordered the U.S. to stop and pay reparations. The U.S. responded by withdrawing the court’s compulsory jurisdiction over it.

6 It is important here to pause and acknowledge the context within which we advocate for this approach. Together, we have over 50 years of teaching experience at a range of institutions and regions across the United States. We have taught Communication Studies, Legal Studies, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. We both see ourselves as interdisciplinary, social justice-oriented thinkers and enact our interdisciplinarity and social justice through all aspects of our professional life. We are both advocates and activists for marginalized communities in our classrooms and in the community with campus reputations for our engagement with students and for pushing back against neo-liberalism in academia.

7 Relevant novels include Abdourahman Waberi’s Transit and Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World, and activist reports, such as Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and David Herd and Anna Pincus’s Refugee Tales, but the selection across a curriculum is nearly limitless.

8 The July 2017 Communication Education forum on Communication Activism Pedagogy provides an excellent conversation on this issue.

9 During the week we wrote this essay, Omar met with a homeless graduate student. Since 2008, he has had more than a few such meetings. As the case previously, he was inclined to invite the student home to live in his basement, but did not. Perhaps other faculty do this. Perhaps some harbor students who are facing deportation. It may come to that.