This kind of aid is usually framed as charity, as philanthropy work, and while it can be local, it is mostly done at a global scale. It also has a lot more steps from giver to receiver, and what’s given, in very simple terms, is money. Which in many cases is needed, and well received and administered by those in need of it. But these types of help, local and global, are different… maybe... or maybe not… Maybe it’s the how not the what that changes the meaning of aid. Maybe it’s the framing, not the actual help, that matters most. Maybe it’s the fact that we call it help when in many instances it’s an exchange of knowledge, service, just a human exchange. And in these maybes, we find a spectrum of possibilities to what global or local aid do. Most importantly, in this spectrum, we get to define the role of the global citizen.

Listen to world-wide campaign ACTIVATE: The Global CItizen Movement and hear their take on the Global Citizen

Yes, you might have recognized the voice of certain celebrities speaking, but why?

With an uplifting background song, and the promise to end world hunger, it seems that these celebrities and philanthropists will keep their promises, and cure whatever ill is happening outside their home countries. It’s promising, but something feels off. For me, it's the assumption that those who have money, like these celebrities, are the ones responsible to end world hunger. And I don’t make this claim as to take away their responsibility, but something feels like the campaign is more about them than the people they claimed to help. Frankly, if this is the Global Citizen, someone who uses trips to “underdeveloped” countries in the world under their wealthy celebrity platform, then global aid is more superficial than I thought. Maybe the help they give, monetary especially, is truly needed, but why make a video so indulged in the celebrities themselves and their inspirational words? In light of this, and how much the idea of a global citizen is tied to wealth and philanthropy, I want to propose a new definition, a transparent one, one that challenges the very words “global” and “citizen”.

A Global Citizen is someone who experiences and/or helps the world transcending international boundaries

The first point I want to make, as noted above, is that global citizenship is also about experience. As you might have guessed by the title of my essay, I don't necessarly use the term global citizen though. While I debate the various meanings of a global cItizenship, I feel there is a predisposed image tied to it. That's why I wanted to create a new term that centered experience as part of citizenship too: the allwhere citizen.

The Allwhere Citizen transcends international boundaries to better their own lives, to seek help and give back with experience. The allwhere citizen challenges the notion of who gives what, the power dynamic from giver to receiver. The allwhere citizen exists beyond borders, aware of the privilage of crossing them. So, in trying to understand why experience matters, I want to bring an example that Performance Studies scholar, Diana Taylor, uses in her essay “Remapping Genre Through Performance”:

According to Wendy Brown in her 2015 book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, a citizen is “expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value” (22). In other words, a citizen is not only measured by the profits they create for themselves and the state in the present moment, but have to constantly think of how to maximize their value for the future. And their value, then, becomes solely monetary. Brown puts it another way: the political elements of life become economic ones. The citizen is economized and reduced to a machine for maximizing profits. So what does this all mean?

Well, take art for example, which is widely known to not give large profits, hence the image of the starving artist. If art is not measured through its monetary value, then what value does it have under neoliberalism and the notion that the citizen can only produce things that give money? What I call the “for the sake of” things, without profit or investment as their goal, start to become devalued under neoliberalism. “For the sake of” things means for the sake of anything but monetary profit. For the sake of living, expressing, healing, and showing values that money cannot measure. I mean, take how many people have used drawing, writing, reading, painting as ways to cope with the shelter-in-place orders, or artists who have uplifted communities in this time of health crisis, parallel to the many funds created to support artists, book stores, local art galleries due to very little or almost no government support for the arts. Art, so important in its essence and what holds humanity together in its most fragile moments, doesn’t qualify as productive for the American citizen.

Or take college education. Students are taught that attending college will increase their qualifications for getting a job. Meaning that their end goal is to find work, and make money, instead of finding college as a moment of self-discovery, a position that holds so much privilege considering that most college students have unbelievable amounts of debt way after graduation. College is a financial investment in the United States, and I have to wonder, to what point is that how education should be? So then the point of a university degree is to maximize future profits.

So the arts and education serve as two examples that either don’t qualify as viable under neoliberalism, or can only function to maximize profits. Now, let’s return to the American citizen…

Under Wendy Brown’s claim, more or less anything not achieved through money is devalued under American neoliberalism, or marginalized from the valuable, and those who can’t meet standards of profit, of maximizing money, are then left out of being considered citizens.

If the American citizen is economized, so is the global citizen, making the global citizen, they who give help, someone financially stable or with money to spare. This assumes that help can only be monetary, and leaves out whoever doesn’t have money outside of being able to offer help, or as the ones who need to receive help. And even hesitate to use the word help, because truly I mean more community engagement, action, and enrichment.

So I don’t know about you, but I certainly feel that community engagement, or in many cases, community help, is much more than just money. And maybe it isn’t the thing itself being offered that’s the problem. Like I said in the beginning it’s the framework that allows a person who’s economically fluid and with money to spare, seem more valuable for giving help than a person with no money at all. It’s framing a valuable citizen through the money they have, instead of the qualities they can share with their communities, and even beyond them. Or if there’s a big global charity, instead of framing it as a superior-inferior way to give help, detached from giver to receiver, the charity could be invested in the national, cultural, and economic borders it crosses; looking at the people it engages with not as numbers on a fund.

With this framework in mind, I decided to ask some local Bay Area non-profit organizations, community centers, and institutions if they would like to hold a short interview with me. One of them is Director of Elementary programs and Volunteer Coordinator at Harbor House Ministries in Oakland, Chelsea Cordero. I’ve had the pleasure of working with her this semester as a volunteer art teacher for first graders at Harbor House, and I’m so happy we got to talk. These were some of the questions I asked her, that she so brilliantly and graciously answered...

Talking to Chelsea made me realize how much local organizations are doing in the time of the Coivd-19 Pandemic. Sheltering in place, for those who have the privilege to, means reaching to what’s near and available. Places like Harbor House are doing an amazing job of being present for their community between cloth and food drives, to English classes online, and even fundraising for immigraht and refugee families who’ve lost jobs and homes during this time. And I think this raises the dilemma of global versus local aid all over again: which one helps the most? But they both do, because again it’s about how any organization is distributing their services. Harbor House is raising money, while also doing services for free, and it doesn't mean that one is more important than the other. They might have different levels of urgency, but all services, whether monetary or not, help. And this is where we can really question the nature of difference, and apply it to understand where global and local help stand in the spectrum of community service.

So, are different kinds of help still important, and can they be valued at nearly equal levels?

I had the pleasure of discussing these questions with professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Washington, Aria Fani. Unfortunately, after an hour of talking on Zoom, I realized my recorder never picked up on any sound. Nevertheless, our conversation was so fruitful and fascinating, I’m delightful to write about it instead. Nearly at the end of our conversation, talking exactly about how to manage difference especially in the context of academic work and academic thought, he said two essential things that stuck with me: one, to not shy away from difference, and two, understand that difference is not fundamental. What does this mean? Well, it means that difference is constructed, and the act of differentiating certainly is. We were talking about difference branching from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay “There is no such thing as Western civilisation”, in which he argues that civilizations are not this homogenous product that mixes as time goes by. He claims thet concept of Western civilization needs to be challenged, and cannot stay as the norm for structures and systems of governance, economies, and academia.