Enlarging the Imagined Classroom Community

Picture this: at 5:30 pm Gulf Standard Time, students promptly log onto Zoom, their names and countries of origin crisscrossing the globe from Argentina to Poland and South Korea. This was the setting of our Senior Capstone Seminar at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) during the 2020-2021 academic year. Ten students and one professor, a patchwork of eleven passports, converging at a small American university abroad that is attended by students from over 115 countries.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the thread that tied diverse NYUAD students, staff, and faculty together was our experience of living in Abu Dhabi. The emirate became a natural laboratory, where we questioned misconceptions about the United Arab Emirates and immersed ourselves in local contexts.

Yet the pandemic and resulting lockdown forced us to reevaluate the borders of our imagined campus community. Where we once shared physical space, we became instead scattered around the world, with some returning to our home countries or lodging in third countries. Some woke up early, and others stayed up late to attend virtual classes. Some lived with families, who sometimes waved from the background, while others logged in from their dorm rooms.

We learned two interconnected lessons from our experience trying to maintain community amid unprecedented disruptions. First, we built connections in isolating times by expanding the imagined borders of our classroom. Second, we did so by paying attention to “elsewheres” that shaped how we related to our community. “Elsewheres,” according to sociologist Tahseen Shams, are places that are neither the homeland nor host land for migrants but that nonetheless shape their identities and relationships. Members of our international community were affected when fires raged in California, or tensions gripped the Tigray region of Ethiopia; as a result, places we may never have visited catapulted to the forefront of our minds.

In particular, as an Indonesian student and her Vietnamese American professor, we grappled with the murder of six women of Asian descent in Atlanta and how it affected our class, half of whom were themselves women of Asian descent. We originated from different homelands, and none of us were in the United States at the time, though several of us had spent time there. To most of us, the murders happened “elsewhere,”—neither students’ homes nor host countries. Yet we collectively

mourned. Through checking in over email and Zoom, discussing the attacks in our seminar, and holding a virtual campus vigil, we shared the profound effects that anti-Asian violence had on us, an ocean away from Atlanta.

As with the reach of the Black Lives Matter movement, discussion of the long history of anti-Asian violence in the United States did not stop at the country’s borders. Instead, community members shared how the murders in Atlanta were the most recent manifestation of messages they had long received about not belonging in places they were born and raised, such as Qatar. The United States became an “elsewhere” that students, staff, and faculty related to and that informed how we offered care and outreach to community members.

Here are some steps we found effective for enlarging our imagined classroom community: First, we began icebreakers with the question: Where do you call home? We used the answers as starting points for ongoing conversations, whether with the entire class or one-on-one.

Second, we spent the beginning of each class with a wellness check-in. A simple “How are you doing?” or “What’s on your mind?” went a long way.

Third, we delved into local and international current events, and wove these back into conversations about the Capstone projects that students were undertaking. These projects spanned reproductive health in Ethiopia to drug use in the UAE to gender in South Korean media.

Finally, we affirmed what each classroom member shared, and drew connections across seemingly disparate locales. When one of us reflected on her social position as a university student studying working-class migrant worker women in the UAE, that resonated with others undertaking research on anti-Chinese attitudes in the US or displaced Nubians in Egypt.

Although we write from a particular experience in super-diverse Abu Dhabi, the lessons we learned can be applied to contexts with mostly domestic students as well. Be it reaching out to classmates confronting natural disasters in their home states or sharing grief with Black students over racialized violence and inequality across the US, we researched, studied, and built community by bringing our “elsewheres” into the classroom. By incorporating these practices, we expanded the borders of our imagined community, sharing in our community members’ grief as well as joy.