During the last few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has (re-)clarified ecological interdependence through a global health crisis, while the murders of unarmed Black people have placed a global focus on how historical and contemporary structural violences manifest in specific communities. This moment clarifies that civic thinking must be done through a lens of interdependence – across borders and time. 

A civics of interdependence grounds itself in considerable portions of the Western Civic Imagination, as exemplified by Kwame Anthony Appiah’s treatment of cosmopolitanism. Yet – with and beyond Appiah – it also reaches beyond the limitations created by positioning rights and responsibilities within the Western Imagination and resists the colonial construction of borders as the primary arbiters of rights and responsibilities.  Vitally, it identifies locations of civic action that are not dependent on conventional understandings of citizen-government relations. 

A civics of interdependence positions civil society, and its intersections with states, politics, and policies, in conversation with market, business, and government systems that span borders and create localized injustices. Key concepts within a civics of interdependence therefore include interdependence and related obligations, global thinking and analysis, locally rooted civic action to address local-global injustices, governance, civil society, cultural humility, power, structural analysis, historical thinking, sustainable development goals, ecological thinking, and participatory methods and partnership approaches that address longstanding epistemic injustices. 

Through collaboration with more than twenty higher education institutions and civil society organizations, The Community-based Global Learning Collaborative put together online, open-access teaching resources that advance a civics of interdependence in May of 2020. Since that time, Haverford College has used the pages for a comprehensive orientation for 60 students, while Dickinson College has used a portion of the pages for an undergraduate course and graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania have considered the pages as part of studies in higher education. Drawing on feedback from these initial Beta Tests, and with an eye toward supporting flipped classrooms and/or flipped co-curricular programming in the fall, The Collaborative is offering a weekly community of practice webinar series on Wednesdays in July and early August. 

The series begins Wednesday, July 8th at 1 pm EST and will continue for six weeks (ending on Wednesday, August 12th). Register here. It is free to Collaborative members and $100 for nonmembers. Space is limited to 10 participants.