September 11, 2015 - 17:16
For a week each of the past three years, President Lincoln’s Cottage and Students Opposing Slavery have hosted an international youth summit centered on training and empowering youth to combat human trafficking. There are typically around 30 participants, aged around 14-19, with established abolitionists from many backgrounds serving as speakers and facilitators. At the 2015 summit, there were students from seven different countries and six different American states. We meet for only a week, five intensive, long days of powerpoints, brainstorming sessions, lectures, and action-planning. We’re vulnerable. We cry. We laugh. We shout. We deeply feel a need for change, even those of us who haven’t been personally or directly ensnared in the dark world of trafficking. But none of it is destructive.
In her essay Arts of the Contact Zone, Mary Louise Pratt examines the existence of “contact zones” and speaks to their important in environments of learning. The primary definition Pratt gives of a contact zone is as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” These summits have much potential to be loud examples of destructive contact zones. There’s a mix of cultures and identities, many with conflicting historical pasts. People in varying levels of power, drawn from identities and personal experience. But I haven’t had a negative experience in these summits. I hold a significant amount of privilege from my identity in that context, and I’ve been in a leadership role within the organization, but I have yet to hear about any participants having any negative or “clashing” experiences, either. These summits could be so negative, exhibit so much of the “grappling” and fighting Pratt writes about.
What determines when a contact zone has the possibility for positivity?
These students were the children of many terrible power hierarchies dominant in the past, forming positive bonds, become close. British and Indian. Poor African-American students from Baltimore and White kids from some of the wealthiest private schools in DC. The Western powers in general have an invasive history with the South East Asian nations, which are always well represented through groups such as IOMX and MTVExit, youth led organizations committed to ending modern slavery in ASEA. Shouldn’t these students be coming in with a feeling of deep rooted power asymmetry, bitterness, and conflict? But we didn’t.
Pratt, towards the end of her piece, speaks of the joys of the contact zone as well. “Exhilarating moments of wonder and revelation, mutual understanding, and new wisdom.” The way Pratt sets it up, it reads as if these qualities, while well worth it, are only possible through leaning into the discomfort of the contact zones. Were we simply able to put aside our differences and possible power dynamics for the sake of “the greater good?” Is that even possible? I wonder if it is because we are going completely past the surface of our identities that we are able to be fruitful in our connections and become woven together in our time during and after the summit. Perhaps it is because we enter with a mindset of collaboration, learning, and listening that we are able to do just that without greater conflict. We are all brought together by compassion for other people; maybe it’s that devotion to empathy that we are able to hear and see each other not simply through the boxes society gives us for viewing Others.
Arts of the Contact Zone ends with a mission statement. "Meanwhile, our job... remains to figure out how to make that crossroads the best site for learning that it can be. We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparisons..." she goes on, listing many more ways intentional communities of disparate backgrounds and viewpoints could contribute to invaluable, enriched learning experiences. Through SOS I’ve seen the reality of the glory of educational environments within the contact zone, but I cannot comprehend what allows certain communities to dive into the “joys” while others are left for centuries drowning in the aggressions. Maybe it just requires a specific mix of characteristics: the hopefulness of youth, the passion of activism, the open-mindedness of positive global communities. Maybe, these small, solid communities, will spread over the next decades to the rest of the world by setting an example of the way contributions of personal history and identity can contribute to positivity, not hate, when laid out in an embrace of support and encouragement of rawness.
I look forward to that time.