Just two days ago, I was on my way home after spending an exhilarating long weekend in London and Amsterdam with researchers of language, linguistics, and culture (at Baraza at SOAS), when I found myself totally turned around in Manchester Airport. Which way to go after passport control? To transfer to another flight? The signage was confusing.

Ordinarily, I would've felt pretty lame about it, but then I also noticed another person angling back and forth between the signs/words printed on doors 1 and 2, with a look of confusion similar to my own. I turned to ask him where if he was on the same flight as me. When he didn't vocalize in reply, but instead used a variety of Sign Language, and gestured to show me a message he'd typed in English into the Notes feature on his iPhone,  I realized that not only was he from my same flight, but that he was also Deaf.

It also dawned on me that this same guy had earlier just been at the Passport Control desk adjacent to me in line, when we had thanked the UK Border Force officer with by gesturing his hand away from in mouth in a sign I recognized as "thank you." Now that we both stood in the airport between doors 1 and 2, the task became about how we would both get to our next flight, as both of us were heading stateside. My new friend tapped his wrist, as if pointing to the time, and indicated that we had only a short while before our next flight. Uh oh. With only limited time, how would we communicate to solve our problem?

There's so much to be learned from listening to the voices of others. This past semester and summer, I was fortunate enough to have been part of an interdisciplinary team that prepared 17 undergraduate students for field research in Cuba. For nearly all of us, this was our first time to the island. For some of us, this was our first experience on an airplane, or outside of the U.S. Together, we represented studies in anthropology, Black Studies, linguistics, cultural studies, economics, environmental studies, Spanish, sociology, and visual and performance arts. ​This was a tremendous experience in intercultural learning and bilingual communication. 

All throughout our 10-day research and study trip, I conducted intermittent video interviews with students, my teaching partners at Swarthmore College--a team of faculty and administrative leadership. I created this video to chronicle our individual and connected reflections on multiple dimensions of our field experiences.

Biggest of all, this was our students' first experience speaking with Cuban people in Cuba about the enduring importance of the Cuban Revolution, the history of African enslavement in the Caribbean, the transformation of economic, education, and medical sectors, and the continuing traditions of African religion, dance, philosophy, and values across the island nation.

By speaking with Cuban professionals, mothers, doctors, museum directors, proprietors, artists, community activists, and makers of all kinds, students learned how to formulate meaningful and localized questions, connect with speakers of Cuban Spanish, and challenge their own assumptions about what is universally important to cultures other than their own. 

Our trip was generously sponsored through support from several partner organizations and departments across the College, and we are grateful!

by Jamie A. Thomas

Though many of us feel there's something deeply wrong about denying opportunities to girls and women, we are okay with demanding that women be judged by their femininity, hairstyles, and nail polish, or lack thereof. Even though we acknowledge that it takes the involvement of men, along with women, to stop sexism, how many of us readily understand that the burden of dismantling racist thinking and practice lies not primarily with marginalized groups?

Just two days after the presidential election result, and students in my regularly scheduled classes seemed lifeless and downtrodden, defeated and deflated. They had no questions, no thoughts for discussion, because their world had let them down. Somehow they had thought one vote would do it all, but I told them that it was never just about this election.

The dog whistles coming from Clinton's opponent (and his tacit supporters) were sounding the very racialization, sexist anxiety, and empowered prejudice that has festered in the U.S. since before its founding. It's a fundamentalist voice that hides behind economic anxiety and patriotism, while minoritizing, marginalizing, and dehumanizing many of the very people who seek to make this union more perfect. Hate speech and its accompanying mob violence, vigilante aggression, structural injustices, and covert, normalized language of biological inferiority have never been fully denounced in this country, and that is the true shame of this moment. 

Anyone clambering to declare "I am not a racist", has likely been unwilling to examine their participation in and benefit from structural inequity. For those of us who think we couldn't possibly be racist, sexist, ableist, class-ist, or otherwise, how do we treat people who (don't) look or sound like us? How much are our lowered expectations, dismissals, fears, and misunderstandings communicated in words like minority, wife, gay, ugly, unattractive, ghetto, poor, weak, foreign? What behaviors do we need to change, along with our language? How can we encourage each other to change?

My students looked so dejected, some close to tears. But this wasn't the time to tap out, I insisted. Now, more than ever, we needed to learn from this election, and from each other. We need to listen, reach out, and work together for social and structural change. And with that, I began preparing us for a visit to Serenity House, a community house and support center in North Philadelphia, where we would have a conversation with community partners about neighborhood activism and identity. 

by Jamie A. Thomas

I've been in touch this morning with a friend in the Netherlands.  Via WhatsApp, she asked me, "Are you scared for what's to come with Trump as president?" Another friend had posed a Trump win as an apocalyptic outcome. "The world will end...as we know it." Then, I was asked, "What will you do if he wins?"

My response was that I would do the same thing, no matter the election result. I would wake up the next morning, with the same plan I've had now for the last months, to take my students to North Philadelphia to local community center Serenity House, for a conversation and discussion with local residents about neighborhood identity and activism. We spent some time this semester in my sociolinguistics course analyzing the language of the presidential debates, and in the previous semester I was following election rhetoric with students in my course on Languages of Fear, Racism, and Zombies. If there's one thing I've learned about zombies, it's that things aren't always what they appear to be. 
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Look, nobody respects women more than I do. *Insert wry laugh* But the last thing I'm planning to do is to throw in the towel, move to Canada (or elsewhere), and give up my social justice work. Hell, no. 

The moment we give way to calling this an apocalypse, we script this occurrence and phenomenon as inevitable and out of our control. We seek to absolve ourselves of our shared responsibility for turning this ship around. Now's the time for critical thinking, instead of conjurings about the end of the world, about deportations and mass executions.

I want to instead think about how to work to educate others, communicate with people I don't already know, and push for new elected representatives and legislation. Even in the movie The Day After Tomorrow, survivors had to begin improvising together, and the U.S. ultimately had to form a coalition with support from the Mexican government. There was always a next step, and it's no surprise that a library, a fountain of knowledge, is what saved the movie's main characters.

by William Marchese