As global citizens we tend to question several things:
What is my role in the world?
Is my role more important than that of a non-global citizen?
How can I make a difference as a global citizen?
Questions like these are poised to us every day within the classroom environment and within our own communities, and every day we find ourselves struggling to find the answers to such questions. But we do not realize that being a global citizen goes way beyond knowing what is our place in the world; being a global citizen also means that we understand where our knowledge comes from and how we choose to remember it. For almost two weeks now in my ASTU class, we’ve been analyzing Farhat Shahzad’s scholarly article on “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” , and it has helped me to understand that my perception of the world changes every day with every news article I read, every conversation I have with a friend, and every history lesson I get from my professors.
Hence, our perspectives are shaped by different agents, or what Shahzad would call “interpretative communities”. As a global citizen I now understand that my perspective of the world has been mostly shaped on and again by the first two global citizens I’ve ever met, my parents. They grew up in Bolivia in times of political transition when the government could not have been more unstable and violent; they witnessed first-hand how their parents became activists against the state and fought against all odds to protect their ideals and the people who shared their views of the world. They taught me what a dictatorship was and why above all else I have to fight for what I believe in and for what is right. As a young global citizen, I have not experienced the repercussions of a dictatorship, but the stories I was told helped shape my understanding of the concept. My parents did their job as an interpretative community to teach me one of many fundamental concepts that I will need for the rest of my life, and as a global citizen it is my job to use those concepts in order to analyze them and recognize their potential and the effects they can have on social justice and human rights today.
