![](\"https:\/\/media.giphy.com\/media\/Rpc7RLegctKms\/giphy.gif\")
<\/a>Is self-reflecting then a deflection the problem of privilege away from the self and onto others? I think this can be an unintended side-effect, but not a necessary one. On the other side, for example, while I recognize the importance of the language we use and its symbolic power on social relations, I don\u2019t think that calling community service \u201ccivic engagement\u201d really changes anything if the types of activities and that constitute civic engagement have stayed the same. For a word to have an impact, those being asked to change their terminology need to understand why it matters to do so and how word choice affects lived experiences. Then they also need to adopt those changed meanings in how they approach the topic. This example is a little tangential, but I think it serves as an important parallel to my point that changing an individual\u2019s disposition doesn\u2019t always change their actions. The question then is how do we better connect or dually promote thought and action together, specifically in an educational sphere.<\/p>\nSometimes academic work can feel very limited in the scope of its importance, particularly when its audience is limited to members of specific course taken during a specific semester with a specific group of people. Even though the question of \u201cSo what?\u201d is central to writing a research paper and coming up with a rationale, its answer can still feel unreachable on a practical level that is removed from an academic sphere.<\/p>\n
And the desire for there to be some way to apply research and \u201cdo good\u201d in the world has implications in the reproduction of privilege, as many of our readings this semester have touched upon. This impulse relates back to the sense of \u201cmoral responsibility\u201d that elite individuals embody and sub\/consciously employ to consecrate their elite status. Even knowing this, and how social justice efforts undertaken by privileged individuals may even serve to fortify\u00a0 Locating the mechanisms that allow for genuine social change\u2014not just a change in the outward presentation of status groups\u2014is hard to do because no action seems sufficient unless it is overthrowing the entire structure. There\u2019s this worry in me that by highlighting large-scale upheaval as being the only means of alleviating social inequities completely than therefore the end goal will feel too unreachable to ever do anything towards. This isn\u2019t to say that we shouldn\u2019t work towards a more equitable structure, but that there are concrete things we can do on a local\/individual level that can help. Of course, now I\u2019m cycling back to my previous concern that I only think this way because I feel a moral responsibility to use (and thus validate) my privilege.<\/p>\n When I started off writing this post, I meant to think a lot more concretely about types of social justice efforts and their intended and unintended consequences, but I\u2019ve ended up writing an abstract call to be less abstract and more grounded in discussions of social justice. To be cyclical one final time, it\u2019s hard to practice what you preach, but that doesn\u2019t mean we shouldn\u2019t practice anything at all\u2014nor does it mean that we shouldn\u2019t think critically about how our attempts to enact social justice might be subversive to that very goal.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n As my involvement in this research project comes a close, I keep asking myself \u201cWhat next?\u201d How can I use my experiences and increased understandings of the tangled nature of privilege and privileging dynamics to take action in the future? What does that look like? What problems and contradictions would future steps incur? These questions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8026,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8026"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5664"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5670,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5664\/revisions\/5670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/global-elites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>instead of dissolve social inequities, doing nothing still feels wrong to me.<\/p>\n