Critical Cosmopolitan Citizens: Experiential Engagement with Local Immigrant and Refugee Communities

This chapter presents a case study of an experiential learning project where undergraduate students conducted interviews with leaders and representatives of local immigrant and refugee communities and with people in local organizations involved with these communities. This community-engaged project leads students to see the inherent interconnections of local to global issues. The open-ended process fostered opportunities for growth in cultural humility and a sense of critical global citizenship, while the design of the project remained very accessible to students and manageable for faculty workloads. Students become aware of the numerous local immigrant and refugee communities and their contributions to the well-being of the larger community, and often developed relationships and skills that carried them into other experiences of emergent cosmopolitan citizenship. Students went on to community organizing, documentary work, policy advocacy, further research, and on-campus activism around refugee and immigrant rights. We believe that this project has fostered cultural humility and critical cosmopolitan perspectives among students, as well as contributing to practices of solidarity and insurgent democratic citizenship (Majka and Longazel in Public Integrity, 19[2]:151–163, 2017; Leitner and Strunk in Urban Geography, 35[7]:943–964, 2014) that are transforming the local community.