Introduction: Special Issue on Listening to and Learning from Partners and Host Communities: Amplifying Marginalized Voices in Global Learning

In early April of 2020, amidst astoundingly sudden suffering and disease, the novelist Arundhati Roy challenged the world with a provocative article, asking: Could the pandemic be a portal to better possibilities? Might we shed, “our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas,” leaving those things behind? Moving beyond the pandemic moment, might we walk “lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”? Over the past two years, driven in part by the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars and practitioners have proposed, reviewed, and refined articles centered on the theme of this Special Issue, “Listening to and Learning from Partners and Host Communities: Amplifying Marginalized Voices in Global Learning.” We see, through these examples, that another world is possible – and that our colleagues and networks are leveraging global education in processes and toward outcomes that transgress the limited colonial and unidirectional models that have been preeminent. Global education is being instrumentalized toward ends that support the co-creation of more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities. Thirty-one authors and co-authors, over a third of them situated in the Global South, have contributed eight articles that systematically demonstrate processes for learning from and amplifying historically marginalized voices in global learning. The result is a clearer light shining on the next steps the education abroad sector must take, if it wishes to live up to its ideals of contributing to a more just, peaceful, equitable, and sustainable world. Abstract in French Au début du mois d’avril 2020, et au milieu de souffrance et de maladie très stupéfiantes soudaines, le romancier Arundhati Roy avait mis le monde avec un article provocant en question, en demandant: la pandémie pouvait- elle être un portail aux possibilités meilleures ? Pouvons-nous diffuser, ‘’nos préjugés et la haine, notre avarice, nos banques de données et les idées mortes derrière : en laissant ces choses-là derrière ? En mouvant au-delà pendant la pandémie, pouvons- nous marcher lentement, avec moins de bagages, prêt à imaginer un autre monde, et à y combattre ? Au cours de deux dernières années, entrainées d’une part, par la perturbation de la pandémie de COVID-19?, des savants et praticiens ont proposé : révisé et réforme les articles focalisés sur le thème de cet problème spécial, Ecouter à et apprendre des communautés d