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This article describes how researchers from a longitudinal study of early childhood service systems generated a visual representation of transinstitutionalization that could facilitate dialogue for change with a variety of audiences. Comprised of seven portable banners, the photo essay that we constructed features snapshots of documents and/or material objects brought forward by mothers, grandmothers, fathers and foster parents in the course of research interviews. Working the theme of tensions in disabled childhoods, we assembled the collection to produce sharp contrasts between the generalizing effects that institutional involvement has on disabled children, and the particular lives that they live out at home with family members. Proceeding banner by banner, the article reveals the “thinking through” that we did to produce the photo essay, and our hopes for informing action on a systemic relation whereby parents are held responsible for producing ‘normal’ children.

This introduction to the special section, argues that this pandemic time has been one of ruptures which unveiled ongoing and intersecting social pandemics such as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, and ableism in the context of the COVID-19 global health pandemic (Brand, 2020). We proposed three ruptures as moments for imagining - and doing – otherwise: (i) the Black Lives Matter movement and increased mainstream attention to racial inequity, (ii) COVID-19 and new imaginings of travel, mobility, and safety (iii) mutual aid as increasingly necessary in a pandemic and as a possible relational way forward. We take these ruptures as a starting point for re-imagining learning and movement as relational. This introduction takes up a contextualization and conceptualization of the field of GSL, an overview of the critical literature in this space, and introduces the two articles in the special section. It ends with the hope that the grapplings and reckonings in this section will help scholars and practitioners think through this present moment and re-orient GSL in more just and equitable ways.

In this paper we are concerned with the ways in which hosts are often excluded from scholarship and programming of global service learning. By global service learning (GSL), we mean a multiplicity of programs that occur facilitating service work for people across borders, generally with volunteers moving from the North to the South. We present findings from a research project conducted in 2014 with 37 host families. We circulated a survey to better understand host experiences of, expectations of, and hopes for GSL. Drawing on these survey results we provide some prompting questions for GSL participants (both students and program designers) to shift focus from student experience to relationship and mutuality. Using global service learning literature, critical disability theory and critical pedagogy through an intersectional lens, we center questions of uneven labor, accessibility, and structures of inequity. Three main themes emerged from our data: mutuality, gendered labor, and preparation. We present several infographic images capturing themes from the study to facilitate discussions with students who are preparing for GSL experiences and for those who are leading and designing programming. Our intention is to provide tools for educators to center the voices, desires, and motivations of Southern hosts in all of their GSL preparations.

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