ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the learning of Northern student participants with a small international experiential service learning (IESL) organization, Intercordia Canada, that worked with Canadian universities and operated on a relational model rooted in a philosophy of “being with, not doing for” and used innovative pedagogical tools to counter the hegemonic charity-steeped benevolent Northerner narratives characteristic of the field of IESL. It focuses on student reflections (stories) about vulnerability during their Global South IESL placements and works to understand how participants experienced encounters that are structured to challenge capitalist forms of community. The deep emotional labour of naming and announcing one’s own vulnerability challenges the script of the benevolent Northern helper in the field of IESL. In the pedagogy of Intercordia, vulnerability was constructed as a natural part of our interconnected humanness and was employed as a tool to get into the messy and difficult work of creating relationships of mutuality across difference. The chapter takes up the ways these tools can reproduce a dangerous equating of vulnerability and pain, and offerings of ways that this thinking can be interrupted. IESL programming often employs the ascribing of vulnerable to the Southern other and need for the Northerner to help, rehabilitate, save, and care for that vulnerable other. The unruly body is always the Southern disabled body, helped and brought joy to by the Northern helper. The author argues that the pedagogy of Intercordia intervened in this construction and invited Northern student participants to engage deeply with their own vulnerability, discovering the ways they are vulnerable and posited that through this self-reflexive process mutuality in relationship with the other is possible.
