Dreams of Twiza as Transnational Practice: Managing Risk, Building Bridges, and Community Partnership Work
Author: Hachelaf, Ahmed Abdelhakim
Date: 2018-00-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Risk,Afro Asiatic Languages,Community Support,Partnerships in Education,Undergraduate Students,Dialogs (Language),Workshops,Networks,International Cooperation,Activism,Arabs,Foreign Countries,Political Issues,Global Approach,Publications,Civics,Cultural Differences,Community Involvement

Twiza is a tricky word to translate from its original Berber. In its simplest meaning, Twiza speaks to the collective effort of a community to support each other. To speak of Twiza is to call forth, then, the collective material practices which enact the values of a civil society. As Edward Said highlighted decades ago however, when terms (or theories) travel, they take on different meanings, losing some conceptual frameworks while adding others. The act of translation, of traveling, then, is also the act of reconstellation of community practices within a different local moment. And here is where the term gets difficult to translate. For the past year, Parks and Hachelaf have been engaged in a transnational discussion about what it means for Twiza to be an organizing term of their collective community partnership work in the United States and Algeria. To date, their collaborative enactments have included developing dialogues among their undergraduate students as well as creating a network of international scholar/activists to create civil society workshops for students on the African, European, and North American continents (For a sample of this work, see https://www.jossournextgen.com). Rather than seamless borders and common meanings emerging from the work, however, they have discovered that when this traveling term is enacted within local contexts situated across international borders this very geographical specificity alters the possibilities (and complications) of community partnership occurs. Now placed under erasure, Tawayiza, the term stands as in as a placemarker for the dream of a common &quot;community&quot; and the specific embodied alliance work required by that very dream. Indeed, the insights drawn from Twiza have also placed under erasure previous articles and community publications, published by Parks, which worked within a nostalgic sense of border crossings. For when Parks and Hacleaf first met, Parks was engaged in a project focused on an anti-gentrification campaign as well as a project documenting the experiences of activists in the Arab Spring. (It is in the latter project where they authors met.) The result of this period were two publications, an article titled, &quot;Sinners' Welcome,&quot; and a book titled, Revolution by Love. The former argued for the need to train students how to be community organizers, framing it as a central goal of partnership work. The latter documented the harsh political conditions in which activists in the Middle East/North Africa operated. While the publications represent a &quot;act locally, think globally&quot; type stance, these works were not seen as in dialogue with each other - the call for student to become activists not located across a geographical context in which this very call posed risks for students and teachers. Or to frame it slightly differently, taken together, the works highlight how many of the key terms within our field, such as &quot;community engagement,&quot; &quot;civic learning,&quot; operate within a specific context that does not &quot;travel&quot; seamlessly. It is a lesson to consider as our field imagines it work as operating on a global stage. In the following dialogue, Parks and Hachelaf discuss their work together, how global contexts shift the meaning as well as the risks of partnership work, and what, ultimately, they hope students might learn though global dialogues on the concept of civic society. In doing so they try to articulate a world where sinners are both welcome and revolution emerges out of a love for one's community. [Berber characters removed from abstract. ]