Collabowriting: Toward a Glocal Grammar of Solidarity

When The Present Tense began, it began with language. Earlier editions reflected on grammar and syntax, on the complexities of speaking and writing in English while carrying the memories, rhythms, and sensibilities of other languages. They explored how peace has a grammar and justice a syntax, and how public witness requires an ever-deepening ethical vocabulary capable of naming both the wounds and the hopes of our time. This seventh edition introduces another contribution to that evolving lexicon: collabowriting. More specifically, we present collabowriting as one pathway toward what we have come to understand as a glocal grammar of solidarity.

The word may sound new, but the idea is not. For over a decade, one of us has wrestled with how to think and act faithfully in a world where local realities are shaped by global forces and global realities take local form. Early efforts (2012–2013) brought together church leaders, activists, organizers, advocates, and students from around the world for gatherings in California, Hawaii, Alaska, New York, and at Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe, a pan-African United Methodist institution. These events were driven by the belief that the local and global are not opposing but simultaneous realities. From this work emerged collabowriting, a term developed to describe a practice in which people from different places and experiences jointly reflect, theorize, and create knowledge.

The concept lingered in discussions about the Isaiah Circle, glocal conversations, and resources for organizing and advocacy across the worldwide United Methodist connection. We now recognize that collabowriting was never primarily about writing. It was about relationship, learning to see the world together, and forming habits of attention that connect distant experiences and reveal common concerns. This remains vital for a United Methodist Church seeking to become more regionally contextualized while remaining a global connection.

This past summer offered an opportunity to bring that longstanding practice into conversation with a new generation’s experience and insight. Through the General Board of Church and Society’s Ethnic Young Adult internship program, we engaged in a ten-week exchange of readings, reflections, emails, and conversations. We brought different generations, disciplines, experiences, and social locations to that exchange: one rooted in decades of multilateral advocacy, ecumenical engagement, and public theology, and the other in Medical Laboratory Science at Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe, and in experiences shaped by life in Nigeria. What united us was a willingness to learn from one another.

What emerged was an experiment in shared inquiry. The documents, speeches, and essays that shaped our discussions addressed human dignity, social holiness, multilateralism, migration, sustainable development, public health, hope, and the healing of nations. These themes opened new windows into medical science.

While medical laboratory science often focuses on diagnosis and treatment, our discussions revealed that health exists within a broader moral, social, economic, and political ecology. Diseases are shaped by poverty, infrastructure, environmental conditions, care systems, displacement, and public policy. Health outcomes depend not only on biology but also on justice and access. The language of rights, dignity, and responsibility is therefore integral to what may appear purely scientific. Every laboratory sample reflects a human life shaped by larger systems and relationships.

The transformation came into focus through lived experience:

“I did not come to understand health as a justice issue in a classroom or from a textbook. It came to me slowly, through my own life. When I was growing up in my village in Nigeria, I was always sick with malaria. It felt normal, like something I had to live with. But when I traveled to the city, I saw something different. People there rarely suffered from malaria the way we did. They had better housing, treated nets, and knowledge of prevention. Some even had access to vaccines. The government and the wealthy could afford care. In my village, we could not. That was when it became clear to me: malaria was not just a disease. It was a disease of poverty. It was a justice issue. The difference between my village and the city was not mosquitoes; it was access, resources, and dignity. That realization stayed with me. It is why I study medical laboratory science. It is why I believe health is not just a medical matter; it is a human rights matter. And it is why I am committed to doing something about it.”

The experience recounted above illuminated a central insight: health is never merely biological. It is shaped by the social, economic, political, and moral conditions in which people live. As we reflected together on diseases of poverty, health as a human right, and the relationship between public health and sustainable development, illness appeared not merely as a medical condition but as a window into deeper questions of justice, dignity, and human responsibility.

A related discovery concerned faith itself. One early reflection wrestled with the claim that faith disengaged from public life is incomplete. Justice, kindness, and humility emerged not merely as personal virtues but as public standards for judging institutions and policies. Public health, migration, environmental stewardship, and sustainable development became inseparable from questions of faithfulness.

Collabowriting is more than co-authoring; it is a practice of shared seeing. Borrowing metaphorically from cognitive psychology, it involves a form of joint attention: the capacity of two or more people to attend to the same reality while recognizing one another as fellow observers and interpreters. Shared attention becomes shared inquiry. It assumes that no person, discipline, nation, or institution monopolizes truth. Knowledge emerges through dialogue; understanding deepens when diverse experiences are brought into conversation. It begins not with certainty but with humility.

Like multilateralism, collabowriting recognizes that understanding rarely emerges alone. Just as nations require cooperation to address shared challenges, insight often arises through collaboration among people whose experiences differ. What matters is not simply what we know but whose perspectives shape our understanding.

The value of collabowriting lies not in producing a manuscript but in cultivating glocal solidarity across borders and generations. Distinct experiences became mutually illuminating, revealing the global within the local and vice versa. This dynamic reflects a longstanding insight of glocal organizing. Solidarity is not patronage but mutual transformation. Mentoring, learning, and attention flow in both directions. Each of us becomes both learner and teacher.

The present tensions between church and society increasingly require transborder and transnational ways of thinking, organizing, and acting. The forces shaping health, migration, democracy, ecology, and development routinely cross political boundaries. Our ethical imagination must learn to do the same. We need practices that bring distant realities closer and situate local struggles within broader, interconnected stories.

In the grammar of peace and the syntax of justice, collabowriting is a verb. It names the disciplined practice of seeing together through joint attention, thinking together through shared inquiry, and acting together through solidarity. It reminds us that understanding begins when both discover they are already attending to the same reality. If our collaboration has taught us anything, it is that some of the most important journeys toward justice and peace begin when people separated by geography, generation, profession, and experience realize they are not participants in different stories but co-authors of a shared one. It is solidarity practiced in a glocal key.