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Belonging Across Borders in an Age of Threat
This post is the lightly edited text of a conversation between Bonnie Stewart and Autumm Caines, held on March 28, 2025
Autumm:
Hello, this is Autumm Caines, I'm sitting here with Bonnie Stewart, attempting to “talk a blog post”, in the spirit of Myles Horton and Paolo Freire’s We Make the Road By Walking.
Bonnie:
No pressure. Isn’t there also a conversation as book by Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault? Heady company. Hiya Autumm. Welcome.
Autumm:
So, we’re at Bonnie’s house in Windsor Ontario, about a half hour from my house across the border in Michigan. Bonnie's been my good friend for years now…
Bonnie:
Nearly ten years. Thank you, old skool online networks!
Autumm:
I was super excited when I moved back to Michigan because Bonnie had moved to Windsor just before, so I knew we were going to be neighbors. I reached out immediately and was like…I want to be your friend.
Bonnie:
Dude, I was so grateful! You took my family to the Detroit Institute of Art for the first time…introduced us to cool things…then the pandemic happened. The border was closed for two years.
Autumm:
Two years. So close, but yet so far away, right? But we continued to “see” each other because, I mean, we're colleagues and we were in each other in various online spaces and read each other's words… eventually the border reopened and we got to hang out again. And now we're sitting here at the end of March 2025. The political climate between the US and Canada, the border relations…things might be worse than the pandemic!
Bonnie:
Elbows up! Kidding. You are so very welcome in my home.
Autumm:
It's an interesting thing to cross the border, right? I feel like crossing a border even just to come see a friend in some ways is a political act, especially these days.
Bonnie:
It is. I won’t cross at the moment, and it’s very much a political act.
Autumm:
And so I wanted to include that in the introduction here to set the tone for the conversation. I wanted to set the stage by creating an environment and situate the relationship between us. Why have I taken the risk of crossing the border to come and have this conversation? Who are you and why am I talking to you? You're an Education and Digital Technologies professor who’s been doing some amazing work on your sabbatical that I wanted to bring to the Civics of Tech community.
Bonnie:
Glad you’re here, Autumm. And yeah, I see borders as a theme of this conversation. I’ve been on sabbatical this past year, as a fellow with the University of Highlands and Islands (UHI)…it’s a distributed institution with multiple campuses scattered across the rural, northern parts of Scotland, serving very local populations often in online and distance models.
I’m looking at belonging and place…what are the practices that support and create belonging, on campuses and in online and f2f classrooms? What does it mean to be able to stay in a given place and get an education? Can we belong and find ourselves at home in this globalized world? The University of Highlands and Islands struck me as a really interesting exemplar for digital and place-based belonging: I liked the idea of taking a small place that people may see as remote or peripheral and centering it instead. You can learn a lot looking beyond the…the usual suspects.
I have my own complex relationship to belonging at UHI, because where I’m from in Eastern Canada is deeply rooted in the Highland Scots diaspora. Both sides of my family came from the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland to Prince Edward Island in the first half of the 1800s. Gaelic-speaking crofters, subsistence farmers, tenants. They were displaced from their ancestral lands by colonial forces of enclosure – by their own elite and a dominant neighbour nation Scotland had chosen union with, ahem – and replaced by sheep. The latecomers especially were pretty destitute – what we call the Irish potato famine also devastated the isles and Highlands of Scotland. But in that arc of emigration they became instruments of colonization in their own turn, because the ‘British’ lands they were settled on were neither empty nor British… except from a European point of view. Mi’kma’ki - the Indigenous territory of the Mi’kmaq people, which includes most of PEI and Nova Scotia, and parts of New Brunswick - was never ceded to the British Crown. I grew up with ceilidhs and bagpipes and oatmeal, thinking I was very Scottish until I went to Scotland for the first time twenty-five years ago and discovered that, of course…uh…I’m not. So this sabbatical project on belonging with UHI has brought me to the islands my people came from…and raised all kinds of questions about power and home...a big part of what belonging is about.
The project’s forced me out of my comfort zone. I’ve worked in participatory digital education for 20 years. People and connections interest me, not technical things. But for the past few years, anytime anybody in the field of digital technology turns around, it’s all AI all the time – how to optimize the technical, ‘how can we’ rather than ‘should we.’
Autumm:
Sooooo much optimization.
Bonnie:
So. When I sat down in the summer of 2023 to propose a sabbatical project – my very first sabbatical, very exciting – all that I wanted to do was NOT talk about AI. Of course, I’ve spent half this sabbatical year *still* talking about AI…but tied to all this belonging work and decolonization thinking.
Belonging is suddenly a more fraught term than I anticipated. I’ve basically had to retrain myself in a whole new field of belonging and place, so this past week, I sent out a scoping review on what belonging means right now…which has turned out to be way more interesting and troubling than I’d imagined in the summer of 2023.
Because, on your side of the border, where ‘Diversity Equity and Inclusion’ is being actively suppressed by the, um, regime, we’re starting to see places where the term DEI is being explicitly replaced with belonging. You and I are currently living in extremely different realities in that sense. Here in Canada, we’re still institutionally embracing DEI, but your weathervane has been turning for a while.
And what I wonder is, does avoiding the word ‘diversity’ actually save somebody or their project or department from the axe? I mean, it seems to me to abandon principles and abandon actual racialized and queer and disabled people and anyone being targeted…but also it seems shortsighted. C’mon. Aren’t most of us old enough to remember the last iteration of language policing? Remember ‘political correctness run amok!’? This is a regular turn by the forces of grievance politics. So if we switch DEI to belonging, thinking it’s more ‘neutral,’ won’t those same forces just recalibrate?
Right now, any term used to signal the idea that we have a democratic, societal responsibility to all people is probably something that your current administration is gonna seize on and attack. I guess I would hope that more institutions – rather than obeying in advance – would not bother spending the money to change all of their letterhead and terminology from DEI to belonging, but would fight for DEI.
Autumm:
Yeh. With DEI I've been hearing calls of, “let's not call it DEI, let's call it by its full name – let’s say ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’ because if someone is going to say ‘I don't stand for DEI,’ it might be more powerful if they had to say all the words and they may realize what they are saying.”
Bonnie:
If there are folks turning to belonging over DEI, actually thinking that belonging can serve as a blander signifier that doesn’t involve power relations…I mean, they’re just wrong. What I’m really trying to ask in my work is ‘what counts as belonging?’ Everything that I’ve found on belonging frames it as this highly relational concept that is both about human relationships, like person to person, but also about power relationships. So we’re watching the term belonging shift in real time. I’m feeling like it’s an important moment to politicize it, to talk about its power relations.
Autumm:
Just listening to you, it made me think about the work I did years ago on digital citizenship when I realized the word ‘citizenship’ comes down to who's in and who's out, right? I guess that's the thing about belonging in this new usage, the thing that it can do is wipe away who gets to belong and who doesn't get to belong. As if we can just all feel good about belonging.
Bonnie:
That’s the risk, right? That institutionally, the word will be deployed as a way to erase difference. If you are actually going to educationally achieve belonging, whether you're looking at early stuff like Maslow's hierarchy of needs or straight through, you know, recent digital concepts, sociomaterial ideas of belonging, human difference and power relations are at the core. If you're not actually accounting for power relations and agency, you're not actually going to achieve belonging. You can achieve compliance and call it belonging, but it's not going to be belonging.
Autumm:
No matter what they call it.
Bonnie:
I think belonging is a vulnerable signifier anyway, because it’s fuzzy and human and gets coded as soft and feminized against the evidence-based, hyper rationalist, technocratic view of the world. And all things that can’t be datafied and automated are vulnerable right now to be weaponized as ‘woke’…or just washed out of sight. Obviously there's this massive consolidation of power happening in terms of US political power and Silicon Valley power kinda merging into this unholy alliance. They seem keen to automate all kinds of social, societal decision making – which we know from a decade in critical edtech conversations means SO many people are going to be deeply harmed, especially people who are already minoritized.
But again, that’s how that hyper rationalist algorithmic view of the world fails us. It won’t look at power relations, will not account for them, prefers and profits from pretending they don’t exist.
And I see that view embedded in the GenAI narrative focused on optimization. A lot of current AI workshops treat AI as inevitable, as if we're all gonna be terribly left behind if we don't learn to optimize this wonder. There are fields where I understand that to be true, but in my field of education, I don’t buy it. I think it’s hype: venture capital literally functions on hype. But as digital tech has encroached into education, decision-makers and media seem to have bought the hype. So the conversation is always already framed by hype-based claims that valorize technical skills and imagined futures…without much vision of human well-being or public good. Even the stuff that emphasizes so-called ‘AI literacies’ tends not to ask whether we need what’s on offer or whether we're just, you know, burning a ton of coal in order to get vaguely okay answers to assignments that nobody reads.
To me, all this reflects this managerial-coded view of education and the world more broadly, where things that can’t be counted don’t count. And it’s got a lot of power, this view, it’s almost hegemonic…meaning it is hard as hell to present a counter-perspective and be heard.
Maybe what I’m trying to say overall is hegemony itself is a problem. We build better societies when we can see power. We need to learn to talk about the power relations we’re in. We can’t actually have belonging or equity unless we’re doing that. Across difference.
Whenever you're actually situated within a hegemonic point of view, your own dominance kind of gets in your way. You and I are white people. There are power dynamics to how that works out within the social stratifications of contemporary society that it took me many years of unpacking to begin to fully grasp.
Autumm:
Absolutely.
Bonnie:
You and I have both grown up as people who are read up socially, societally, as women…and there are power dynamics to that that you and I are probably both acutely aware of that perhaps my male partner has been, um, on a longer journey to become aware of. LOL.
Autumm:
Right. A sort of top dog view.
Bonnie:
Yes! There’s this cartoon I always think of. Two birds are talking to each other, in armchairs, and one is like, ‘Do you think the owl is a predator?’ ‘Nope he’s never bothered me.’ ‘Yeh. Dunno what Mr. Mouse is on about.’
It’s all where you sit. It’s really hard to see power relations when you benefit from them.
Autumm:
Yeh. Or at least if you're not harmed by them…you don't even have to be benefiting. Like even if it's just that you're not being harmed.
Bonnie:
Sure. Also I think when we're not being harmed, we are often benefiting.
Autumm:
It's kinda ridiculous that that's a benefit, right? Not being harmed. Well, should be ridiculous.
Bonnie:
Like it should be baseline? Yeah. But in the cartoon, the birds benefit from not having to survive as a mouse. I don’t think it’s visible to them that their friend Mr. Mouse is not them. And so they can’t see the harm or the risk.
So I'm gonna circle us back to – in the friendliest way I can – the discussion of hegemony and borders and our two countries right now. Because the thing about being Canadian is we have this hyper-awareness of the US. You are dominant in size, in reach, in pop culture, in, like, sheer flex. It’s a disproportionate power relationship, as nation-states…Trudeau Sr. back in the 60s called it ‘sleeping with an elephant’ – every twitch and grunt affects us. We have to be hyperaware. The elephant doesn’t.
It's why there are so many successful comics in the US who are Canadian – they make humour out of this deeply studied understanding of those who are more dominant than us. It’s survival.
And we are attached to our survival, actually. Some Americans are surprised to discover that Canadians have a pretty salty take on the US, generally. And that we don't want to be Americans. It's not personal. But at the national level, really our core vibe is we’re not you.
We always knew that the power relations were uneven, that maybe a lot of US folks can’t name five cities in Canada…but the last few months has been shocking. The 51st state threats. The tariffs. The disrespect. I mean, I live 4 minutes from the border, from the tunnel to Detroit: I’ve been ‘joking’ since January that it feels uncomfortably like living in Austria right before The Sound of Music.
A lot of social media conversations lately kinda feel like Mr. Mouse… like our US friends don’t really grasp this threat. The fear and anger it creates. The betrayal.
And I realize, to be fair, that you all have your own fears right now…that you’re trying to process a firehose of awful and shocking things, by design. So it's hard to focus.
But I also think hegemony makes it hard for you to see us. As us. Even academics who can articulate precisely how gender and racialization and power dynamics all operate from a US lens often assume it’s identical here, apply the same map of relations, basically impose a hegemonic point of view over our border.
The thing is, your fears right now are not quite our fears. We’re scared for you…not just out of democratic and planetary preservation instincts…but we’re also scared of you. Because we are not you. We are not in the same boat in this shitstorm. You got to vote for your boat and we hope it doesn’t sink. But we also want it to stay on its own side of the Detroit River, thanks.
Autumm:
Yeah, I can't imagine if somebody was threatening very clearly to invade my country. My neighbor, who is my friend. That's just terrifying, frankly, and I'm sorry that more Americans aren't taking it seriously. I do think that many are…maybe more who I'm surrounded by because I also live on the border?
Another part of the personal dynamic between these two cities that we didn't talk about was that I grew up here, right? And in my ancestry, work has actually found my people over here…remember when we found out that my great-grandfather lived just down the block from your last address?
Bonnie:
Absolutely. Serious interconnectedness.
Autumm:
But it’s kind of crazy that…that politically we're here after, like, two months.
Bonnie:
It's terrifying. It's a terrifying moment and I'm terrified for you. I'm terrified for us.
I guess that the thing that ties all these conversations together, whether we're talking about belonging or its misdeployment, about AI and hype, or about borders…this very grim reality that we are all facing collectively from our various little boats is that what is happening in the US right now is a threat to the stability of everyone. Because of your power and hegemony. If the US can toss away rule of law, then…guess what? A lot of other powers are gonna follow suit. And history’s clear: we are all less safe and stable in a world of naked power.
Autumm:
So…we all need to talk more explicitly about the power relations that we're in.
Bonnie:
Yeh. And be able to articulate the principles and relations behind what we see. This is something that – to circle back – as a member of the dominant, hegemonic Anglo-Scottish culture that colonized this country, that we do not talk about well, either. Our relations. It’s not just you.
Particularly relations with Indigenous peoples…with place, and land…as a species, we need to learn to see and talk about power, especially when we have it or are the inheritors of it. It’s all tied up with colonial histories and empires and capitalism. We don't take account of our power positions well because the language and imaginaries we have are good/bad binaries…the time for those simple stories is over.
We're not gonna do a great job of creating belonging and capacity for survival if we can't talk about power. In this consolidation of autocracy and big tech automation, what gets constrained is our agency. My concern is not the sentient machines. My concern is that we forget about our agency, that we forget what it means to make and create, that we forget and give over our power to name our worlds, to take responsibility for each other. So when we acquiesce to censorship of the language we can use to talk about diversity and equity and inclusion, or belonging, or race or difference, we become non-agential cogs in that machine. We give away our power.
Autumm:
And also when we silence particular voices…because for somebody who sits in a place of power, a place of privilege, one of the most important things is to be able to listen to people’s voices…and maybe just shut up for a little while, right? But now, those voices, they are vulnerable.
Bonnie:
Being literally disappeared.
Autumm:
Because the things they are saying, and just who they are, and the act of speaking or having spoken is putting them in a place of vulnerability. How do we continue the work of trying to create belonging if we can't engage in that practice?
Bonnie:
I mean, I don't think either of us have ever lived in countries that have done a genuine, full job of creating belonging, right? As nation-states. And yet. As human beings in small scale worlds, in communities of affinity and action, historically we seem to find purpose and moments of belonging, no matter what kind of threats, perils, political situations we face.
So my hope is that while recognizing that we've never done it well, we can keep the idea of belonging…the imaginary of it…visible through conversations, through action together?
Autumm:
Maybe even through crossing borders?
If we get to the point where we can't cross that border physically, we'll do what we did in the pandemic and use digital stuff as much as we can to try to cross that border figuratively.
Bonnie:
If that’s safer, yeah. I worry.
But if it ever gets to the point where you need to escape over the mountains, like in Sound of Music…you know that there's a bed for you down the hallway, friend.
Bonnie is an educator and digital media researcher fascinated by who we are online. Associate Professor of Online Pedagogy and Workplace Learning at the University of Windsor, Canada, Bonnie explores the implications of digital information ecosystems for institutions and society. Bonnie was an early MOOC researcher and ethnographer of Twitter as an academic environment, and currently investigates what it means to know, to learn, and to belong within our weaponized digital world.