Voting from Abroad

    2020, a year to definitely go down in history. To think that the year isn’t even finished almost baffles me. Yet it’s actually this time of the year where civil society in the US is heating up just in time for the presidential election. 4 years ago, on the day of the 2016 presidential elections, I remember sitting in my high school classroom in Dubai after experiencing one of the most tense days. The entire day classes were practically cancelled as students and teachers alike had their eyes glued to their phones, laptops and projection boards, live streaming the elections. In contrast, my freshman roommate in UCSB from Newport, CA said her high school carried on completely normally that day. You’d think that a tiny school in the Middle East wouldn’t really be this personally affected, but it just goes to show how interconnected the world really is.

    This year I can vote! Having an American passport but living abroad is an interesting combination. It’s different on the scale of being an international student, yet an American citizen, in a public American university where I’m considered American systematically, yet at times feel completely removed from the American culture. Now imagine on the scale of global politics at large. I sit here in Dubai in the midst of a global pandemic and somehow I’m still connected to the world of politics in a country on the complete opposite side of the world from me.

    When I think about being an American citizen abroad, one of the first questions people tend to ask me is “how do you feel about the presidency?”. Luckily I love politics, so it’s a conversation I’m excited to have, especially to other abroad students. My perspective is not solely centered on American politics however, because foreign policy affects the rest of the world. Realistically American elections affect the entire world. The power of social media alone projects politics into an entirely new digital sphere. In the 2016 US elections, the Pew Research Center reported that 44% of US adults found their information from social media. Especially with the tool of Twitter, Trump and Clinton’s twitter accounts were primary sources of information for 24% of US adults. The debate is now virtual, which means we are all included, whether American or not.

    A global perspective is something I cherish having because I’m able to see things from the outside. In a TED talk by Taiye Selasi, she described herself as “multi-local”, referring to the locality she found as an international individual in which she adapted and became “local” to the various places she lived in. International students in particular are looking for belonging and locality, but it is exactly the wide-ranging experiences all around the world that have shaped my identity. I am a global citizen. My mindset is not one of a political party that I can conform to a checklist of things I’m supposed to believe in. It is the cultures and beliefs I have surrounded myself with globally that allow me to look at American politics in my own light. It excites me to be part of change in this world, even if just one vote, because we are a generation that finds value in debate and strives for change.

Sources:

Glass, Chris R. “International Students' Sense of Belonging-Locality, Relationships, and Power.” Association of American Colleges & Universities, Old Dominion University, 30 Apr. 2018, www.aacu.org/peerreview/2018/Winter/Glass.

Williams, Christine B. “Introduction: Social Media, Political Marketing and the 2016 U.S. Election.” Journal of Political Marketing, vol. 16, no. 3-4, 2017, pp. 207–211.