Berkley Center

Background: Trishla Jain, an undergraduate student, interviewed Andria Wisler, director of the Center for Social Justice at Georgetown University, on March 26, 2013. In this conversation, Wisler reflects on her journey to social justice work, the role of religious communities in combating poverty, the intersection of faith and service, and the role the Georgetown community has in making themes of social justice more accessible.

How has your personal journey brought you to your work today, and why were you drawn to these particular issues?

I think about this a lot in terms of who are those people or what are those moments in your life that bring you to that change. I actually did not do a lot social justice work in college, and I went to Notre Dame. I actually did more work in student activities and working to bring things to campus since Notre Dame is in the middle of Indiana. After I graduated college I became a schoolteacher on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a small Catholic, independent, all-girls middle school called the Cornelia Connelly Center. It is a Catholic school founded by Holy Child Sisters who follow Cornelia Connelly, whose main pillars are confidence, cheerfulness, courage, and leadership. I just love those and we were constantly inculcating them in our students, but they really resonated with me. I try to keep those in my work all of the time. I taught mainly seventh graders at this school, which serves girls who are from families that represent the immigrant urban poor. It was in its fifth year of existence when I became a schoolteacher there. I taught there full-time as a teacher for two years, and I lived on the top floor of the school. The two founders of the school still worked at the school, one as director and one as a principal and teacher.

What those couple of years teaching helped me understand was that I did not have the strengths for what I called blackboard classroom teaching. I loved it, but it was not exactly what I could use all of my gifts and talents for. However, I started to understand what the intersection of education and social justice looked like and that I could pursue a vocation within education in which blackboard, seventh-grade teaching was not my main job. I really started to understand issues around finance and education, immigrant communities and education, violence and education, and gender and education. I really started to understand the cultivation of hope through education, especially in these marginalized communities in urban cities as well as in conflict zones. I think that was really critical for me.

The two women there who founded the school became supreme mentors of mine and really helped me understand what my strengths and gifts were in terms of contributing to the common good as well as how to be somebody who worked to lift barriers in society that were keeping other people from contributing to the common good. They are both really strong presences in my life, even though one of them passed away last year, and they were really important to my formation and in understanding how the work I do now in higher education is about helping to develop our next generation of social justice leaders.

What got you interested in working at Georgetown?

I pursued peace studies in college, but after becoming a schoolteacher I felt like I could not leave education once I got wrapped up into it. One of my professors at Notre Dame mentioned that there was a small field and a small program at Columbia University called peace education. When I heard about it, I thought that it would be perfect. It was my entry point into pursuing what I knew was my heart’s work, but I wanted to get my brain and my hands on board. My schooling in this field allowed me to connect the head, heart and hands. I always kept a line of my research on girls in the Lower East Side from immigrant families, but I also wanted to move into the post-conflict, post-genocide world, so that is where I started doing my research on the Balkans.

My graduate schooling took about eight years between my M.S. and Ph.D. and I was always working and teaching and doing fieldwork. Then this job at Georgetown came up at exactly the right time because 2008 was a really bad year for academic jobs due to the recession. I remember the day I saw the posting and I was like this is it. I knew that we had the Center for Social Justice and that we had this program in justice and peace. Kathleen Maas Weigert who was the first executive director at the Center for Social Justice was actually my thesis advisor at college in Notre Dame.

It felt so great to come here and to be able to do this work of helping students discern their lives ahead of them that are enriched by social justice in a place where you can talk about religion and spirituality not just as content, but also as substance. It is not something that you just learn about, but it is something that you learn with and that is a part of you. Even though I got a Ph.D. in comparative and international education, I knew I wanted my teaching home to be in peace studies and social justice. I just use education as a way to talk about these issues and that is where my research lies. This job as director of the Center for Social Justice came up this past summer and it was a discernment really thinking about is this the right moment for this job for me. I had just had a baby and I was like am I really applying for a new job. But I knew that I wanted to stay in D.C., and I realized that I really wanted to stay at Georgetown so this job really came up at a perfect moment.

What do you believe is the intersection between interfaith dialogue and community service?

I think that community service can be one of those activities and moments that brings together totally unexpected people. It is that larger meta lens that help people think about their similarities and not the fact that they are Hindu, Christian, Muslim or Jewish. It becomes a greater umbrella. I love interreligious dialogue, but some people just have to be doing something. They are going to feel more comfortable if they have got their hands dirty. Sometimes, if the focus is not on the dialogue, but it is on being together and doing something together and then through that you are having a dialogue.

I think we always have to have lots of different opportunities, not just to have the dialogue part, but to think that the dialogue could be through an activity and not just everyone sitting around in a circle. Georgetown is involved in the Parents’ Circle in Israel and Palestine where parents who have lost children to the conflict in Israel come together. They are coming together as parents and not as Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, or Israelis, but as parents. There is another identity that embraces them to come together and something that they can connect on, even though in this case it is sad because it is the loss of a child. Community service can be that thing that brings these people together that you would have never expected. I remember somebody was telling me about their van ride to their MLK Day of Service site and they were telling me how cool the van ride was because they had all of these different people who they would have never met at Georgetown had they not done this MLK Day of Service. They had not even done their work yet; they were just in the van.

How does your faith inform the service work that you do?

I am Catholic and I was raised Catholic, but I really pursued it on my own. I went through Catholic schooling all through grade school and high school and then I went to Notre Dame. I got confirmed at Notre Dame, and that was a choice I made to be confirmed later. Religion to me is an act that is lived. I have been deeply influenced by liberation theology and Catholic social teaching and the idea of the preferential option for the poor. That is something that I have always tried to think about in my work. It is not just the poor economically, but also the poor in spirit or otherwise. I also really see models of peacemaking through the lives of Jesus and Mary. I think are both sometimes called peacemakers, but it is not always the first way that we look at them. Although I believe that is what they really were and I love that. I think that is definitely how religion shapes me and I feel a great kinship with Mary, especially now as a mother.

How do you think religion can work to combat poverty issues in Washington, D.C.?

Many communities here in D.C. are formed around churches and other places of worship. From what I can gather, here in D.C. people stay with their church, even if they move from that community somewhere else. I think the church and other places of worship are just great places to find people here and they are where people convene. There is quite a large diversity of those places of worship. These communities are getting people involved in fighting poverty and using the church or their place of worship as a vehicle. I think this is something that we can tap into even more than we already do.

What can the Georgetown community do to help, and what is your message to the average Hoya?

Not everybody grows up in a household, school, worldview, or framework that uses the term social justice. It actually was not the framework that I used until I got to Georgetown because I was very much interested in peace and conflict studies. I think that we need to make it accessible. We need to make sure that every freshman knows what it is. It is not a phrase that is used universally, but I think inherently people do know what it means. Every single person is implicated in the creation of a socially just world. There is a space for every single person, the average Hoya, in the growth and development of that world. I think we just have to open our doors and make it more accessible instead of saying that people already need to have been converted to the social justice way before you can work for one of our programs. I think we really need to think about how we can open it up to people and meet them where they are at and then challenge them to grow.

A lot of people come to volunteerism or service, which is an entry point for social justice work, from a feeling of privilege. They feel that they were very privileged in their life so they want to make sure that they are giving back. That is one way to come to it, but I do not want someone to stop there; I want people to have grown. Privilege is one place from which you can serve, but I want students and everyone else to be serving from our whole selves and existence, not just one from one thing. We get a lot of students who have been told that they are privileged so that they should give back. I would say great and I will open my door to you, but I want to challenge you on that and make sure that you open up yourself beyond your privilege and that you are thinking about the communities that we serve and not just yourself first. We need to meet students where they are because they are coming from such a wide background. We need to make sure that it is accessible to them and show them what it can look like in their lives here at Georgetown and forevermore. It looks very different to different people because there is not just one way to do social justice.