(Re)discovering connection and community: A call to move beyond the ‘normalization of disconnection’

Look within. Look around. Reflect upon your connections with others who shape, and share, the spaces and places of your lived experience. For so many of us, when we look deeply and openly into our academic environments, we see and feel disconnection. In this provocation essay, we vulnerably share about our own disconnected experiences as we simultaneously invite others to critically reflect upon the conscious and unconscious ways in which we reinforce the ‘normalization of disconnection’ in our lives. Our hope is to inspire radical and intentional shifts into spaces and places within which we stand together, as a community grounded in care and solidarity, dropping stones of hope to create ripple effects of (re)connection and repair.