Recognizing Frontline Locals

In 2018 Psychologists for Social Responsibility initiated The Andreina Blua Acknowledgment Award for Frontline Neighbors† with the vision of recognizing on-the-ground locals who step away from violence and complacency to respond to those living with political violence and/or flight. These locals noticed something disconcerting unfolding in their communities and responded before the larger public or in the face of a public that sought to deny or dehumanize. They saw through the fog of disorientation, grasped new truths, leveraged their privileged positions, and disseminated dangers they witnessed, despite threats and other condemnations. Their intuitions led them to take actions that became the bread and butter; the accurate read that held an escape plan, the underground system to secure provisions or shelter, and the bridge to a web of contacts.

These community responders looked into the heart of devastation without dissociating, translated the inchoate, and possessed a fluency to engage those impacted by human rights violations. They transformed what they intuited into knowledge that was galvanizing—enabling them to capture, decipher, and represent troubling realities and traumatic chaos without de-linking the suffering they saw from the societal structures responsible. The anguish they witnessed carried an ethical claim, to resist a larger ethos of dehumanization (Butler, 2003): They understood that for the deracinated catastrophe comes, as one said, “When they are visible as human beings.”†

To date we have honored three women in Polykastro, Greece who brought provisions to people fleeing across the border between 2014–2016; a retired teacher instrumental in creating homes for migrants from Sub-Saharan, Africa working in the fruit bastion of Italy; and an educator in Palestine/Israel recentering Palestinian realities of expulsion.

Given human propensities to occlude an emerging social atrocity and the agony of those impacted (Cohen, 2001), what capacities did these l