Marcelo Diversi’s second book on “betweener” culture urges tackling social justice issues from a personal perspective.

On the 9-hour flight between his native Brazil and his current home in the Pacific Northwest, Marcelo Diversi acquires a new identity. “I’m going from being a white person [in Brazil] to being a brown person [in the United States], from a native to a migrant,” he said. “You see what doors open and what don’t.”

That position provides a unique vantage point for the social justice philosophy he practices and describes in his new book, “Betweener Autoethnographies: A Path Towards Social Justice,” co-written with fellow native Brazilian Claudio Moreira. Diversi is associate professor of human development at WSU Vancouver, and Moreira is associate professor of performance studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

“Betweener Autoethnographies” (2018) expands upon the ideas the two authors set forth in their previous book, “Betweener Talk” (2009). Their friendship and ability to write collaboratively further illustrate the concept of “betweeners.” Although Moreira grew up poor while Diversi grew up privileged, they have found common ground in the space “between” their differences. Overcoming the “us vs. them” mentality, or, as the book puts it, “expanding the circle of us,” is the vision.

“I’m male and privileged socially, but I have my own ways in which I experience being on the wrong side of the tracks,” Diversi said. “Even the most privileged person experiences that once in a while, and in that moment we have the opportunity to identify with others. Either you are part of us—family, country, tribe—or you’re them, the other. We explore the spaces in between us and them, and we call for people to find those places where they themselves have been in that other situation.”

Autoethnography—a form of ethnography that combines personal experience with observation—is an emerging research practice. “Betweener Autoethnographies” both endorses the practice and exemplifies it. The authors tackle social justice issues from their own subjective perspectives. Their work combines academic training and writing with techniques borrowed from literature to analyze political issues. “Creating a direct link between the personal and the political is the principle of autoethnography,” Diversi said. 

Even most knowledgeable and well-trained observer, with the best statistical analysis, needs firsthand experience to understand certain problems, he said. You simply can’t separate the personal from the political: “It’s not an either/or choice.”

Their writing about overcoming the dehumanizing “us vs. them” mentality so prevalent in the world today could not have come at a better time. Indeed, they start by examining the politics of the day in both Brazil and the United States. “How can anyone protest against liberation and humanization of those historically oppressed? By making Them, the historically oppressed, seem innately different from Us, less than Us, ungrateful ..a menace,” Diversi and Moreira write. 

The topics they ponder are big, divisive political issues: immigration, refugees, decolonization, and inclusion versus exclusion. “There has never been a greater need for a militant utopianism,” writes Norman K. Denzin in the introduction. Denzin is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Illinois, where both authors earned Ph.D.s.Diversi acknowledges that their vision may be utopian—that is, if everyone bought into the idea of betweeners, the world would be a far better place—but he remains clear-eyed about the future. “If we have a catastrophic collapse, we will revert to more tribal state,” he said. Citing theologian Theodore Parker, he continued: “But we also have a long history, and the arc of history bends toward justice. I do see that happening.”