Global Virtual Immersion in a Post-COVID World: Lessons Learned in Moving from Sympathy to Informed Empathy in Subsistence Marketplaces

We describe lessons learned from one-and-a-half decades of global virtual immersion practices in subsistence marketplaces, and explore implications for international business teaching and learning in the post-pandemic world. Global virtual immersion refers to bottom-up learning experiences, typically in contexts much different than what we may be familiar with, without being physically present in a specific geographic location. "Bottom-up" learning connotes learning from actual ground-level reality rather than the opposite, "top-down" reliance on prior knowledge. The aim of global virtual immersion is to move learners from sympathy -- a most natural human emotion in response to poverty and suffering, to informed empathy, developing an understanding of subsistence marketplaces in different countries through a variety of means. Students, thus, broaden their global horizons, paving the way for additional learning and perhaps actual immersion, where possible. This process is particularly relevant as global contexts are so diverse and often elude generalities, and more so at lower income levels. This "bottom-up" approach for understanding subsistence marketplaces enables a better appreciation of the environmental realities, social contexts, market-level exchange systems, and individual behaviors of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs, providing a particularly important learning approach for international business education across geographically diverse settings.