The Paradoxes of Interculturality

Offering a unique reading experience, this book examines the epistemologies of interculturality and explores potential routes to review and revisit the notion anew.
Grounded in different sociocultural, economic and political perspectives around the world, interculturality in education and research bears a paradoxical attribute of 'contradictions' and 'inconsistencies', making it a polysemous and flexible notion that has no definitive diagnosis and requires constant unthinking and rethinking. The author provides a toolbox of 'out-of-box ideas' in the form of fragmental yet standalone writings and follow-up questions concerning stereotypes about the very notion of interculturality and conceptual and methodological flaws in the way it is used. Readers are encouraged to critically reflect about interculturality as it stands today in global research and education. In identifying the paradoxes of interculturality and proposing alternative directions, the book stimulates a diversity of thoughts about the notion that goes beyond the 'West'.
The book will be an essential reading for scholars, students and educators interested in education philosophy, applied linguistics and the broad field of intercultural communication education.

Fred Dervin is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki (Finland). He specialises in intercultural communication education, the sociology of multiculturalism and international mobilities in education and has widely published in different languages on identity, interculturality and mobility/migration. Exploring the politics of interculturality within and beyond the 'canon' of intercultural communication education research has been one of Dervin's idée fixes in his works over the past 20 years. His recent publications with Routledge include the coedited volumes Teaching Interculturality 'Otherwise', Academic Experiences of International Students in Chinese Higher Education and the coauthored title Revitalizing Interculturality in Education: Chinese Minzu as a Companion, etc.