Bridging the gap to those who lack: intercultural education in the light of modernity and the shadow of coloniality

Abstract

Academic courses on interculturality have become a rapidly growing discipline in the West, where supranational bodies such as the European Union and UNESCO promote intercultural education as a path towards improved global cultural relations. Through interviews with students who completed a university course on interculturality, this essay investigates the tenets of interculturality and problematises whether this discourse merely reproduces a classificatory logic embedded in modernity that insists on differences among cultures. The argument put forward is that in the analysed context, interculturality tends to reproduce the very colonial ideas that it seeks to oppose. In doing so, interculturality reinforces the collective ‘we’ as the location of modernity by deciding who is culturally different and who is in a position that must be bridged to the mainstream by engaging in intercultural dialogue.

Keywords:

• coloniality
• modernity
• interculturality
• interculturalism
• intercultural education
• postcolonialism

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Andreas Fejes and Lisbeth Eriksson for valuable and helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay. Written while being a visiting scholar at Duke University, I am indebted to Walter Mignolo for his invitation and his insightful amendments to improve the text.

Notes

1. Through the academic year of 2010–2011, the following Swedish universities gave at least one course on interculturality: Dalarna University, Göteborg University, Jönköping University, Karlstad University, Kristianstad University, Linköping University, Linnaeus University, Lund University, Malmö University, Mid Sweden University, Södertörn University, Umeå University, University West and Uppsala University.

2. The course concerned here collaborates with indigenous movements in Latin America to empower those organisations.

3. European Credit Transfer System: 30 ECTS equals one semester of full-time studies.

4. A few of these organisations are Kawsay, Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador, Concejo Regional Indígena del Cauca and Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indígenas y Negras.