Québec's interculturalism: promoting intolerance in the name of community building

Abstract

As philosophers such as Fendler, Bauman and Young have shown, the concept of community poses significant challenges for diversity by reinforcing similarity, necessarily bracketing that which is viewed as outside, other or strange. In this paper, I interrogate the concept of community as it applies to Québec's intercultural context. I explore how intercultural dialogue, a mechanism to promote intercultural community building has, through a number of public displays of xenophobia, reinforced a discourse of intolerance in Québec's public sphere. Québec's Geography, History, and Citizenship education course is aimed at (re)creating an intercultural ‘micro-society’ in which students practice the demands of intercultural citizenship, such as dialogue. As a curricular requirement, intercultural dialogue places educators with the responsibility of (potentially) perpetuating an intolerant discourse of difference.

Keywords::

• community
• Québec interculturalism
• history and citizenship education
• intolerance
• identity

Disclosure statement

The author declares that she/he has no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.

Notes

^1. Bill 60 is officially titled ‘Charter affirming the values of State secularism and religious neutrality and of equality between women and men, and providing a framework for accommodation requests’ (2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds de Recherche: Societe et Culture, Quebec [177398].