{"id":3819,"date":"2013-02-08T07:20:47","date_gmt":"2013-02-08T07:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.eltweekly.com\/elt-newsletter\/?p=3819"},"modified":"2013-02-08T07:20:47","modified_gmt":"2013-02-08T07:20:47","slug":"vol-5-issue-5-conference-intercultural-versus-multicultural-education-the-end-of-rivalries-selangor-october-1-2-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eltweekly.humbeestudio.xyz\/?p=3819","title":{"rendered":"Vol. 5 Issue 5 \u2013 Conference: Intercultural versus Multicultural Education: The End of Rivalries?, Selangor – October 1-2, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

ELTWeekly Vol. 5 Issue#5 | February 11, 2013 |\u00a0ISSN 0975-3036<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

The ‘Intercultural versus Multicultural Education: The End of Rivalries?’ international conference is organized by\u00a0Taylor\u2019s University, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,\u00a0University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland and\u00a0Western University, London, Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n

CALL FOR PAPERS<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018When I use a word,\u2019 Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, \u2018it
\nmeans just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.\u2019
\n\u2018The question is,\u2019 said Alice, \u2018whether you can make words mean so many
\ndifferent things.\u2019
\n\u2018The question is,\u2019 said Humpty Dumpty, \u2018which is to be master – that\u2019s all.\u2019<\/p>\n

Lewis Carroll, Through the looking glass<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Our contemporary \u201cfractured\u201d (Moghaddam, 2008) and \u201caccelerated\u201d (Pieterse,\u00a02004) worlds are leading to more encounters between people but also and\u00a0especially to more inequalities and power gaps between the haves and have-nots. In education, many notions are used to talk about ways of tackling\u00a0these issues: cross-cultural, meta-cultural, polycultural, multicultural and\u00a0intercultural – but also global and international (Dervin, Gajardo & Lavanchy,\u00a02011; Grant & Portera, 2011). According to Henry (2012), social justice\u00a0education seems to be \u201cincreasingly preferred\u201d to e.g., multicultural education\u00a0in the USA. All these \u201clabels\u201d often appear interchangeably – without always\u00a0being defined or distinguished. This has been problematic in both research and\u00a0practice.<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n

The multicultural and the intercultural seem to be the most widely used notions\u00a0worldwide. They have been discussed extensively in education scholarship\u00a0and practice: many researchers and practitioners have attempted to define their\u00a0specific characteristics by establishing borders and boundaries between them,\u00a0through which they have often tended to be opposed, namely in geographical
\nterms (the US vs. Europe, Northern Europe vs. Southern, etc.).<\/p>\n

Some researchers have even demonized the \u2018multicultural\u2019, asserting that\u00a0multicultural education celebrates only cultural differences and ignores\u00a0similarities, individuality, and the importance of relations and interaction\u00a0\u2013 as the \u2018intercultural\u2019 is said to operate. Others are critical of the fact that\u00a0intercultural education tends to ignore power discrepancies. Henry (2012)\u00a0claims that multicultural education is a bit d\u00e9mod\u00e9; Moghaddam (2012)\u00a0a \u2018\u2018politically correct\u2019\u2019 policy; and Mclaren & Ryoo (2012) that it is \u201cunder\u00a0egregious assault\u201d.<\/p>\n

But even if multicultural education and intercultural education have different\u00a0origins (Abdallah-Pretceille, 1986) \u2013 the former is related to Civil Rights\u00a0Movements while the latter to mass immigration in Europe, amongst others\u00a0\u2013 Holm and Zilliacus (2009) argue that today multicultural and intercultural\u00a0education can both mean different things: \u201cit is impossible to treat and\u00a0draw conclusions about intercultural and multicultural education as if there\u00a0was only one kind of each since there are several different kinds of both
\nmulticultural and intercultural education\u201d (ibid.: 23). As any social category,\u00a0the multicultural and the intercultural represent many and varied perspectives\u00a0that need to be discussed as perspectival and historical approaches, which are\u00a0disrupted by the movement of people and re-constitutive of the phenomena\u00a0they seek to describe (Gillespie, Howarth & Cornish, 2012: 392).<\/p>\n

This series of conferences wishes to investigate this claim and allow\u00a0researchers working on these two \u201cfields\u201d to get together and discuss their\u00a0differences and similarities and to put an end to rivalries. The fact that the\u00a0conference sites are located on different continents allows widening the debates\u00a0as these two notions are not only driven by research traditions (local and\u00a0transnational) but also by political contexts.<\/p>\n

The conferences will bring together international researchers and practitioners\u00a0from a range of backgrounds and institutions to discuss the following topic\u00a0strands (amongst others):<\/p>\n