Actualizing interculturality through finding de-centred threads

Abstract

Education and Intercultural Identity and Making Sense of The Intercultural both deploy interviews, oral narratives, and ethnographic research to illustrate the critical role of intercultural discourse in the transformation of global normativity and hegemony and the development of a global orientation, critical consciousness, and intercultural understanding. Both books recognize dialogue as an indispensable tool to develop relationships of collective thinking and action within our society. To Barthes et al. (2012), dialogue is identified as the ‘zero degree of language.’ At this degree, communication becomes a transformative act emancipated from ideology. Likewise, to Freire et al. (2020), dialogue becomes a pedagogical condition for new yet critical consciousness to emerge and challenge constricting worldviews, knowledge production, and boundaries to human existence. Looking around the world, conflicts, fear, and coercion dominate headlines raising debates over refugees and nationalism in the Western societies that have become even more charged during the Covid era of isolation and polarization. With increasing conflict, migration and globalization bringing innumerable changes to social, cultural, and political environments, we need a proper language to describe, conceptualize, and practice multiculturism, intercultural communication, and diversity (Beck 2011). This book review starts with an overview of each book and then discusses ideas shared by both books and thoughts and visions that contrast or complement each other. Lastly, the review article concludes with questions for readers to further think about decolonizing normativity and embodying the alternative ways of knowing and being.