This book starts from the premise that honest and constructive dialogue
between scholars and educators of interculturality, especially from
different geopolitical spheres, is needed more than ever. The book is
about the important and yet contested notion of interculturality-a
notion used in different fields of research. It was co-written by two
scholars who have never met before and who got to know each other
intellectually and personally in the process of writing this book, using
interculturality as a looking-glass. (Re-)negotiating meanings,
ideologies and their own identities in writing the chapters together,
the authors enter into multifaceted dialogues and intercommunicate,
sharing while accepting disagreements. The co-authors' different
profiles in terms of geography, generation, status, preferred paradigms
and multilingual identity (amongst others) are put forward, confronted,
and mirrored in the different chapters, leading to the joint negotiation
of aspirations concerning interculturality in communication and
education. While describing their current takes on interculturality they
also conduct autocritiques of their past and present engagement with the
notion. The following questions are also addressed: Who is talking the
most about interculturality in the world today? Whose voices are not
heard? How to disrupt current hegemonies around the notion for real? And
how to promote epistemological plurality in the discourses and
narratives shaping our understandings of the notion? Autocritiquing is
proposed as a way of unthinking and rethinking interculturality ad
infinitum. This book argues that engaging with the notion requires
constant self-reflection, examining one's positionality and
intersectionality, listening to the voices that one projects onto the
world of, e.g., research and education, and operating transformations in
one's thinking, trying out new paradigms, ideologies and methods.
