LAUSR

When participants of an anti-oppression movement fail to vigilantly protect its integrity – the ideals that made the movement a threat to the existence of oppression – that movement grows more and more likely to devolve into a reflection of the very conditions it was fomented to redress. This sort of devolution has been observed in the very history of intercultural education in Latin America, where a revolutionary approach to education, built on intentions of equity and decolonisation, slowly was reshaped until it was implemented merely as appreciating diversity or in other ways that masked instead of redressed injustice (Aikman 1997). Similarly, when participants of a movement fail to reshape their approach in response to emerging conditions, and particularly to shifting forms of exploitation and oppression, they render their movement less and less a threat to injustice (Gorski 2009). We live in an era characterised by many uncertainties and socio-political turbulence. Opportunity, access and material resources are distributed in grossly inequitable ways, which should be, but rarely is, understood as a particularly pernicious form of violence in a world in which the resources exist to provide for everybody’s well-being. There is nothing particularly new about this reality. However, the forms of the inequitable distribution are always adjusting themselves, often in response to gains made by movements created to disrupt injustice. With these concerns in mind we offer this special themed issue1 of Intercultural Education as a call for proponents of intercultural and multicultural education to reimagine multicultural and intercultural education in light of current socio-political and economic realities, in consideration of new and shifting and worsening forms of oppression. As Coulby (2011) has stated, ‘Intercultural education needs to reformulate itself so that it can play a part’ (260) in the formulation of a more just world. We share his sentiment, having argued in our own scholarship for an intercultural education that responds in more transformative ways to hegemonic normalisations that continue to marginalise some groups as ‘other’, while privileging already-privileged groups as ‘normal’ and deserving of their privilege (Palaiologou and Dietz 2012), for the broader decolonisation of intercultural and multicultural education and for recommitting to intercultural and multicultural education’s most transformative roots (Gorski 2009). These sentiments underline our recognition of the important role multicultural and intercultural education can play in supporting local and global forms of justice when they are implemented in ways that respond directly to the most pressing contemporary forms of exploitation – when they respond to the newest forms of exclusion, disenfranchisement, and marginalisation. In addition, our concerns about the constant changes in the modern global sphere make us believe that the role of intercultural and multicultural education today more than ever before could be decisive on younger generations’ minds in the direction of shaping a global awareness. Merryfield (2008) describes global awareness as a mindset that students need in order to survive in a world ‘increasingly characterised by economic, political, cultural, environmental and technological interconnectedness’ (383). Merryfield has suggested that