Acute Challenges for Intercultural Education

As we started work on this volume in early 2015, the full effects of the massive displacement of human beings due to violence and economic hardship in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa were just beginning to be felt in the countries toward which these refugees had made (and were still making) their way. As of this writing, in the spring of 2016, the long-term social, economic and cultural consequences of this ongoing ‘migration’ – particularly for Europe, where a great many of the refugees have sought asylum – can still only be guessed. In the short-term, however, one has become accustomed to speaking of a ‘refugee crisis’, and Europe is not the only place where this crisis has produced political upheavals that three years ago would scarcely have been imaginable: Above all, a powerful resurgence of nationalist political parties, sentiments and rhetoric. One thing has become clear: integration will be perhaps the single most urgent question facing European and other Western host societies in the near and foreseeable future. To a large degree, the course of Europe and the West, and certainly of the European Union itself as a political and economic body, will be determined by how that question is answered. Thus, a scholarly volume focusing on performative approaches to intercultural education arrives, albeit unintentionally, at a portentous moment.

Though refugees leave much behind – their homes and possessions, their jobs and daily routines, their friends and often their families – they bring their cultures with them. For many, this is all they have left. They may arrive disoriented, exhausted and penniless, but they retain the inexhaustible wealth of their languages and arts, their values and customs, their religious beliefs and practices.