One of the dreams of education is to create conditions for more peaceful forms
of coexistence across human divisiveness — a dream that has shaped efforts in
intercultural, multicultural, and cosmopolitan educational projects alike. Such
maneuvers regularly cast pluralism in terms of “diversity,” “multiplicity,” and
“difference,” and largely claim that the “recognition” of identities, achieved most
often through dialogue, constitutes the political hope for developing a more
inclusive democracy. In this sense, democracy is seen to be pluralist in its intent to
account for the wide variety of cultural traditions, ethnic groupings, linguistic
communities, and religious beliefs in human society. By ingesting these, so to speak,
into democratic processes, the hope is that we better nourish the body politic. But are
the terms by which we often identify such variation adequate to facing the question
of human pluralism and what pluralism means for democracy? And is it the case that
dialogue across such variation — and the recognition to which this supposedly leads
— are the optimal ways of promoting democratic possibility and dealing with
conflict?
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