Diversity, Intercultural Encounters, and Education

This book concerns the challenges and tensions rising from mass migration flows, unbalanced north-south and east-west relations and the increasing multicultural nature of society. The scope of the book’s theme is global, addressing diversity and identity, intercultural encounters and conflict, and the interrogations of a new socio-political order or paradigm. Thus, it highlights some of the most poignant and challenging outcomes of cultural diversity faced more or less palpably by everyone everywhere in today’s societies.

The book’s theme of multi- and pluriculturality is of particular current interest in the academic, socio-political, economic and entrepreneurial spheres. It covers Western and non-Western perspectives, representing a valuable resource in terms of international dialogue and experimentation. The chapters are complimentary, completing a rigorous theoretical framework offering detailed presentation and analysis of the phenomenon of diversity as encountered in society and the educational setting and at large viewed in a multidisciplinary multiperspective fashion. Among the theories and concepts represented are those intrinsic to sociology, psychology, political science, economics, history, literature, pedagogy, communication and linguistics.

Susana Goncalves is an Adjunct Professor at the Polytechnic of Coimbra, a researcher at the Research Unit for Education and Training/University of Lisbon, Director of the Centre for the Study and Advancement of Pedagogy in Higher Education (CINEP) and Secretary General of the academic European Erasmus network CICE (Children’s identity and Citizenship in Europe).

Markus A. Carpenter is a sociologist and an ESL tutor at the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra. He has been a member of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American studies since 1995 and is writing a dissertation on the cinematic adaptations of Bradbury’s works. He is also a Portuguese to English translator.