LTERC SEMINAR SERIES PRESENTS

Liquid Community and the Awkward Resilience of Multiculturalism and Multicultural Education

Presenter: Professor Handel Wright (University of British Columbia, Canada)

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Abstract

How to do research on multiculturalism in the present circumstances - exploration of those circumstances and the complexities of them as opposed to fact that multiculturalism and multicultural education are still there and resilient.

I draw on Bauman's notion of liquidity to point to and acknowledge the reconceptualization of community and the emergence of what we might call "liquid community" (i.e. global, glocal, diasporic, multiracial, transient, expedient, cyber, etc.). However, I also speak to what in the new theoretical arguments about cosmopolitanism has become the mostly unacknowledged resiliency of old forms of community (local, national, even ethnoracially uniform, etc.). My position is that old, solid forms of community remain as stubborn boulders in the stream of new liquid forms. I argue, therefore, for the continued relevance and indeed strategic importance of multiculturalism and multicultural education in addressing socio-cultural difference and justice in and through education and in conceptualizing community in the present moment in which old and new forms of community co-exist.

Speaker Bio

Handel Kashope Wright is Canada Research Chair of Comparative Cultural Studies, David Lam Chair of Multicultural Education; Director of the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education http://www.ccie.educ.ubc.ca/; and Professor of Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Professor Wright is co-editor of the book series African and Diasporic Cultural Studies (University of Ottawa Press); Associate Editor of Critical Arts and serves on the editorial board of several cultural studies and education journals, including Cultural Studies, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Topia, the Canadian Journal of Education, Taboo, the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Education, and Diaspora, Indigenous & Minority Education. He has published extensively on continental and diasporic African cultural studies, cultural studies of education, critical multiculturalism, anti-racist education, post-reconceptualization curriculum theorizing, service learning for social justice, and qualitative research.

His publications include the book, A Prescience of African Cultural Studies (Lang, 2004) and co-edited journal issues on trans-nationalism and cultural studies (Cultural Studies, 23, (5), in press) and paradigm proliferation in educational research (International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19, (1), 2006).

Date of Presentation

26 November 2009