EDUCATION, INTERCULTURALITY AND INCLUSION. HUMAN RIGHTS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE CHALLENGES FOR VIOLATED DIVERSITIES IN THE AMERICAS
This symposium originated in Vienna, with the purpose of creating a space for the dialogue of knowledges with a comprehensive, interdisciplinary view of reality, presenting theoretical and methodological elements that guide research on Education, Interculturality and Inclusion. Within this context lie the challenges facing Human Rights and Social Justice in the Americas, with the reconfiguration of the pattern of capitalist accumulation—which fosters greater violence and increases inequalities toward diversity within diversity—as a turning point. Paradoxically, this occurs within a framework of profuse regulations and increasing “protection” measures for vulnerable groups. Today, sharing research advances from different theoretical-methodological approaches is essential for understanding the objects of knowledge within this line of research.
The trajectory of this symposium reflects the formation of a plural academic group that has fostered a dialogue of knowledges from a comprehensive and interdisciplinary perspective, in which the following have been discussed: The intercultural paradigm—and, within this framework, the intercultural approach and intercultural education, grounded in a critical and decolonial perspective and its derivation into policies of recognition; Inclusion in the Social and Educational spheres, and Inclusive Education within the context of social policies and programs; the diversity of diversities in alterity and processes of interculturalization; and Human Rights as a framework for social interaction and coexistence, and as a means for achieving Social Justice toward overcoming vulnerabilities.
The institutional perspective and normative frameworks are unavoidable for recognition, citizenship, and the democratic exercise of life in society for all people, and for avoiding violence, segregation, discrimination and racism. One question is why policies for access to Human Rights are still needed, if they are already regulated and established. Today, targeted policies, positive discrimination, and affirmative action are insufficient for addressing poverty, and similarly insufficient for addressing diversity.
The purpose of this symposium is to find the turning points and axes for continuing to problematize the objects of knowledge in the research presented.
The institutional spaces in which we develop our academic activities carry a social commitment to society, because education has a public character, and, in this context, to the diversity of diversities. The challenge remains access to human rights for social justice, toward the management of spaces where differences and different points of view can meet to form an intercultural and inclusive “we.”
