Québec's interculturalism: promoting intolerance in the name of community building

Abstract

As philosophers such as Fendler, Bauman and Young have shown, the concept of community poses significant challenges for diversity by reinforcing similarity, necessarily bracketing that which is viewed as outside, other or strange. In this paper, I interrogate the concept of community as it applies to Québec's intercultural context. I explore how intercultural dialogue, a mechanism to promote intercultural community building has, through a number of public displays of xenophobia, reinforced a discourse of intolerance in Québec's public sphere. Québec's Geography, History, and Citizenship education course is aimed at (re)creating an intercultural ‘micro-society’ in which students practice the demands of intercultural citizenship, such as dialogue. As a curricular requirement, intercultural dialogue places educators with the responsibility of (potentially) perpetuating an intolerant discourse of difference.

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