DGfE (German Society for Educational Science) Congress “Bewegungen”

Contribution: Critical Diversity Literacy – Tensions and challenges in international research collaborations with focus on diversity

Based on experiences from an international research cooperation, Melissa Steyn, Ulla Klingovsky and Georges Pfründer explored the question of what contribution critical diversity literacy (CDL) can make to international research cooperation, how it should be further developed and what effects it can have on other research and educational practices.

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the social transformation processes of recent decades – caused among other things by flight and migration – a broad interest to and new focus on topics regarding diversity have been inspiring changes in global education systems. The core idea of the diversity discourse is the “recognition of human diversity and the pluralisation of life forms in their individual, social and political dimensions” (Rosenstreich 2011, p. 232). At the same time, we witness how socio-political discourses attempt to curb various fundamental rights, how opportunities for participation and social inclusion are restricted and how forms of diversity and otherness are merely used to enrich the “own” (cf. Purtschert/Lüthi/Falk 2012). Furthermore, empirical studies regarding structural racism and research on exclusion mechanisms in the education systems show that the recognition of diversity is far from being a lived practice (cf. Bader/Fibi 2012; Becker/Jäpel/Beck 2013; Haenni Hoti 2015). On the contrary, these findings indicate that the social processes that produce (injust) differences are often veiled and escape our scrutinity. Questions of such recognition are yet to be addressed and diversity still calls for our active engagement (cf. Gomolla/Radtke 2007). In state educational institutions in particular, the need to consider aspects of diversity is particularly acute, not least because of the concept of social justice and democracy which is fundamental to their social educational mission.

The international research co-operation between a university of education in the “Global North” and a South African university is informed by this context. The ambition of the initiating tream is to develop an intercultural collaboration that opens up spaces in which different social and cultural positions come into contact with each other and to initiate movements of negotiation of apparent differences (cf. Sternfeld 2013). Considerung these areas of tension, the focus is therefore on the following questions:

• what knowledge and skills do researchers need to develop in order to recognise difference as a productive force and to creatively generate new knowledge
• how can these skills be applied to educational practice, in particular for training and further education at tertiary level?

In the process of the research collaboration, these challenges were discussed at the symposium from two overarching theoretical perspectives:

• to reflect and discuss these challenges through the lens of critical diversity literacy, a concept developed in the context of post-apartheid in South Africa which provides a framework for analyzing our cultural, social and political environments. With this tool, social power relations, historically constructed differences and the conflicts associated with them are analyzed and scrutinized for their effects in concrete current situations.
• to consider challenges of transnational cooperations in which we explore how spaces for negotiation can be constellated in the form of “contact zones” within which colonial-asymmetrical power relations can be analyzed (Pratt 2008).

The contributions outlined these theoretical reference points, placed them in relation to research cooperation and discussed to what extent this knowledge can be made productive towards the context of university teaching, continuing education and art education.