The International Social Science Journal (ISSJ), founded by UNESCO in 1949, is published quarterly.
Its purpose is to bridge diverse communities of social scientists, working in different problems and disciplines and in different parts of the world. It provides information and debate on subjects of interest to an international readership, written by an equally international range of authors. The ISSJ has a particular interest in policy-relevant questions and interdisciplinary approaches. It serves as a forum for review, reflection and discussion informed by the results of relevant research, rather than as an outlet of “first publication” for the results of individual research projects.
March 2010
Editorial Adviser: Sophia Labadi
Cultural diversity remains amongst the most charged of issues in the contemporary global field. Considered to be at once the dominant ideology of our times, the glorious translation of identity politics into policy, and a masked for of neo-colonialism, cultural diversity elicits controversy on both the left and right.
Since its inception, UNESCO has been a central force in longstanding debates on racism, culture, and plurality. More recently, UNESCO has become one of the most important voices in shaping the debates on cultural diversity which it steadfastly tries to reconcile with its intellectual commitment to concrete universalism.
The papers assembled here emerge as an intellectual supplement to UNESCO’s 2009 World Report on Cultural Diversity and thus critically reflect on the political, social and subjective implications of “cultural diversity”. By examining how the concept is deployed and “lived” in a variety of contexts, this volume serves to demystify the reception of “cultural diversity” as an idea that is intrinsically emancipatory, while simultaneously problematizing many of the assumptions about difference and uniformity that serve to naturalize the concept in policy, practice, and scholarship.
Hence, this volume attempts to explore the horizon of cultural diversity and examines it in relation to questions of cultural rights, multilingualism, post and anti-multiculturalism, media representations of otherness, climate change and biodiversity. Whether reduced to a buzzword or elevated to the basis of new forms of global governance to come, cultural diversity is a social fact and one which still merits interdisciplinary critical attention.
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Next issue (200): Brain and Aggression
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John Crowley