This book tackles the role education can play in dealing productively and peacefully with the challenges of the localization as well as the globalization of difference. The authors focus on how the politics of difference influences and is influenced by educational programs and provisions in Canada and, possibly, elsewhere in the world. They also discuss how different theories of knowledge define and represent new and established notions and practices of schooling and social development.
Important factors, such as social class, race, and gender, are explored in the authors' investigation of the politics of difference in spaces of public schooling. Ghosh and Abdi contend that despite the rhetoric of official multiculturalism, and multicultural education, the realities on the ground still depict a Canadian public space in which cultural minorities and the peoples of First Nations continue to be, relatively speaking, marginalized. The authors conclude that with the continuities of the Euro-centred focus, these policies and their possible praxes have not hitherto achieved the desired goals of true multiculturalism.

Ratna Ghosh is James McGill Professor and William C. Macdonald Professor at McGill University, where she was also Dean of the Faculty of Education. The recipient of several awards from national and international organizations, she was featured in Time magazine as one of “Canada’s Best in Education.”

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