Multicultural Dialogue Dilemmas, Paradoxes, Conflicts [Hardcover]

As cross-cultural migration increases democratic states face a particular challenge: how to grant equal rights and dignity to individuals while recognizing cultural distinctiveness. In response to the greater number of ethnic and religious minority groups, state policies seem to focus on managing cultural differences through planned pluralism. This book explores the dilemmas, paradoxes, and conflicts that emerge when differences are managed within this conceptual framework. After a critical investigation of the perceived logic of identity, indicative of Western nation-states and at the root of their pluralistic intentions, the author takes issue with both universalist notions of equality and cultural relativist notions of distinctiveness. However, without identity is it possible to participate in dialogue and form communities? Is there a way out of this impasse? The book argues in favor of communities based on nonidentitarian difference, developed and maintained through open and critical dialogue.

Gressg?rds book is impressive for its wide array of philosophical voices. She manages to bring together theories from different theorists/philosophers, integrating them in a way that gives new meaning to certain philosophical conundrums.???Journal of Gender Research

What is important about this book is less the conclusions that are arrived at than the rigour and depth with which the conditions of social being are examined.???Acta Sociologica

This thought-provoking book is beneficial reading for those who are interested in a? deeper understanding of the dynamics of equality and diversity, related to the division between us and the others.????The Nordic Journal of Migration Research

&the value of Gressg?rds work lies in the conceptual exploration of the roots of our sense-making and a fundamental effort to question it andl3,