Epistemological dilemmas in teaching critical interculturality: Ideologies and the ‘pseudo-critical’

‘Critical’ approaches have been a trendy epistemic paradigm of interculturality education and research in recent years. From this recognition, we may cease to interpret criticality as a universal concept (with some patterns of theorizing and speaking, for example, frequent employment of the subaltern and minorities rhetorics) that is owned by someone, a community, an institution or a cabal of scholars. While we may be critical of others’ criticalities, there is indeed no consensus on how criticality is procured, which is again an ideology in itself in a battle of ideologies competing for an honorary title. This chapter argues that ‘the critical mode’ designates a way of parsing social realities through whatever lenses one determines to instigate doubt, questioning and critique in the pursuit of undistorted truth. It discusses how the critical intellectual mode of interculturality is a dimension of knowing that needs to centre the subject who is doing the knowing and how that knowing is conditioned by certain parameters that simultaneously accommodate scepticism and social/epistemic justice and unsettle discursive arbitrariness and political distortions. That is, teaching critical interculturality is personalized, context-sensitive and geopolitically situated with some epistemological dilemmas in making sense of the ‘critical’, ‘uncritical’ and the ‘neutral’ or all combined. Copyright © 2025 selection and editorial matter, Fred Dervin; individual chapters, the contributors.