Realizing intercultural capital through intercultural education: prospects and limitations

Nowhere does the need to appreciate a diverse range of different intercultural experiences appear more obvious than in the context of intercultural education. Yet, in times of neoliberal hegemony over educational politics and policies, less socioculturally dominant and often more colloquial funds of intercultural knowledge risk to suffer continued institutional marginalization and curricular obliteration. To counter such forms of symbolic violence and to create learning environments that value a wide range of processes of intercultural capital realization, intercultural education needs to overcome ideas of “bad habitus” and “good reflexivity”, for they prematurely discredit the value of people’s practical sense, while failing to problematize the sociocultural contingency of their reflexive capacities. In a critical appropriation of Bourdieu’s conceptualization of human agency, the present article highlights the reconcilability of reflexivity and habitus, with a particular interest in processes of intercultural capital realization and the (unfulfilled) potential of intercultural education.