Solidarity, Interculturality, and Global Education

Solidarity may be considered as a lens through which it is possible to recognize, value and respect diversity. Solidarity is crucial to envisage new forms of global citizenship, through a reconsideration of issues such as human rights, gender and ethnic equity and equality, the environment, sustainable development, poverty, global justice, freedom and peace. As Fred Dallmayr has stated in his work Freedom as Solidarity, solidarity cannot be imposed by sovereign power and (totalitarian) control. The connection between freedom and solidarity implies a transit from the Western-centric perspective to a more global or cosmopolitan constellation in which the polarity between ego and external world, between freedom and social solidarity is overcome and reconciled. (2016: 3). Within this perspective, it is possible to reflect upon interculturality and the role of the intellectual (both teachers and students in the stage of mutual formation) in the transmission of diversity as a crucial means towards global citizenship, sustainability, and solidarity. Interculturality can be envisaged as a soil to rethink solidarity, but it also implies a reflection on solidarity as structural as equality and fraternity. The introductory essay makes reference to such scholars as Raimon Panikkar, Kalpana Das, Edward Said, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, in order to interconnect feminist theories with intercultural and postcolonial studies.