text: Can There Be Pluralism Without Conflict? - MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library
  Can There Be Pluralism Without Conflict?
  Todd, Sharon (2009) Can There Be Pluralism Without Conflict? Philosophy of Education Yearbook. pp. 51-59. ISSN 8756-6575
  One of the dreams of education is to create conditions for more peaceful forms of coexistence across human divisiveness — a dream that has shaped efforts in intercultural, multicultural, and cosmopolitan educational projects alike. Such maneuvers regularly cast pluralism in terms of "diversity," "multiplicity," and "difference," and largely claim that the "recognition" of identities, achieved most often through dialogue, constitutes the political hope for developing a more inclusive democracy. In this sense, democracy is seen to be pluralist in its intent to account for the wide variety of cultural traditions, ethnic groupings, linguistic communities, and religious beliefs in human society. By ingesting these, so to speak, into democratic processes, the hope is that we better nourish the body politic. But are the terms by which we often identify such variation adequate to facing the question of human pluralism and what pluralism means for democracy? And is it the case that dialogue across such variation — and the recognition to which this supposedly leads — are the optimal ways of promoting democratic possibility and dealing with conflict?