Habitus, reflexivity and the realization of intercultural capital: The (untapped) potential of intercultural education

Abstract

The need to appreciate a wide range of different intercultural experiences seems to be more than obvious in the context of intercultural education. However, in this era, characterized by the hegemony of neoliberal educational policies, the less dominant and often more colloquial socio-cultural intercultural knowledge runs the risk of suffering a continuous institutional and curricular marginalization. To counteract such forms of symbolic violence and to create teaching environments that value a wide range of processes for the realization of intercultural capital, intercultural education needs to overcome the notions of “bad habitus” and “good reflexivity”, since these prematurely discredit the value of people's practicality, and at the same time they fail to problematize the sociocultural contingency of their reflective capacities. In a critical appropriation of Bourdieu's conceptualization of human agency, this article underlines the reconciliation between reflexivity and habitus, with particular interest in the processes of realization of intercultural capital and the (untapped) potential of intercultural education.