Journal of Multicultural Discourses

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Governing superdiversity: a critical commentary

on intercultural understanding

Ronald Walter Greene & Zornitsa Keremidchieva

To cite this article: Ronald Walter Greene & Zornitsa Keremidchieva (2023) Governing
superdiversity: a critical commentary on intercultural understanding, Journal of Multicultural
Discourses, 18:1, 22-32, DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2023.2234888

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2023.2234888

Published online: 16 Jul 2023.

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JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES
2023, VOL. 18, NO. 1, 22–32
https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2023.2234888

COMMENTARY

Governing superdiversity: a critical commentary on

intercultural understanding
Ronald Walter Greene* and Zornitsa Keremidchieva*
Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The proliferation of models of diversity governance signals not just Received 19 June 2023
persistent unease with diversity itself, but also a trend toward Accepted 26 June 2023
increasingly intensive investments in governance and
KEYWORDS
governmentality across political, social, and media platforms. And, Intercultural communication;
following Sara Ahmed (2012), we are cognizant that the Liberalism; migration;
institutionalization of diversity may reinforce as much as it may cultural diversity;
disrupt whiteness. In our response, therefore, we first consider governmentality
Elias and Mansouri’s proposals in the context of diversity
governance as a political project. In a second step, we explore
how cultural difference is expressed in Elias and Mansouri’s idea
of intercultural engagement. Third, we bring into better focus
how communication is envisioned and deployed, activated and
delimited in the interculturalism model that the authors promote.
Ultimately, we argue that at the heart of intercultural understanding
is a peculiar bundling of culture and communication that targets
the interactional order of human relationality in ways consistent
with a liberal social order reproducing its social inequities more
than challenging them.

How diversity is perceived and how it is governed are historically, politically, and culturally
contingent questions. As Elias and Mansouri (2023) make evident through their engage-
ment with Australia’s efforts to respond constructively to its fast-changing demographic
makeup, diverse and pluralistic societies raise myriad theoretical and empirical questions
that also invoke ethical and political concerns. In their paper Elias and Mansouri both
acknowledge and attempt to address this complexity by centering education as a labora-
tory and platform for forging attitudes, behaviors, and values with profound implications
for how a common life can be experienced, managed, and understood in an age of high
mobility and increasingly contested globalization. Its appearance as both a strategy for pro-
moting specific diversity philosophies and cultural values and a testing ground for pedago-
gical interventions to modify the attitudes and behaviors of school leaders, teachers, and
students explains why education is often a battlefield of competing ideologies with diver-
gent views on the purpose of schooling and the appropriateness of ethical interventions.
As communication scholars currently situated in the United States, we can attest that
the challenges and proposals outlined by Elias and Mansouri are neither unique nor

CONTACT Ronald Walter Greene green179@umn.edu

*Each author contributed equally to the production of this article.
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES 23

limited to the Australian context or even the contemporary moment. Australia and the
United States share legacies of settler colonialism which in the present continue to mani-
fest in modern urban metropolitans here and elsewhere (Lechuga and Ackerman 2022;
Primack 2020). In a somewhat ironic way, that same colonial history has generated
both anti-immigrant and anti-indigenous discursive environments ripe with racial and
ethnic prejudice (Gavilanes 2021) and efforts to counteract such modes of social exclu-
sion. The project of ‘inclusion’, however, is far from settled or complete. Instead, it strad-
dles a rather vast continuum from stringent assimilationist and cultural reformist
movements all the way to seemingly laissez faire attitudes that may mask structural
inequalities that steer individuals and communities toward limited options for how to
survive, interact, or express themselves.
From our perspective, the proliferation of models of diversity governance signals not just
persistent unease with diversity itself, but also a trend toward increasingly intensive invest-
ments in governance and governmentality across political, social, and media platforms.
And, following Sara Ahmed (2012), we are cognizant that the institutionalization of diversity
may reinforce as much as it may disrupt whiteness. In our response, therefore, we first con-
sider Elias and Mansouri’s proposals in the context of diversity governance as a political
project. In a second step, we explore how cultural difference is expressed in Elias and Man-
souri’s idea of intercultural engagement. Third, we bring into better focus how communi-
cation is envisioned and deployed, activated and delimited in the interculturalism model
that the authors promote. Ultimately, we argue that at the heart of Elias and Mansouri’s
approach to intercultural understanding is a peculiar bundling of culture and communi-
cation that targets the interactional order of human relationality in ways consistent with
a liberal social order reproducing its social inequities more than challenging them.

Governing frameworks
Elias and Mansouri’s central argument is that intercultural understanding can bridge in
and out of school relations and produce social and political subjects who are more
likely to think and act inclusively, non-prejudicially, and constructively in relation to
people from different cultural backgrounds. The desired consequence or effect of such
dispositions, they believe, would be a society with less inequality and more social
justice. As the authors put it, the goal is ‘to improve school standards, ameliorate racist
attitudes, and create more inclusive and respectful social milieus in the schoolyard and
beyond’ (Elias and Mansouri 2023, 14). From there, a critical and transformative intercul-
tural education is presented as a mechanism of ‘diversity governance’ (2) that is better
than extant multicultural frameworks and previous visions of intercultural education.
For Elias and Mansouri, a strong critical transformative intercultural education is one
that produces ‘deeper cross-cultural pedagogic knowledge and associated intercultural
understanding (ICU)’ (2). They rightfully admonish also that pursuing such futures requires
the development and alignment of pedagogical techniques and micro-practices, insti-
tutional resources and capacities, as well as adequate and conducive policy frameworks.
Thus, Elias and Mansouri join what is now a transnational and transdisciplinary discourse
formation that simultaneously insists on an active approach to managing diversity while
also centering the values of ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion’ (2) in institutional and com-
munal life.
24 R. W. GREENE AND Z. KEREMIDCHIEVA

It is worth pausing for a moment on the concept of diversity governance and the role of
education in it. To begin with, Elias and Mansouri’s work can be situated in a broader field of
efforts to negotiate liberal governance models with pluralistic social contexts. In addition to
the paradigms of multiculturalism (Modood 2013) and interculturalism (Zapata-Barrero
2017) which Elias and Mansouri explore, cosmopolitanism (Fossum 2011; Fossum and
Olsen 2021) can be credited with establishing the global institutional frameworks and the
presumably universal or shared values that the authors invoke. More recently, transnation-
alism has also joined this field of work, less as a normative and more as an empirical project
that simultaneously honors the phenomenon of multi-identity formation and challenges
the preeminent position of the nation-state in framing questions of diversity (Kastoryano
2021). These models differ from each other both in theory and practice, but they appear
to be united in assuming that diversity in itself poses a challenge of some sort and that
such a challenge needs to be actively addressed by global, national or local institutions.
Not surprisingly, education is quickly invoked as an appropriate and convenient insti-
tutional lever for managing the social field, but doing so still requires critical recognition
of public schooling’s own diverse political histories and current challenges. As Danielle
Allen (2016) has pointed out,
in our current context, it is entirely reasonable that the justification for the co-optation of edu-
cation by the state, for the conversion of education into a sociopolitical practice, might be
utilitarian – a state asserts authority over education as a matter of securing social reproduc-
tion. (12)

But in modernity, states have taken different forms spurred by the proliferation of political
ideologies such as various forms of conservatism, liberalism, socialism, and communism.
Across that spectrum, educational systems can be oriented to different ends and a state’s
prerogative may not necessarily entail the task of promoting either equality or human
flourishing. Hence the connection between education and governance itself invites criti-
cal reflection. We are well aware of the educational system’s role as an ideological state
apparatus, but schools often find it difficult to accomplish the competing demands to
produce a ‘well-tempered self’ capable of both the communal virtues of political citizen-
ship and the individual maximization of education for economic success (Miller 1993).
Elias and Mansouri posit intercultural understanding as a way to generate the attitudinal
adjustments necessary for generating a well tempered self that may also be useful to the
twin needs of state legitimacy and/or capital accumulation.
To what extent does interculturalism’s reliance on the political infrastructures of liberal-
ism for both its social imaginaries and procedural mechanisms empower or hinder its
capacity to serve as a critical project? If, as Elias and Masouri acknowledge, intercultural
education seeks to ‘decolonize knowledge and challenge “dominant hegemony, hierar-
chies, and concentrations of power and control”’ (6), then could it really get detangled
from liberalism’s own role in producing those very conditions of inequality and colonial-
ity? With its emphasis on interaction and intersubjective dialogue interculturalism might
seem unbound, at least in principle, from the needs of state legitimacy and capitalist
reproduction. However, much of its pedagogical arsenal is borrowed from liberal technol-
ogies of the self and implementing it through state-run educational systems in liberal
democracies may make a material difference for what it actually produces. Plus, we
should all be careful not to overclaim the ability of schooling to produce critical or
 JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES 25

docile students since students (and teachers and parents) have their own ways of moving
through and disconnecting from the goals of schooling. Thus, it is worth asking whether
intercultural understanding is an outcome exclusive to managed educational processes. If
not, then the comparative value of pursuing it through state-affiliated institutionalized
processes of subjectification needs to be considered given IUs reliance on state and cor-
porate means of education.
Another way to stage the issue is by thinking a bit more carefully about what might
render intercultural education into a critical rather than a purely instrumental project.
Michel Foucault (1996) argues that we are always subject to regimes of governance,
but a critical attitude emerges in the ‘art of not being governed like that at this price’
(384). Elias and Mansouri believe that multiculturalism’s emphasis on the politics of rec-
ognition does not go ‘deep enough’ to produce intercultural understanding and their pre-
ference for a ‘deeper’ knowledge of and respect for cultural differences suggests that
multiculturalism simply doesn’t go far enough on that score. Hence, they suggest that
intercultural education is a better model because it provides a more active intervention
into the relational dynamics between individuals marked by forms of cultural differ-
ence/superdiversity. In this framework, to speak of diversity governance is to suggest
that diversity and more so, superdiversity, is a reality in need of governance. Hence, super-
diversity generates policy questions about the kinds of interventions into this reality that
are necessary for solving its problems. A critical question, in particular, might ask more
directly how models of diversity governance might be constrained by the social construc-
tion of the very reality they wish to address and transform.
Elias and Mansouri’s observation that ‘the need for policies fostering social inclusion
has become intertwined with security concerns felt across society including within edu-
cational settings’ provides one such social construction that deserves comment. To
what extent is the strategic rationale for interculturalism embedded in security as a
binding force for promoting social order? What exactly is the nature of the cultural inter-
action that raises questions of societal (individual) social (dis)order? Is the security concern
presumed to be of the ‘clash of civilizations’ type (Huntington 1996) or something else? If
intercultural education is advanced as a remedy, whose lack of social inclusion is being
imagined as a threat to social order? Our concern is that aligning the purpose of intercul-
turalism too closely to security transforms the pedagogical tactics of interculturalism into
‘techniques of security’ (Neocleous 2000, 43) that code cultural differences (and the scope
of these differences is expansive) as potential threats to the social order and, thus, subject
to the police power of the state (Neocleous, x). A more critical attitude suggests that
embedding intercultural education as a technique of security into the police power of
the state is too high a price.

Culture
As ‘a conceptual work in progress’ (Messner and Vertovec 2015, 542), Vertovec’s (2007)
concept of ‘superdiversity’ is deployed by Elias and Mansouri to resituate the rationale
and to intensify the exigency for intercultural education. While Elias and Mansouri
apply it to contemporary Australia and others have used it in reference to the European
(Messelink and ten Thije 2012) and North American (Maron et al. 2021) contexts, super-
diversity pushes back on how one might operationalize the ‘cultural’ in intercultural
26 R. W. GREENE AND Z. KEREMIDCHIEVA

education. In our reading, the notion of ‘superdiversity’ is meant to do more than capture
the congregation of people from different backgrounds in spaces of close proximity.
Rather, the concept aims to replace the typically uni-dimensional and static cultural
terms of both popular and technical discourses of difference. As Vertovec (2007) puts
it, ‘the proliferation and mutually conditioning effects of additional variables shows
that it is not enough to see diversity only in terms of ethnicity, as is regularly the case
both in social science and the wider public sphere’ (1025). In response, the lens of super-
diversity aim to capture ‘the interplay of these factors’ (Vertovec 2007, 1025) and to reflect
people’s multiple identities (Geldof 2023, 345) and relational opportunities (Stansfeld
2023, 27), emphasizing their dynamic and constructed character.
Viewed this way, however, superdiversity may appear as much a challenge as an
obvious justification for Elias and Mansoury’s pedagogical agenda. To begin with, even
if it remains beholden to a socio-scientific urge to model social phenomena in terms of
‘factors’ and ‘variables’ while bemoaning their seemingly endless complexity, superdiver-
sity alludes to the dynamic character of cultural variegation in a way that spotlights the
material significance of local contexts and governance regimes in producing the very
diversity that is then posed as a source of concern. For example, in drawing attention
to the punitive dynamics of the European border regime, Suzanne M. Hall (2017) calls
for ‘mooring super-diversity to a brutal migration milieu that both requires and refutes
the migrant, thereby producing the volatile life-world of migration in public discourse,
policy, and everyday life’ (1570). In this view, European security considerations about
migration generate superdiversity and precarity as political effects rather than precondi-
tions. And as Junjia Ye (2023) points out, ‘just as migration processes are highly place-
based and dynamic, processes of diversification are also not universal. There are multiple
modes of negotiating, advocating, experiencing, and producing different forms of diver-
sity that are contingent on historical and geographical circumstances’ (329). Put simply,
anatomical and taxonomical models of diversity can hardly capture the complex and
mobile assemblages through which difference is produced in the contemporary world.
National educational systems and the ways in which they figure–describe, critique,
celebrate or in any other way invoke or activate (super)diversity – then may produce
novel political and social realities. Elias and Mansouri certainly aim to harness that very
possibility when they insist that
approaches that emphasize a critical intercultural discourse, move beyond the recognition of
difference, and promote more engagement and transformative knowledge will be critically
needed. In the absence of a deeper intercultural dialogue, rising levels of ethno-cultural diver-
sity amid persistent social fissures and entrenched inequalities will adversely impact the
experiences of minorities in education and the broader society. (Elias and Mansouri 2023, 2)

They then aim to develop interactional techniques through which to intervene in local
educational sites and the micro-processes of interpersonal and small group encounters,
with the assumption that classrooms can serve as either good approximates or as pre-
ludes to other social settings where intercultural engagements may occur.
What does it mean or take for a classroom to stage and facilitate such encounters,
however? This is where the concept of superdiversity runs into the material constraints
of technocratic settings and ‘outcome’ oriented educational models. As a starting
point, to maximize interpersonal contact, the interventions of intercultural education
 JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES 27

require that student populations be paired in terms of cultural groupings. These group-
ings risk a more static than dynamic notion of culture (Shi-xu, 2023) because it is
unclear how difference would be coded and situated in such occasions. Superdiversity
does not provide ready terms through which to group students together. For example,
students might have salient but unregistered cultural similarities (we go to the same
school, cheer for the same football team, live in the same neighborhood) even if
ethno-racial-religious markers are more present and available for grouping (for
example, the use of specialized religious clothing, a yarmulke, or a hijab). Thus the admin-
istrative imperative of tracking, which requires that some demographic markers are kept
constant, may strain the transformational potential of interculturality.
But shifts in ascribed and avowed cultural identity markers seem to be less of a concern
to Elias and Mansouri than promoting a certain cognitive and affective conversion marked
by ‘a move away from a mere acceptance of different cultures co-existing peacefully, to an
augmented relational exchange and respectful dialogue that can engender transformative
attitudinal change across cultural differences’ (6). The hope is that such relational encoun-
ters would cultivate dispositions that, in turn, would lead to more tolerant and inclusive
political behavior. Yet on that score superdiversity’s emphasis on the dynamic character
of human variegation once again runs against the methodological tools of social
science. Elias and Mansouri’s assessment instrument accounts for time sequence
changes of individuals aggregated as a population. For example, their finding that
longer interventions correlate with stronger attitudinal changes suggests that the inter-
ventions will also require some form of strength training to create more secure anchors.
Otherwise, different kinds of encounters may disrupt the gains in intercultural understand-
ing. Thus, superdiversity poses a challenge to ‘impact’ oriented policy agendas.
The challenge begins with methodological difficulties, but it is not limited to them.
First, the change in interpersonal scale is not isomorphic with the global, regional or
national scale. Second, because intercultural understanding is not static, the need for
intercultural understanding would require constant supervision (to account for any back-
sliding) and new intervention techniques appropriate to new encounters at different
stages of the life-span. Furthermore, since intercultural understanding can tack
between surface and deep levels, it is unclear how deep it must go before finding
bedrock. Put differently, the constant need for intercultural education risks the formation
of moral entrepreneurs selling intercultural education in order to cultivate the ethical dis-
positions of populations. For if the goal of transformative education tacks back and forth
between the individual and the social, the constant need to calibrate the dialectical
relationship between one in light of the other necessitates a never ending quest.
Efforts to better secure these populations’ alignment with a (proper) notion of cultural citi-
zenship entails a need to secure resources dedicated to reproducing intercultural edu-
cation as a regime of diversity governance. At that moment, intercultural education
becomes its own market with values, price points, and managerial rationalities that
may further invert the authority structures of public schools.

Communication
Finally, we wish to engage with the role of communication in Elias and Mansouri’s model.
While particular modes or media of communication are not highlighted in sufficient detail
28 R. W. GREENE AND Z. KEREMIDCHIEVA

either in reference to the specific educational intervention they designed or in the general
sections of the paper, the authors repeatedly invoke the power of ‘dialogue’, ‘engage-
ment’, ‘relational encounters’ ‘deliberation’ and ‘interaction’ as the key levers for
making intercultural education more transformative. We have to assume that such rela-
tional developments could not be carried out without the work of communication
since it is communication that organizes so much of the interactional order between indi-
viduals (Goffman 1983). Moreover, intercultural understanding is as significant a dimen-
sion to theories of interpersonal and public communication as it is to current models
of diversity and global governance. As a value that also invites practical applications, it
is already ensconced in numerous UN and UNESCO documents and it is a common
feature of educational curricula in liberal democracies. In that way, Elias and Mansouri’s
embrace of intercultural understanding as a core concept works within a well-established
paradigm.
Yet it is in this crease between communicative action and realpolitik, between empiri-
cal and normative approaches, that the connection between communication, intercul-
tural understanding, and diversity governance becomes fraught. For starters, efforts to
elevate communication for the sake of critical interventions may downplay the materiality
of interest-based politics even as forms and technologies of communication have long
been implicated in the structural transformations of capitalism that continuously breed
inequality (Fuchs 2020). Furthermore, the communicative techniques of dialogue and
deliberation often deploy ethical models of interaction as second order convictions
that are meant to temper first order convictions, thus, regulating the terms of political
contestation to the purpose of liberal democratic renewal (Greene and Hicks 2005). At
the same time, for all the embrace of communication as a powerful medium of socializa-
tion, there is also built in recognition that ‘changing attitudes and behaviours toward
those who are different from ourselves involves much more than raising cognitive aware-
ness, which we know does not by itself change actions’ (De Leo 2010, 12). Some nuance
and caution in the way communication is invoked and deployed for the sake of intercul-
turalism, therefore, is warranted.
The American experience provides some pertinent lessons in that respect. Here in the
United States the connection between communication and the agendas of intercultural
education emerged during the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, when
high levels of immigration prompted cultural, educational, and government institutions
to develop strategies and techniques for facilitating cross-cultural encounters and for fos-
tering culturally-appropriate behaviors and a democratic ethos among the foreign-born
(Greene 2005; 2013; Hahner 2017; Keremidchieva 2017; 2020a, 2020b). Out of these
efforts, some of which were more egalitarian and others more coercive or crudely assim-
ilationist, the academic research area of intercultural communication emerged to develop
socio-scientific, humanistic, and critical models and theories meant to reframe difference
from an obstacle into a resource or, at least, a manageable social reality. And the ambi-
tions of the field have hardly ever been humble. Reminiscent of Elias and Mansouri’s
express motives, intercultural communication scholars have long described their
project in existential terms. For Asante, Miike, and Yin (2008), for example, ‘intercultural
communication is the only way to mitigate identity politics, social disintegration, religious
conflicts, and ecological vulnerability in the global village. Human survival and flourishing
depends on our ability to communicate successfully across differences’ (1).
 JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES 29

However, as communication is a complex human activity, understanding, managing,

and envisioning the connection between modes and forms of communication, on the
one hand, and social and political outcomes on the other has proven far more difficult
than our disciplinary manifestos would wish to acknowledge. To begin with, it is worth
recognizing that all modes of communication have their histories and cultural contexts.
For example, narrative may be a common communicative form but its features, conven-
tions and functions can vary significantly across cultural contexts and media platforms.
Migrants’ personal narratives in particular signal the fraught ways in which the cultural
self emerges as a situated communicative production (Bardhan and Zhang 2017; Keremid-
chieva 2015). Consequently, to the extent that they operate within the epistemological
paradigm of post-positivism, the communication field in general and the intercultural
communication sub-field in particular continue to struggle with the task of construct
development free from ideological and cultural presumptions (Spitzberg 1989).
Investing in specific constructs, as Elias and Mansouri do with intercultural under-
standing, therefore, requires careful analytic and empirical work of conceptual differen-
tiation and definition so as to avoid overgeneralizing applications and overclaiming
outcomes. The authors are specific that it is not ‘intercultural competence’ that they
seek per se (6). Rather, following intercultural communication scholar Milton
J. Bennett (1998), Elias and Mansouri’s investment is in facilitating ‘dynamic and perfor-
mative’ encounters which they assume will lead students to ‘take a cross-cultural per-
spective transcending cultural boundaries, learning to accept and adapt to other
cultures’ (Elias and Mansouri 6). There appear to be at least two ways communication
concepts and communication processes are put to work here. First, there is the
pursuit of a certain epistemological shift: learners need to come to see knowledge
and beliefs as contingent and movable. But such dynamism may be expressed in
ways other than as intercultural understanding. And while reflective self-awareness
may facilitate cognitive and emotional growth, it is still a good distance away from
the kind of critical consciousness that would support an active stance against inequality
or injustice. A step further, it is worth considering how ‘culture’ is identified in the ‘cross-
cultural perspective’ that Elias and Mansouri seek. Without some strategy of differen-
tiation between ‘cultural’ and other sources for claims, culture can itself become natur-
alized and the conditions of possibility for unwarranted generalizations and stereotype
threats may be born out. Thus, communication and its facilitation are challenging pro-
cesses which invite continuous vigilance and critical reflexivity.
The stakes for such caution are not small as the weight of wishful thinking can bear
down on our foundational presumptions. As a value and ethos, intercultural understand-
ing builds on long-standing postulations that are now receiving critical re-evaluation. At
the root of the interculturalism model is the contact hypothesis stemming from Allport’s
(1954) germinal post WWII study, which suggested that intercultural contact and
exposure might reduce prejudice. Notably, Allport warned that contact, in itself, may
not produce positive outcomes, but may even exacerbate relations. Hence he suggested
that certain conditions would have to be met: (1) groups need to have equal status in the
context of the encounter; (2) the participants should share common goals; (3) there must
be intergroup cooperation; and (4) authorities, law or custom need to be in support of the
engagement. In 2006, Pettigrew and Tropp conducted a meta-analysis of over 500 studies
of the effects of intercultural contact. On the one hand, they affirmed that increasing
30 R. W. GREENE AND Z. KEREMIDCHIEVA

intergroup contact can indeed reduce intergroup prejudice, but they also cast significant
doubt on Allport and subsequent scholars’ understanding of the conditions that might be
conducive to such an outcome and they duly noted studies that documented the oppo-
site effect. Writing as recently as 2019, Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Seth A. Green, and Donald
P. Green conclude that much empirical work still needs to be done before contact
research can reliably guide public policy. It is important, therefore, that our desire to be
relevant beyond the world of academia stays commensurate with our capacity and will-
ingness to be accountable for the concepts and propositions we develop, especially as
our research reaches ever more diverse audiences of scholars, policy makers, and
practitioners.

Conclusion
Let there be no doubt that we share with Elias and Mansouri a resistance to responses to
diversity such as authoritarianism or ethno-nationalism. At the same time, it is important
to avoid models of diversity governance that rely too heavily on educational interventions
designed for attitudinal change to generate responsive and active cultural citizens in a
context of superdiversity. Culture is more than an attribute of individuals or groups; it
is a terrain of struggle negotiated, contested, and made meaningful through a host of
communicative practices. Intercultural understanding wants to invest in regulating the
interactional order by using culture and communication as techniques to promote
student dispositions capable of transcending the politics of cultural difference. Yet
these techniques for prompting human relationality are embedded in long histories of
liberal pedagogical techniques that are often put to work to secure the political and econ-
omic organization of the social order. We have provided reasons for why one might be
careful not to overclaim the success of intercultural understanding for overcoming the
political difficulties of inequality and social injustice that rub against the human potenti-
alities of superdiversity. The promise of Intercultural understanding is its ability to assem-
ble different institutional actors at different scales of the social order into a shared project
of diversity governance. Whether or not intercultural education can scale the classroom,
the workplace, the nation, and the international state system without also being a tech-
nique of security embedded to the police power of the state and the needs of capital in an
age of superdiversity requires further reflection. What it does do in the meantime is pull
together different institutions, populations, and experts into a market of knowledge and
power and it makes an appeal that we invest in its potential as a remedy for managing
cultural difference.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Ronald Walter Greene is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University
of Minnesota (Twin Cities). His research focuses on the material role of communication as a field and
technique of governance in political, educational, and economic contexts.
 JOURNAL OF MULTICULTURAL DISCOURSES 31

Zornitsa Keremidchieva is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at

the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). Working within critical feminist paradigms, her research
investigates the historical and situated role of communication in governing difference in intercul-
tural and international contexts.

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