Democracy and the Discourse of Cultural Difference: towards a politics of border pedagogy

Within the last decade in the United States, diverse conservative groups have attempted to undermine the struggles of various progressive social movements that constitute the new politics of cultural difference. In this paper, I analyse how conservatives have sought to transform both the arts and the schools into hegemonic cultural sites. I then focus specifically on the work of conservative Diane Ravitch, who has been a major force in discrediting radical and progressive attempts to implement multicultural curricula in American public education. Finally, I develop a new theoretical cartography around the concept of border pedagogy, which functions as a heuristic metaphor and theoretical space for creating a discourse capable of raising new questions, offering oppositional practices and producing fresh objects of analysis; moreover, such a discourse embodies a political project which serves as a partial response to the assault on difference and culture currently being waged by the New Right in the United States.