Adult Education and Difference (International Issues in Adult Education, 36)

The world ecological system is marked by difference throughout. There is social difference with different identities, shifting and transmuting, being forged, and extra-human differences. All these have implications for intra human and human/non-human earth relations. This aspect is not always recognised and valorised. Education, though not an independent variable, still can be mobilised, together with other sources of potential transformation, to redress this situation marked by aggressions, micro and macro, inertia and indifference. It represents a number of immediate challenges for Adult Education. This compendium is intended as a useful resource in this regard. It maps out a kaleidoscope of myriad differences and suggests options for overcoming the various obstacles that stand opposed to those who seek fulfilment in the way they are discursively located. The obstacles are a dent on efforts to living in communion with the rest of the cosmos. The utopian view is that of different species living in harmony with each other. This book emphasises social/ecological justice, intersectionality and relationality as the targets for Adult Education in this relatively still new millennium.

Contributors are: Sharifah Salmah Binti Abdullah, Thi Bogossian, Lauren Bouttell, Lidiane Nunes de Castro, Anyela Nathalie Gomez Deantonio, Preeti Dagar, Raquel Galeano Giminez, Ksenija Joksimović, Kainat Khurshid, Robert Livingston, Peter Mayo, Sonia Medel, Yunah Park, Zainab Sa’id Sa’ad, Bonnie Slade, Gameli Kodzo Tordzro, Agnieszka Uflewska and Aisara Yessenova.

Bonnie Slade, Ph.D. (2008), University of Toronto, is Professor, University of Glasgow. She has published in the areas of adult education, power relations and migration in journals, monographs, and edited books, including Learner-Centred Education for Adult Migrants in Europe (Brill, 2021).

Peter Mayo is Professor and UNESCO Chair in Global Adult Education, University of Malta. This is his 25th book, only 9 of which are edited. Widely published, he is the editor of Brill's series 'International Issues in Adult Education', editor of Convergence: An International Adult Education Journal and founding editor of Postcolonial Directions in Education. He has been inducted into the International Adult Continuing Education Hall of Fame.

Thi Bogossian, Ph.D. (2024), University of Surrey, is Teaching Fellow in Global Development, University of East Anglia. They have published on education and difference in journals such as International Studies in Sociology of Education, Postcolonial Directions in Education, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.