The UNESCO-UV Chair on Global Education in the Mediterranean: Studies for the Pau, Interculturality and Sustainability celebrate the "II Congreso internacional de Educación global en el Mediterráneo: horizontes pedagógicos para la igualdad y la justicia social" the 23, 24, and 25 October, 2024 at the Aula Magna from the Faculty of Philosophy and Education Sciences from the Universitat de València.
In our globalised world it seems that freedom is the fundamental value. After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and with the expansion of the free market economy, we can see the rise of liberalism as a dominant ideology not only in the Western world, as Kohlberg (1980) predicted, but in one way or another also on a planetary level. But where are such decisive values as equality and solidarity, and can a concept of freedom really be articulated socially, politically and educationally without said values?
In Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty’s (2021) recent book, he devotes himself precisely to investigating the question of inequality in today's world. Piketty argues that modern inequality is characterised by a "set of discriminatory practices between social statuses and ethno-religious origins that are exercised with a violence poorly described in the meritocratic fairy tale" (p. 12). Think of homeless people, or those that come from neighbourhoods (or countries) of hunger, violence or poverty; or the people who drown in the sea, in our Mediterranean... So, the author continues, we need a new universalist and egalitarian horizon that adequately addresses the challenges posed by inequality, climate change and migratory movements. Otherwise, everything points to the rise of identity movements, the advance of the murderous identities mentioned by Maalouf (2012) and of hate speeches, as well as the expansion of authoritarianism and attacks on liberal democracy itself in what is already known as post-democracy (Gozálvez, Buxarrais and Pérez, 2023).
This is the leitmotiv of our meeting: to reflect together in order to create and forge a new universalist and egalitarian horizon for our times, to rethink once again the meaning and limits of equality, to explore the value of solidarity and social justice as ethical achievements of humanity which cannot be renounced in any way... And all with a view to global education that, from the Mediterranean, addresses the planet and its problems, opening routes for action and reasons for desirable and reasonable hope.
About the Chair
The UNESCO-UV Chair on Global Education emerged from the proposal of the Università di Messina (Italy), in collaboration with the Gandhi Centre (Italy) and the Operazione Colomba (Italy). Its aim is to incorporate other Mediterranean universities and to establish collaboration networks between universities and different organizations of the civil society (secondary education centres, Development NGOs and associations with national and international relevance such as UNICEF, Save The Children, ACNUR, etc.).
