How do we create an inclusive & egalitarian society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved & benefit of the society as a whole?

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Despite progress made over the last decades, MULTICULTURALISM — HOW we can rise up to the challenges of creating a multicultural democracy in the 21C — remains an enduring challenge, all the more urgent as we stand at the junction of retrogressing to the hierarchical & segregationist past rather than progressing towards egalitarian, inclusive & plural ideals.

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While teaching a largely homogeneous group of university students on the subject of MULTICULTURALISM, I observed an interesting phenomenon: When the issue was framed as a 'minority issue' & 'how to treat minorities better,' the issue remained outside of my students, but when it was framed as 'what kind of society do we want to create?' 'how do we ensure equality, fairness & justice for ALL?', then students got riled up about the issue without me having to convince them why the issue mattered & why they should care. This experience taught me that in order to achieve UNITY in society, MULTICULTURALISM had to be framed as a social justice issue that affected us all, including the majority, which brought everyone together in a shared pursuit of shared ideals, rather than a  a 'minority issue,' which maintained a division between the majority & minorities.

 

MULTICULTURAL CHALLENGE creates the SPACE for CRITICAL ANALYSIS & SOCIAL VISIONING that clarifies shared ideals & generates shared vision forward. It serves as the space for:

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• HOLISTIC: Holistically making sense of HOW the intersection between economic, social, cultural & psychological forces is colliding to produce the phenomenon that is being expressed now & HOW it can be addressed in order to create the vision of a society that we believe in;

• ​CLARIFYING: Clarifying that the values of equality, inclusion, justice & fairness are neither Left nor Right ideal but UNIVERSAL ideal — the source of unity — under which different ways of achieving these ideals can be debated & discussed; 

• UNIFYING: Having 'difficult conversations' that nonetheless needs to be discussed & clarified in order to bring different sectors of the society onto the same page & move forward.

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It offers SOCIAL DESIGN WORKSHOPS that engage students in critical analysis of WHERE WE STAND NOW & social visioning of HOW WE CAN MOVE FORWARD, empowering them with critical thinking, interdisciplinary thinking & design thinking skills in direct engagement with urgent issues of our time.  Current offerings are as follows:

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• BEYOND MULTICULTURALISM [8-weeks, online]: How do we create an inclusive & egalitarian society in which diversity is not merely tolerated or managed but fully harnessed as a thriving lived experience for enrichment of everyone involved & benefit of the society as a whole? BEYOND MULTICULTURALISM empowers participants with social consciousness to be able to SEE, with a critical distance, WHY where we stand now is still a problem & HOW we can move beyond where we stand now towards creating a truly multicultural society & HOW we can become active agents of social transformation in the way we choose to create our everyday lives. [MORE>]

• ROOTS OF POPULISM [8-weeks, online]: Despite the eruption of populism across the globe that is throwing liberal democratic values into a disarray, there is little public understanding of what populism is, what's fueling it & what can be done about it.  ROOTS OF POPULISM takes participants through the process of holistically & systematically making sense of how the intersection between economic, social, cultural & psychological forces is fueling the phenomenon of populism that is being expressed now & how it can be addressed at the root. [MORE>]

• CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY [8-weeks, online]: When we say 'democracy' in the West, we mean liberal democracy.  But liberal democratic values — such as freedom, equality, the rule of law — have increasingly come under attack, not only in societies that adopted liberal democracies from the West but within Western liberal democracies themselves. CRISIS OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY explores WHAT we mean by 'liberal' in liberal democracy, WHY it has come under attack & HOW we can restore liberal democratic values as the source of unity rather than division.  [MORE>]