ABSTRACT
Child and Youth Care is an international community that is bound together by our dedication to children, youth, families, and the communities in which they live. Due to our geographical distances, varied cultural contexts, political realities, and a plethora of social issues to be addressed, it is easy (even tempting) to imagine ourselves as inherently or naturally attuned to issues of diversity and colonization as they pertain to multicultural practice. And yet, when an e-mail request was received on CYC-net in 2011 asking for a comprehensive resource for multicultural practice in CYC, the response was not overwhelming. This is not to say there are not excellent practices that are happening in the day-to-day praxis 1 in which we engage; rather it suggests that when it comes to collecting these stories of cultural diversity and, more specifically, the problematic unfolding of some of these stories, there remains hesitancy in the field. This hesitancy, in part, is due to assuming we are practicing in postcolonial times, where all the messiness, the doubting, and the pain have been “dealt” with. The authors of this volume suggest otherwise and their words are an important contribution to the field. They are a diverse group of practitioners but they share a common concern that the term multicultural practice grooms hegemonic interventions that do not critically take up issues of power, difference, colonialism, Whiteness, or species, to name a few. Although the title of this issue is “Troubling Multiculturalism,” the language within this issue stretches this term, troubles it, and at times, re-invents it.
