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The COVID-19 pandemic that since January 2020 has been battering different regions, countries, and continents has not only paralysed much of the world's economic activities, but it has also made an impact on the educational work of schools and families, teachers, and communities. In this brief contribution, we will sketch the effects of the pandemic on indigenous children and teenagers in Veracruz, Mexico, who are being affected by the closure of their schools--schools that are part of a public network of intercultural and bilingual education for indigenous students, conceived by the Mexican nation-state with the aim of including an intercultural approach and of taking advantage of the diversity of diversities as a learning resource. After describing the negative impacts the COVID-19 pandemic is having on these children and youngsters, we will briefly outline some positive long-term effects the pandemic and school closure crisis may have on the future of intercultural education in Veracruz and Mexico.

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including analysis of Bertely's "academic activism," contribution of María Bertely Busquets to the Historiography of Education and writing in indigenous languages.

Our main objective is to analyze the different ways in which people involved in the Mexican intercultural education subsystem conceive interculturality. This subsystem is still emerging and we refer to the specific case of Veracruz. We point out the discursive elements implied in the construction of definitions as well as the linguistic screens generated by actors and institutions. How are significations, translations and adaptations in intercultural education models changed when passing from a European "migrant" context to a Mexican indigenous one? Through an ethnography of intercultural discourses, we analyze the way in which Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural teachers of its campus Selvas produce alternative discourses, which are critical toward exogenous interculturality and focused on empowering local subaltern subjects.

In this interview, Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos addresses, on the one hand, the process of transnationalisation of universities and the neoliberalisation of the classical model of the European university. On the other hand, he stresses that the recognition of difference and internal pluralism of science, which have pervaded the universities during the last decades, is now losing steam. However, he believes that the emergence of the Epistemologies of the South he proposes may contribute to the re-foundation of a new university more suited to the ethos of the 21st century, since the reconstruction or reinvention of confrontational politics requires an epistemological transformation. Therefore, he proposes a new, polyphonic university (or better, pluriversity) as this epistemological transformation unfolds. This means that the political alliances of the future will have an epistemological dimension characterized by an articulation or combination of different and differently relevant kinds of knowledge.

The article "MULTICULTURALISM, INTERCULTURALITY, AND EDUCATION: 30 years of knowledge states of COMIE" from the Mexican Journal of Educational Research highlights the importance of the knowledge states of the Mexican Council of Educational Research (COMIE) in Mexico. These knowledge states synthesize educational research in the field of multiculturalism, interculturality, and education in response to the demands of social movements and public policies related to cultural diversity. The article also mentions the expansion of intercultural and bilingual education in Mexico, as well as the challenges faced by researchers in this field. Sylvia Schmelkes addresses the topic of intercultural education in Mexico, emphasizing the importance of inclusive and equitable education that values cultural diversity and promotes peaceful coexistence among different ethnic groups. She proposes strategies such as the training of teachers in intercultural topics and the implementation of educational programs that foster respect and appreciation for cultural diversity. [Extracted from the article]

Intercultural education has arisen in the last two decades as an intersectional field of academic knowledge and professional development, located at the borders and in the confluence of the multicultural paradigm in the social sciences, the anthropology of education, and other interdisciplinary subfields commonly known as Intercultural Studies. As will be discussed throughout this article, the thematic range represented by the broad topos of interculturality-in-education is not limited to questions about minority groups, but is closely linked to core issues of national identity and broad societal identification processes. Therefore, in order to be able to critically engage in a fruitful, truly "intercultural" dialog between multicultural theorists and activists, on the one hand, and between academic and practitioners' knowledge on diversity, we need a particularly, and constantly, self-reflexive and mutually comparative hermeneutical approach. In this way, we can avoid the traps and bridge the biases of the underlying, but omnipresent, self-fulfilling, and self-essentializing identity discourses in broader national society as a whole. (Contains 1 note and 1 figure.)

Religious education (RE) is a persistently "hot topic" in contemporary Spain. Although nominally Catholic, majority Spanish society tends to be sharply divided with regard to the issue of religion in education: more conservative and Church-attending parents approve of the still overwhelming presence of Catholic teachers, trained and chosen by the Catholic Church, who teach (confessional Catholic) religion in both public and confessional primary and secondary schools. More liberal or progressive parents reject this "intrusion" of the Church as reminiscent of "national Catholicism" and favour a strict state-Church separation similar to the French laicite model. This bipolar conflict has become more complex recently. The current dynamics of pluralisation of confessional RE at school, which is currently being implemented in several pilot primary schools in districts with high percentages of Muslim (particularly Maghrebien) as well as Protestant (increasingly Latin American) immigrants, meets strong resistance, not only from the Catholic Church, but also from those who struggle for a completely "laicist" solution. The following analysis of qualitative and quantitative questionnaire data designed and collected in the frame of the comparative REDCo project ("Religion in Education: a contribution to Dialogue or a factor of Conflict in transforming societies of European Countries, sixth framework programme") presents an approach to youngsters' attitudes and experiences with confessional RE. (Contains 15 notes, 1 table, and 1 figure.)