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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.

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.

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.)

Multicultural discourse has reached Latin American higher education in the form of a set of policies targeting indigenous peoples. These policies are strongly influenced by the transfer of European notions of "interculturality", which, in the Mexican context, are understood as positive interactions between members of minority and majority cultures. In Mexico, innovative and often polemical "intercultural universities or colleges" are being created by governments, by NGOs or by pre-existing universities. This trend towards "diversifying" the ethnocultural profiles of students and curricular contents coincides with a broader tendency to force institutions of higher education to become more "efficient", "corporate" and "outcome-oriented". Accordingly, these still very recently established "intercultural universities" are often criticised as being part of a common policy of "privatisation" and "neoliberalisation" and of developing curricula particular to specific groups which weakens the universalist and comprehensive nature of Latin American public universities. Indigenous leaders, on the contrary, frequently claim and celebrate the appearance of these new higher education opportunities as part of a strategy of empowering actors of indigenous origin or African descent. Going beyond this polemic, this paper presents the first findings of an activist anthropological and ethnographically-based case study of the actors participating in the configuration of one of these new institutions of higher education, the "Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural" (UVI), located on the Mexican gulf coast. This article examines the way UVI has appropriated the discourse of interculturality on the basis of fieldwork conducted in the four indigenous regions where the UVI offers a B.A. in Intercultural Management for Development. The study focuses on the actors' teaching and learning practices, which are strongly shaped by an innovative and hybrid mixture of conventional university teaching, community-oriented research and "employability"-driven development projects. (Contains 3 figures and 2 notes.)