Human beings inhabit a symbolic reality that articulates meaning. This is culture understood as a web of meanings that actually builds our identity by providing guidance in the complexity of our environment. It is the complex interplay between identity and alterity, between interiority and exteriority, between familiarity and strangeness. Worldviews set up borders that delimit one's own world and others' ground by establishing stereotypes and prejudices. This article presents the results of a research project on prejudices towards the other in (...) students majoring in Education and Psychology with the aim of offering some reflections on what is at stake in social exclusion policies. (shrink)

Literally before our eyes, the modeling of global development, or world modeling, has, during the past five to seven years, advanced from the initial experiments of individual groups of enthusiasts to the status of an independent sphere of scientific research enriched each year by new and ever larger teams of experts and by whole institutes.