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as prejudiced, any effort to diminish the impact of prejudices has to use a more sophisticated understanding beyond good and bad, black and white.
The main task of academic research on prejudice is to find the reasons for the ongoing but ever-changing existence of prejudices, to look for the structures and functions of prejudices. To get an understanding of prejudices, we have to ask many questions—without hoping to get one single answer, but in the realistic hope of getting more and more answers.
The idea of editing a handbook on prejudice was not prompted by the quest for the one and only answer. There is no answer—there is only an array of sometimes contradicting answers. The handbook is not so much about answers, anyway, but about looking behind seemingly convincing answers and eliminating certain interpretations of prejudices which are themselves based on prejudiced bias.
The handbook is based on the understanding that only an interdisciplinary approach can provide the necessary in-depth reflection on the “state of the art”. There is no discipline able to claim that its specific approach ought to be superimposed on all other disciplines. The resulting discourse has to be comprehensible in all the realms of the different academic milieus.
Prejudices do exist and will exist. The option society has is not to eliminate prejudices but to find ways of living with them, of reducing and controlling the explosive, potentially murderous consequences prejudices may have, of deconstructing some of the constructions behind specific prejudices.
Prejudices are the result of the socialisation process. Therefore, education is the most suitable instrument when it comes to dealing with prejudices, as it enables people to adapt to a specific environment. Education is the most important, logical consequence of any programme designed to fight prejudices.
This handbook is not about “best practices” in education. However, it presents a set of insights, explanations, and theories which can be used to develop “best practices”. Academic by nature, the handbook is not a textbook for the improvement of an educational agenda. But it does