TO CITE THIS ARTICLE PLEASE INCLUDE ALL OF THE FOLLOWING DETAILS: Waghid, Yusef (2010). On the limits of cosmopolitanism and a ‘curriculum of refuge’ – A response to Molly Quinn. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 7 (1) http://nitinat.library.ubc.ca/ojs/index.php/tci <access date> On the limits of cosmopolitanism and a ‘curriculum of refuge’ – A response to Molly Quinn Yusef Waghid Stellenbosch University, South Africa If Molly Quinn wanted to introduce her readers to a poetic exploration of cosmopolitanism and curriculum change she succeeded in doing so quite insightfully. She begins and inconclusively ends her essay with poetic language and affirmation of cosmopolitan justice through convincing arguments in defence of a curriculum of refuge. She derives her notion of a curriculum of refuge from Derrida’s (2002) idea of a ‘city of refuge’ which builds on both an ‘acceptance of human vulnerability’ and a capacity for ‘imagining community anew’. For Quinn, in academia a curriculum of refuge ‘is multicultural in terms of inclusive curriculum – anti-racist, anti-oppressive, et al. – a sanctuary for the unsanctioned – different epistemologies, subaltern discourses, other discourses – initiated in audacity for interrogating the apparatuses of welcoming’ (Derrida, 2002) as well as in terms of practices of legitimation. This includes the rights and responsibilities curriculum takes up (or doesn’t), and has (or hasn’t) historically. So conceived, this call may for instance also involve offering protection to children, from a culture of consumerism; a culture that has been called our ‘audit society’ (Quinn, 2010, p. 94). Thus conceived, for Quinn a curriculum of refuge should in fact be a haven for hospitality and multicultural, intercultural, transcultural and postcultural community, thus making room for imaginative transformation of a ‘not-yet’, ‘yet-to-come’ child/children-centred curriculum (Quinn, 2010, p. 95). It is hoped that this curriculum would entertain encounters with otherness, difference and forgiveness – the latter being by far the most pronounced piece of poetic justice that a curriculum of refuge, in my mind, has to offer. As a South African who has encountered racial oppression, marginalisation and exclusion in much of my life, I can relate experientially to Quinn’s poetic call for forgiveness as a corollary of a curriculum of refuge. I agree with Quinn that practising forgiveness would enable teachers, students and others to enhance educative relationships constituted by moments such as ‘walking city sidewalks into a new way’, ‘wondering anew’, ‘wondering into unexpected moments’, and ‘being open to otherness’ – all those encounters with others, strangers or otherness in our midst. Why? Like Quinn I contend that forgiveness is a redemptive encounter with the other which would enable us to move towards reconciliation and peace. This is what post-apartheid South Africans ─ and I am sure Quinn’s community too ─ are expected to do. Only then curriculum change will hopefully be justly poetic. But this is also where I wish to depart from Quinn. In as much as a curriculum of refuge (intertwined with hospitality, the granting of temporary asylum to others, and forgiveness) might be of value, such a curriculum also has the potential to reify encounters with otherness as some romanticised dream. My argument is premised on an understanding that Quinn seems to be silent about the nature of cosmopolitan encounters with others and otherness. I am not suggesting that Quinn has abandoned the democratic education project but her obvious silence on deliberative iterations as a cosmopolitan imaginary suggests that she might be ignoring an epistemological and psychological endeavour (that is, iterations) to talk