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By the time we began to draft the introduction of this special issue, we came up with the challenge of putting our ideas into words: ideas related to our personal interpretations in our encounters with the texts in this volume; ideas related to our academic viewpoints on the intrinsic relation between language, literacy, education, and society; ideas related to ourselves in relation to a world that has been historically marked by crises of all sorts. This special issue refers to crises, in its plural form. As we are politically and socioculturally situated, greater attention will be drawn to the COVID-19 crisis in all the complexities, disparities and challenges that arise when an unprecedented pandemic faces a neoconservative and neoliberal governance.

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The breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic in the beginning of the year 2020 undeniably makes us ponder whether the world has changed for the better or for the worse. We still lack a prompt answer. Nevertheless, for ^{Sousa Santos (2020}SOUSA SANTOS, B. Vírus: tudo o que é sólido se desafaz no ar. Sul21, 2020. Available at: Available at: https://www.sul21.com.br/opiniaopublica/2020/03/virus-tudo-o-que-e-solido-se-desfaz-no-ar-por-boaventura-de-sousa-santos/ Access on: Marc. 15, 2021.
https://www.sul21.com.br/opiniaopublica/... , p. 5), when one thinks about the concept of crisis, one needs to acknowledge that “The current pandemic is not a crisis condition clearly opposed to a condition of normality”. The author goes on to argue that “Since the 80s - as neoliberalism imposed itself as the capitalist prevailing version and as the latter became more and more subjected to the logic of the financial sector, the world has witnessed a perennial crisis situation” (our translation).

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Human beings all over the world have been experiencing a mental, physical and emotional vertigo marked by fear, anxiety, loss, pressure, and loneliness. Brazilians might add a few more categories to such unfortunate scenario: despair, disbelief, discontent, to name a few. The escalating neoconservative political actions founded on neoliberalism, fundamentalism and anti-communism that came out in the 2018 presidential election (^{DUBOC; FERRAZ, 2020}DUBOC, A. P.; FERRAZ, D. M. What’s Behind a Literacy War? A Discursive and Political Analysis of the Neoconservative Brazilian Literacy Policy. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, [S.l.], v. 15, n. 2, p.1-22, 2020. DOI: 10.1080/17447143.2020.1800714
https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2020.18... ) now gain momentum, for

Right on spot! The microscopic coronavirus does have specific targets whenever it meets a necropolitics in action.

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In times of all sorts of crises, it is imperative that contemporary Applied Linguistics assertively responds to the challenges put forward by this new social landscape. Recent literacy research and practice have been heavily criticized, provided that they seek to problematize literacies and their relations with language education in multifaceted and dialogical, and agonistic ways, questioning the dichotomies built by the paradigms of modernity (regulation vs emancipation, science vs non-science, inferiority vs superiority, us vs them). Thus, this special issue calls on researchers to reflect on the potentialities and limitations of the following themes: teacher language education, language/literacy conceptualizations, and language/literacy education in their intrinsic relation to political, cultural, ideological, and technological aspects.

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Outlining a co-authored introduction to a special issue often demands, on the one hand, the a priori establishment of the writing strategies that suit both authors, and, on the other, the scope definition, which has to be in line with the set of contributions in the volume. The main difficulty in writing this introduction about crises in times of crisis is that we ended up questioning to what extent introducing the topic turns out to be redundant. What is to be introduced when many of us are deeply immersed in pain and perplexity in face of an explicitly orchestrated necropolitics and the widening of abyssal social disparities?

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It took us some time to eventually draft an outline as our personal and professional lives have profoundly been altered with the pandemic, echoing the emotional, cognitive, mental and physical side effects that many of us are coping with. Our hands seemed to stubbornly postpone the task, wishing to deny the act of writing a linear introduction. A shortcut emerged out of our lived experiences. For ^{Ferraz (2019}FERRAZ, D. M. (Pós)modernidade, (pós)estruturalismo e educação linguística: construindo sentidos, ensejando transformações In: ANDRADE, M. E. S. F. de; HOELZLE, M. J. L. R.; CRUVINEL, R. C. (org.). (Trans)formação de professoras/es de línguas: demandas e tendências da pós-modernidade. Campinas: Pontes Editores, 2019. v.1, p. 17-40.), besides problematizing, expanding and questioning the traditional concept/field of Teaching and Learning of Languages/Foreign Languages/English Language, Language Education (LE) or Critical Language Education (CLE) revisits the teaching and learning of languages, taking into account linguistics, critical and sociocultural dimensions. In doing so, the author is fond of visual literacies work (^{FERRAZ, 2014}FERRAZ, D. M. Letramento visual: As imagens e as aulas de inglês. In: MACIEL, R. F.; TAKAKI, N. H. (org.). Letramentos em terra de Paulo Freire. Campinas: Pontes Editores, 2014.) and has vastly published on the topic so as this mosaic of integrated and multimodal visual elements soon became a must have.

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As “writing” could never be fully abolished in academic genres, this split introduction was inspired by Duboc’s recent reading of South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s metafictional work Diario de um ano ruim (²⁰⁰⁸COETZEE, J. M. Diário de um ano ruim. Trad. José Rubens Siqueira. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008.). The creative novel takes the form of a set of political essays written by Señor C who hires a young Filipina female neighbor as a typist. The essays, which take up the larger part of the page, are accompanied by diary entries displayed beneath them and between divided lines through which readers get access to both Señor C’s and Anya’s desires and viewpoints. This introduction was, then, inspired by Coetzee’s visually split-novel layout so that beneath our bricolage composed of contemporary news headlines, visual art, and quotes (this volume) come glimpses of our meaning-making processes.

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Needless to say, beyond any conventional view that still conceives of visual images as mere representation of the written language, what turns out to be the core element within this introduction is the non-linear mosaic itself whose material dispositions will surely bring distinct affective and political reactions. At first, we thought of bringing the mosaic itself with no recourse to this bottom metanarrative entry. Nonetheless, we wished to write something, not in the sense of explaining or clarifying our bricolage, but in the sense of addressing the potentialities of collective action along with critical language work.

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With regards to collective action, this special issue celebrates the ten-year “National Project on Literacies: Language, Culture, Education and Technology” (henceforth PNL) for its relevance in addressing language research and language teacher education from critical lenses. Coordinated by Walkyria Monte Mór and Lynn Mario Trindade Menezes de Souza (USP), PNL is a collaborative network amongst more than 30 public Brazilian who have developed local actions aimed at: i) reflecting about language teaching policies; ii) designing language education programs in Higher Education; iii) designing courses to/with public school teachers; iv) establishing international agreements and exchanges with foreign universities with the participation of graduate students and post-doctoral students in internship programs.

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The texts in this issue portray a collective effort to discuss the social and political role of language and literacy theory and practice vis-à-vis contemporary crises. The quotes are brought to the fore in our genuine acknowledgement of the collaborators’ care and self-implication imbued in their own local ongoing language and literacy research and practice involving children, teenagers, families, school teachers, policy makers and student teachers, unveiling less authoritative and horizontal attitudes towards more dialogical practices between university and society.

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Emphasis is also brought to the critical language work itself fostered by collaborators in this issue. Critical language and literacy education have delineated foregrounding theories in the PNL and might provide a substantive basis for rethinking the crisis/es put forward by the COVID-19 pandemic. More recent studies have approached language and literacy studies to decoloniality and transdisciplinarity as ways to change the terms of the conversation so as to fight against social disparities resulting from colonial epistemic racism, along with the still hermetic intradisciplinary academic practices.

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The texts you are about to read reclaim and restate the importance of language and literacy debate in addressing alternatives to crises of all kinds. Scope and viewpoints differ in accordance to each authors’ research interests, acknowledging the very refracted nature of language and the multiple interpretations of realities. A common ground, though, is to be found: they all acknowledge the ethical responsibility and self-implication of language and literacy researchers and teacher educators in preventing society from “invisible” viruses. For now, the fight is against the coronavirus. In the past and upcoming years, the fight has been and will be against all sorts of discriminatory practices resulting from coloniality. Enjoy the reading and stay safe.

References

References (images)

Publication Dates