This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood as well as items less commonly included. This is to approach language not as a pre-existing or circumscribed entity but rather as something produced in social action. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. Once we ask whose version of language counts, we have to base any practical theory of language on what language is within a local ontology. This necessitates an engagement with language ideological assemblages and an understanding that languages are inevitably locally made assemblages (linguistic, semiotic and material). Applied linguistics as a practical assemblage is one way we can start to address the needs for a practical theory of language that can remain both plural and political.

The introduction to this volume describes its content. It also provides the rationale for including selected topics and provides comments on the manner of presentation adopted in this volume.

In the Conclusion, we outline a series of methodological and ethical considerations for scholars interested in researching the intersections of language and hope, particularly as they are practiced and manifested among marginalized and disenfranchised communities. Faveladas/os reveal a great deal of awareness of the extractivist tendencies of field research and their critical stance in advancing an agenda for sociolinguistic scholarship that is reflexive to more responsible, sustainable, and dialogic practices vis-à-vis interlocutors’ agendas and ethical concerns. Further, because we attend to knowledge about language produced by everyday people, we emphasize the need to be mindful of alternative and unconventional forms of knowledge production toward an ongoing understanding of the ways in which language can lead to hopeful futures. In short, insofar that hope demands that we reorient our view of the future and temporality more broadly, an understanding of language as hope demands that we reorient our assumptions of what counts as producing legitimate knowledge about language.

This chapter investigates scaling in the work of hope. We foreground how hope is not merely an abstract aspiration but a principled, time-oriented praxis by showcasing how hope can be meaningfully pursued when scaled through pedagogical work. Our cases include the central NGOS/activist groups in our ethnography, namely Instituto Raízes em Movimento, Instituto Marielle Franco, and Coletivo Papo Reto. We examine, for instance, the case of how Raízes em Movimento appropriates and rescales the trope of “circulando,” a policing practice premised on the criminalization of faveladas/os. We afterwards examine the case of artistic and organizational responses to the historical and contemporary silencing of Blacks in Brazil, examining the case of Favela Não Se Cala alongside the activist work of the Instituto Marielle Franco. We then look to the work of Coletivo Papo Reto who perform pedagogical work representing the transformative ethos of papo reto activist register. This collective work highlights the teachable–scalable–dimensions of hope through sociolinguistic action, by which hope comes to be rescaled from mere abstraction toward a form of social change.

The Introduction describes the fundamental objective of the book, which is to discuss what language can teach us about the practice of hope into the 21st century. Hope has always been critical to human survival, but the surge of right-wing populism, racism and ethnocentrism around the world spells hopelessness for many communities, including those whose backgrounds are subject to increased discrimination and precarization. Meanwhile, those in periphery contexts have lived in perpetual conditions of seeming hopelessness. Yet, they have not merely succumbed to despair but found creative ways of surviving material inequities. One key resource that faveladas/os have relied upon to hope is imagining language, temporality, digital technologies, and cooperation toward challenging past inequities and establishing socially equitable futures. They have also been very critical about the dynamics of knowledge production, including extractivist practices of academic scholars. These instances point to the importance of subjects’ reflexivity and practical work in producing conditions of hope.

This chapter outlines a theorization of language as hope. We begin with an understanding of language not merely as a fixed language system to communicate reality as such, but as an inherently flexible and negotiable practice that can reconstitute realities, in the sense of “languaging” (see Li, 2018). We approach languaging in relation to various conceptualizations of hope, beginning with Ernst Bloch’s (1986) pioneering account of hope as both an affect and a principle of explanation. As an affect, “Hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them” (p. 3). Temporally, hope orients people to the “Not-Yet-Being,” towards expansion and potentiality. This view of hope is complemented with various treatments within the social sciences and in sociolinguistics more specifically. In so doing, we propose that those who must grapple with enveloping challenges predicated on regimes of violence and economic dispossession do not merely succumb to hopelessness but instead have found ways to recast temporality, engage in tactical cooperation, and reimagine sociolinguistic resources in and through their everyday languaging toward the production of hope.

This chapter focuses on how hope demands an ever-shifting reorientation to time. We engage more fully with the case of Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian councilwoman from a favela who was brutally assassinated in 2018. Her spectral presence became an icon of hope for the dispossessed. We trace her “presence” in the range of protests and demonstrations that erupted following her death. We additionally analyze ethnographic accounts of women who were influenced by Marielle, online archives of their speeches, and news articles and social media material that circulated in the months following her murder. Additionally, we show how hope in Marielle’s communicative practice had an important pedagogic dimension in that she led others in the cultivation of adequate virtues, affects, and ideologies for surviving historical inequities and formations of violence. We thus illustrate how hope demands a reorientation to time–a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. Temporality, in this sense, is “metaleptic” in that the past may belatedly inform the present, thereby not necessarily relying on chronology, linearity, or progress.

The purpose of this chapter is to advance the introduction and provide sociohistorical context necessary to understand the complexities of language and hope in Brazil. While Brazil is one of the world’s wealthiest nations it is simultaneously notorious for having one of the largest and rapidly increasing rates of class and income inequality in the world (Loureiro, 2000). In addition, while it is known for having the largest population of peoples of the African diaspora (Parra et al., 2003), it is also known for its longstanding history of anti-Black violence (Afolabi, 2009; Butler, 1998; Twine, 1997). Nowhere are the stratifications along social, economic, and racial lines more concentrated than in the favelas across the state. While the favelas, from this perspective, are spaces of seeming hopelessness, they are also locations of intense cultural production, everyday creativity, and most crucially, survival and hope. Critically, as we will demonstrate, the ways in which faveladas/os practice language and enact hope offer important lessons on the feasibility of hope into the 21st century.

This chapter presents a treatment of hope via an engagement with the complex interrelationship between communicative resources and their emergent indexical values. Hope, in other words, as a language practice, is presented here as an entailment of sociolinguistic enregisterment. Though meanings and values associated with various registers are productions of language ideological stances, our empirical cases point to the importance of reflexive practices in calibrating language and semiosis as hope. We offer an extended discussion of the papo reto (straight talk) activist register, an emergent translational activist register from the favelas that has been instrumental in recasting convoluted bureaucratic language in a manner that is legible to those who have not had access to extensive formal education and acculturation to mainstream political communicative conventions. We outline some of the formal and discursive features that have come to be associated with papo reto and analyze instances in which Marielle and other favelada/o activists have located spaces for papo reto in their activist work, disrupting the exclusionary language ideologies and normative regimes in Brazil.

Many people have tried and failed to make English the only official language of the United States. In contrast to earlier studies of these national efforts, I argue that people in the English-only movement are really at their most successful when they focus on writing local language policies. Working in local governments and talking about the local community can make monolingualism seem practical at best, innocuous at worst. People who participate in the English-only movement are adept at drafting, copying, revising, sharing, and promoting language policies. At the same time, they are not a united front, in terms of either their motivations or their strategies. After introducing the topic, I address why English-only policies matter: They target people who are already marginalized, they oversimplify how language works, they are popular, and the strategies people use to write and promote these policies are ingenious. Finally, I discuss how I designed this study of the recent history of English-only policies using ethnography and other research methodologies.

Sociopragmatics typically refers to sociocultural parameters of the communicative use of language (Leech 1983; Thomas 1983). This concept has long been taken up in the area of applied linguistics (Kaspar & Rose 2002) and historical pragmatics (Jucker 2006; Culpeper 2009). Context per se is difficult to pin down and, therefore, its association with language in a principled manner is a challenging task. In view of the above, and within a Construction Grammar framework (Fried and Östman 2004), this chapter aims to show that the object of sociopragmatic analysis can in fact be viewed as the domain of socioculturally defined genres that are often associated with particular (genre) constructions reflecting a speaker’s knowledge of the language (Nikiforidou 2016). The question to be addressed in this view is to what extent speakers’ understanding of context is systematic, conventional, and, hence, an inherent part of grammar and the description of language. The data to be discussed include recipes, labels, couple talk, stage directions, and TV talk. It will be argued that sociopragmatic context, typically encoded at the meso-level of genre, can be accounted for as a set of specifications that are routinely incorporated in the description of a language’s grammatical constructions.

Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of childhoods and children, illustrating how the concept of childhood has developed over time. The discussion focusses on how adults working with children, including applied linguists, need to reflect on the implications of their belief systems and their conceptions of children and childhood. The chapter then elaborates on the most notable conceptions of childhood, including the universal view. It then introduces Childhood Studies, a multidisciplinary approach to studying children from bottom up. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) and its proposal that children are rights-bearing citizens and their voices must be heard are introduced, and the discussion addresses how the proposed rights can be realised in practice by schools, communities and individual adult researchers. The main contributions of Childhood Studies over the last three and half decades are summarised to draw attention to some current issues and concerns. Finally, the chapter outlines the main components of the extended framework, which includes possibilities for conducting studies not just ‘on’ and ‘about’ but also ‘with’ and ‘by’ children.