In this book dialogue is used as a research, knowledge-sharing and community-building tool in which participants engage with each other in reflecting upon the perspectives of self and others: challenging, complementing and contradicting each other as critical peers. The book aims to be an enactment of sociological reimagination, as a way to reimagine public conversations that inspire criticality, innovation and multimodality around the intersection of identity (self), language (mediating mechanism) and power (sociocultural domain). Each chapter illustrates the use of dialogue as a participatory research tool as a way in which the sharing of knowledge and the growth of understanding occurs through meaning- and strategy-making processes. Together they present dialogue as an integrative model of self-inquiry and social activism and provide a valuable standpoint to understand the participatory nature of our very effort to question and investigate our sense of self in the world.

In this edited volume, language weaponization — or the weaponization of language — is used to describe the process in which words, discourse, and language in any form can be used to inflict harm on others. The term harm is of vital importance because it refers to how specific groups of people are affected by ideologies and practices that normalize inequity and injustice in their environments. The contributions in this book explore how language ideologies, practices, and policies can physically, emotionally, socially, and/or economically disadvantage or harm minoritized individuals, as well as their cultures and languages.

Identity and Language Learning draws on a longitudinal case study of immigrant women in Canada to develop new ideas about identity, investment, and imagined communities in the field of language learning and teaching. Bonny Norton demonstrates that a poststructuralist conception of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and place is highly productive for understanding language learning. Her sociological construct of investment is an important complement to psychological theories of motivation. The implications for language teaching and teacher education are profound. Now including a new, comprehensive Introduction as well as an Afterword by Claire Kramsch, this second edition addresses the following central questions: - Under what conditions do language learners speak, listen, read and write? - How are relations of power implicated in the negotiation of identity? - How can teachers address the investments and imagined identities of learners? The book integrates research, theory, and classroom practice, and is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in the fields of language learning and teaching, TESOL, applied linguistics and literacy.

Reimaginig Utopias explores the shifting social imaginaries of post-socialist transformations to understand what happens when the new and old utopias of post-socialism confront the new and old utopias of social science. This peer-reviewed volume addresses the theoretical, methodological, and ethical dilemmas encountered by researchers in the social sciences as they plan and conduct education research in post-socialist settings, as well as disseminate their research findings. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry that spans the fields of education, political science, sociology, anthropology, and history, the book explores three broad questions: How can we (re)imagine research to articulate new theoretical insights about post-socialist education transformations in the context of globalization? How can we (re)imagine methods to pursue alternative ways of producing knowledge? And how can we navigate various ethical dilemmas in light of academic expectations and fieldwork realities? Drawing on case studies, conceptual and theoretical essays, autoethnographic accounts, as well as synthetic introductory and conclusion chapters by the editors, this book advances an important conversation about these complicated questions in geopolitical settings ranging from post-socialist Africa to Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The contributors not only expose the limits of Western conceptual frameworks and research methods for understanding post-socialist transformations, but also engage creatively in addressing the persisting problems of knowledge hierarchies created by abstract universals, epistemic difference, and geographical distance inherent in comparative and international education research. This book challenges the readers to question the existing education narratives and rethink taken-for-granted beliefs, theoretical paradigms, and methodological frameworks in order to reimagine the world in more complex and pluriversal ways.

In contrast to other studies on identity, this book takes its point of departure in the complexities that characterize and shape both individuals and societies – past and present. Its chapters challenge demarcated fields of study and conceptions of identity as gender, identity as functional disability, identity as race, and identity as, or based upon language groupings. The contributions take a social practices perspective in their exploration of the performance, living and doing of identity positions across time and space. Many of the contributions take an intersectional stance and the majority report upon empirically driven studies that examine the ways in which micro-level analyses of naturally occurring human communication contribute to our understanding of identification processes. Specifically, they study the ways in which more recent dialogical and social theoretical-analytical frameworks allow for attending to the complexity and dynamics of identity processes; the ways in which institutional settings, media settings, community of practices and affinity spaces provide affordances and obstacles for different types of identity positions; and the ways in which shifts in identity positions can be traced across time and space.

The interwoven futures of humanity and our planet are under threat. Urgent action, taken together, is needed to change course and reimagine our futures. Education, long acknowledged as a powerful force for positive change, has new, urgent and important work to do. This report, two years in the making, invites governments, institutions, organizations, and citizens around the world to forge a new social contract for education that will help us build peaceful, just, and sustainable futures.

The interwoven futures of humanity and our planet are under threat. Urgent action, taken together, is needed to change course and reimagine our futures.