Call For Papers Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada – v.26, n. 3 (jul. - set. 2026) Dossier: Doing/Saying Literacies in Contemporary Times

Call For Papers Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada – v.26, n. 3 (jul. - set. 2026) Dossier:  Doing/Saying Literacies in Contemporary Times

Editors :
Adriana Carvalho Lopes
Ana Lúcia Silva Souza
Kassandra Muniz

Submission deadline: December 31, 2025

Doing/Saying Literacies in Contemporary Times

The first two decades of the 21st century have been marked by significant transformations in how academic knowledge and literacy practices are produced, as a result of the achievements of social movements, especially the Black movement. As part of the scientific community, Black youth from the peripheries and favelas, despite facing numerous challenges, have come to be and to see themselves as producers of knowledge, cultural agents, and authors of their own narratives.

Ana Lucia Silva Souza (2011), in dialogue with hip-hop youth, highlights literacy practices of reexistence that re-signify reading and writing through the appropriation of the historicity of African and Afro-diasporic heritages. Ethnographing the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Adriana Lopes, Daniel Silva, and Adriana Facina (2019) show that the knowledge and writings of young people who once circulated in funk parties (Lopes, 2011), in the alleys and narrow streets of the favelas, now survive and emerge in various spheres of academic life. Kassandra Muniz (2020), based on the black-epistemological concept of mandinga, highlights how the trajectory of black women at university subverts the whiteness produced by statements that sustain unequal power relations, allowing other ways of experiencing language.

As a result of the historical struggles of the Black movement, especially during democratic governments, several frameworks have become part of educational legislation. One example is Law 12.711/2012 — the “Quotas Law” — which guarantees places at federal universities and institutes for students from public schools, including Black (Black and Brown), Indigenous students, and students with disabilities. As José Jorge de Carvalho (2022, p. 21) states, this law has demanded the decolonization of the curriculum in order to train “licensed teachers, bachelor’s, master’s and PhD graduates grounded in Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous and other traditional peoples’ epistemic bases.”

Focusing on the advances of public policies to combat racism, and their intersections with class, gender, and sexuality, this special issue aims to foster reflections that contribute to the creation of more multi-epistemic curricula (Carvalho, 2022). We seek to gather articles that propose what we call a textual gesture (Derrida, 1995) – an act of deconstruction involving a critical analysis of the very concept of literacy, displacing the white and Eurocentric perspective that pervades it. Inspired by quilombola author Antônio Bispo (2023), this approach to literacies invites research and teacher education practices that recognize the coexistence of diverse knowledge forms – especially traditional, popular, Black, and Indigenous ones – within an ecology where “not everything that comes together necessarily blends” (p. 12). We name this gesture the Contemporary Literacies Manifesto – a performative, a doing/saying (Austin, 1962), that brings to light a logic grounded in social justice, present in everyday literacies at the margins/centers where plural ethical and aesthetic temporalities and agencies emerge—silenced throughout the history of modernity (Augusto, 2019).

Rather than focusing solely on the academic origin of the term literacy, our proposal is to ethnographically investigate (Blommaert, 2008) the contemporary uses and circulation of this concept in public debate – within and beyond universities, in schools, public policy, digital media, and social movements. Based on the premise that the contemporary is plural and inherently political, we aim to bring together texts across genres that explore how current issues have reshaped conceptions and practices of literacy, including the production of meaning, authorship, reading, writing, and the uses of orality.

 

References

AUSTIN, J. L. How to do things with words. Cambridge: Havard University Press, 1962. 174p.

AUGUSTO, J. Contemporaneidades periféricas: primeiras anotações para alguns estudos de caso. In: AUGUSTO, J. (org.) Contemporaneidades periféricas Salvador: Editora Segundo Selo, 2019. p. 31-68,

BLOMMAERT, J. Grassroots literacies: Writing, identity and voice in Central Africa. London: Routledge. 2008. 240p.

DERRIDA, J. A Escritura e a Diferença. Trad. Maria Beatriz da Silva. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1995. 125p.

DE CARVALHO, J. J. Cotas étnico-raciais e cotas espistêmicas. Bases para uma antropologia antirracista e descolonizadora. MANA, v. 28, n. 3, p.1-36, 2022

LOPES, A. C.; FACINA, A.; SILVA, D. N. (orgs) Nó em Pingo d’agua. Sobrevivência, cultura e Linguagem. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula, 2019. 333p.

LOPES, A. C. Funk-se quem quiser no batidão negro da cidade carioca. Rio de Janeiro. Faperj/Bom texto, 2011. 177p.

MUNIZ, K. (2020). Linguagem como mandinga: população negra e periférica reinventando epistemologias. In: SOUZA, A. L. S. (org.) Cultura e política nas periferias: estratégias de reexistência. São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2020, p 273-288.

SANTOS, A. B. dos. A terra dá, a terra quer. São Paulo: Ubu Editora/PISEAGRAMA, 2023. 112p.

SOUZA, A. L. S. Letramentos de reexistência: poesia, grafite, música, dança: hip-hop. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial, 2011. 206p.