Language is the main resource for meaningful action, including the very formation of selves and psychosocial identities, shaped by practical norms, beliefs, and values. Thus, language education constitutes one of the most powerful means for both social reproduction and social production and ideological maintenance and utopian innovation. In this paper, we attempt to emphasise the invaluable psychosocial, political, economic, and cultural function of language education in order to propose a critical view of the current transition from the monolingual to a (...) multilingual paradigm. We maintain that multilingual approaches tend to serve the neoliberal framework and reproduce its systemic inequalities. Therefore, we argue in favour of emancipatory multilingual practices that could embody a translingual pedagogy capable of promoting the development of capabilities, the recognition of otherness, and the cultivation of diversity. Rooted in critical theory, namely in Foucault’s notion of subjectification and Freire’s view of conscientisation, an emancipatory translingual pedagogy would enable and empower every learner to synthesise a contextually creative field of new semantic and pragmatic relationships. Critical language education would enhance the ethos of biophilia that fosters what we term the poetics of communality and selfhood, that is to say, the proactive commitment to expanding symbolic and existential novelty. (shrink)

Literary writing in the digital era is evolving using languages that have a much greater dynamic potential than those known hitherto. The very phrase `text processing' implies the notion of writing `in process', which has very recently been joined by another possibility, the unrestricted circulation of texts on networks on a worldwide scale, without spatial limits and in real time. In the arena of writing that is no longer simply textual but hypertextual, literary writing is becoming highly dynamic, intertextual, fragmentary, (...) interactive and playful. In this article the author discusses the implications of digital publishing and warns of the unexpected consequences of replacing the book, entirely or partly, with new instruments and techniques of communication and information. (shrink)

O presente texto tem por objetivo esboçar um cenário da contradição: riqueza e pobreza na América Latina. Não pretende trazer nenhuma novidade e nem mesmo esgotar um tema, já tão discutido por analistas e estudiosos de diferentes posições tanto ideológicas como teóricas. A ideia é reforçar o indicativo do recrudescimento dos problemas sócio-econômicos da região, em razão das recentes iniciativas dos governos dos principais países de ajustarem suas estruturas produtivas no sentido de acompanharem os movimentos das estruturas dos países desenvolvidos. (...) Para tanto, o texto é desenvolvido em dois itens: o primeiro trata da questão do crescimento econômico, o que tem sido um conteúdo privilegiado nos discursos dos governantes, e o segundo mostra o custo social deste crescimento, principalmente no referente aos desagregados sociais. Por fim, faz uma referência especial à questão dos meninos e meninas em situação de rua na América Latina. (shrink)