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In this paper, we investigate the pressures placed upon English teaching by neo-nationalist politics, particularly as it overlays existing neoliberal constraints. We focus on the experiences and perspectives of Brazilian teachers who are committed to critical language education even as it carries increasing risks to themselves. Interviews with five teachers are used to illustrate the ways in which their work is regulated through a form of power working through fear and threat of violence that has been termed (in)securitization (Rampton et al., 2022). By identifying the metapragmatic strategies adopted by teachers faced with hostile neo-nationalist (in)securitization, including through what we are terming border talk, teachers and other agents in other settings are in a better position to strengthen critical language teaching and, as a consequence, fight for a more democratic future.

Translanguaging has gained prominence as a pedagogical orientation that promises to promote the rights of minoritized migrant students by valuing pre-existing multilingualisms and identities. However, the effects of classroom translanguaging on teacher and student outlooks and relations of inequality are far from universal. In this paper we consider translanguaging in English language teaching in Brazil, a context in which multilingualism is often tied to social and racial closure. We show how English teachers position themselves and students in relation to translanguaging, drawing on analysis of stance-taking in online discussions. We find limited support for a transformative role played by current translingual practices, despite contributions to the establishment of affective bonds with students. We then examine a polemic over localized usages of English that casts light on how teachers do position themselves critically and opens up space for the development of critical language awareness. We argue that teacher outlooks are shaped by the changing status of English in the global south, and by unequal patterns of access to English in public, private, and commercial education settings.

This paper contributes to southern theorization of multilingualisms. Noting the predominance of northern-generated academic debates, we discuss perspectives from close engagement with southern socio-historical and political contexts, and through prioritizing community and teacher outlooks on multilingualism. Our account is illustrated with examples of linguistic citizenship that highlight local agency and dialogue in border-crossing across multiple linguistic and institutional regimes. Drawing on examples from our research in Brazil, South Africa and Australia, we focus on four agentic multilingual moves that illustrate linguistic citizenship and challenge coloniality. Each of these moves (contestation, transgression, negotiation, and conversation) implies that teachers must situate their work within relationships of reciprocity, and 'from below.'

This paper seeks to identify strategies for anti-racist higher education, drawing on scholarship that locates structural racism in global and local centre-periphery relations. We first examine how the centre-periphery divide has been identified and challenged in anti-racist intellectual and political movements, focusing on exchanges and solidarity between peripheral territories. We then discuss the implications of this framework for the setting in which the authors work: Brazilian higher education. The Brazilian university sector has recently expanded through affirmative action policies that have resulted in an influx of Black students from urban peripheries. However, the dominant nationalist ideology in Brazil has historically denied racial divisions, presenting a myth of racial democracy and delegitimising transnational links between anti-racist movements. Reflecting on our own experiences and perceptions through a narrative approach, we draw out elements of border thinking that we believe can contribute to anti-racist pedagogical and institutional relationships.

International education options have expanded in most school systems around the world with promises of curricular innovation. However, there has been limited attention given to the consequences of this shift for social inequalities embedded in pre-existing institutional hierarchies. The International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma, a two-year high school curriculum, has been prominent among recent private curricula, centred on notions of international mindedness and global preparedness. This article seeks to examine the consequences of the presence of the IB Diploma in a school system that is socioeconomically and academically stratified and shaped by strategies of academic distinction focused on local hierarchies. Using quantitative data on IB Diploma students and schools in Australia, it analyses the interaction of the IB Diploma with social inequalities in a system that combines a high level of between-school stratification and a comprehensive (unified) curriculum. We show how the IB Diploma has been successfully used by socially dominant and academically powerful families to consolidate their academic capital and secure educational advantage, thus contributing to the reproduction of social inequality in domestic circuits of schooling. Against its perceived innovative status, the IB Diploma has paradoxically contributed to fostering traditional forms of schooling -- including within-school tracking -- and a narrowing of the curriculum -- including through its strong focus on examinations. It is argued that the social impact of emerging international curriculum options can only be adequately understood if they are simultaneously contextualised within historically constituted local school and curriculum hierarchies.

This paper examines educational segregation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro through the lens of a multifaceted centreperiphery relationship involving geographical, racial and historical dimensions. The paper first situates Brazilian racial inequalities historically, drawing on decolonial theory, before examining student enrolment patterns in Brazil's second-largest metropolis. Although Brazil is often held to be a racially integrated society, the analysis shows sharp racial and social divisions between a 'peripherally' oriented mass public school system, a 'centrally' oriented private sector, and selective public schools run by the federal government. The selective public sector is undergoing a period of transition, driven by affirmative action policies, and provoking tensions that are examined through the experiences of two politically-engaged teachers. The findings point to the importance of political mobilisation in effecting change and the need for further affirmative action policies, along with a revised funding model for public schooling.

This article contributes to studies of race and class in English Language Teaching (ELT) by examining the local production of meanings in pedagogical encounters mediated by global textbooks, focusing on racialized occupational hierarchies in Brazil. We seek to locate these meanings in the interpretative frames provided by the experiences of two Black, first-generation university students, which we connect to dehumanizing histories of labor relations and narrow textbook representations. The findings suggest that Brazilian ELT, through its reliance on global textbooks, presents interactional scenarios that are often the site of racial humiliation. Following Grosfoguel and Sousa Santos' conceptualization of racial oppression, we identify racialized orders of being as an analytical category that allows for connections to be made between political economy and language education, including as part of anti-racist pedagogical efforts.

This article examines shifts in the meaning and relevance of institutionalised knowledge about social inequalities as it circulates globally. In so doing, it contributes to research critiquing an unequal geopolitics of knowledge that grants greatest authority to theories produced in the global north (Connell, 2007; Mignolo, 2003). I discuss the resignification of globally circulating texts in terms of their entextualisation and reflect on my own role in this process through an auto-ethnographic narrative. I focus on two widely circulating texts that explicitly deal with questions of social power and globalisation: 'On the cunning of imperialist reason' (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999) and 'A pedagogy of multiliteracies' (The New London Group, 1996). Examination of their re-entextualisation in Brazil points to the need to bring to bear additional epistemological resources attuned to social and political struggles in order to address the racial inequalities that have come to be at the forefront of my own scholarly concerns. The article concludes by suggesting ways of engaging with globally circulating knowledge through the incorporation of knowledge produced by local struggles and emerging from everyday categories, giving the example of possible uses of the Brazilian concept of gambiarra.

This article explores the kinds of teacher knowledge promoted in TESOL-related curriculum standards in five jurisdictions (Australia and England at the national level, New York City and New York State in the United States, and Ontario, Canada, at the subnational level). Such documents are increasingly important in defining, and potentially undermining, the professional status of specialist TESOL knowledge and roles in schools. Part of the influence of teacher standards is through policy transfer, and the examples analysed here were selected for their status as models for the drafters of an emerging policy framework in Victoria, Australia. Building on an emerging theoretical tradition focused on pedagogical content knowledge, the analysis identifies contrasting paradigms of teacher expertise that vary in depth and relative importance attributed to knowledge of language. The authors argue that the differing constructions of pedagogical content knowledge across jurisdictions imply different kinds of teacher roles that are potentially in tension. The three kinds of positioning that the authors identify are generalist teacher of language and literacy, teacher as TESOL specialist, and teacher of emerging bi/multilinguals. The analysis suggests that greater attention should be given to how teacher knowledge is framed in educational policy, with regard for coherence, practicability, and broader professional expectations.

Accounts of neoliberalism in education frequently evoke a universal trend, with insufficient attention to context, as well as routinely presenting the 'pre-neoliberal' as the ideal. This paper argues that studies of neoliberalism, concentrated in the global North, frequently ignore the distinctive forms and histories of neoliberalism in the global South, as well as its connections to other logics of power, which are illustrated using examples of schooling in Brazil. The differing weight of neoliberal politics and policies across geopolitical boundaries suggests caution in casting neoliberalism as a unique institutional setting for contemporary educational inequalities or attributing all educational conservatism to neoliberalism. A conceptual contribution is provided by proposing a multi-scalar approach to educational inequalities, in which educational sites, events and practices are considered in terms of nexus.

The global middle class (GMC) is a theoretical construct that seeks to globalise a set of attributes identified in studies of school choice in the global north, and to a lesser extent in developing nations in Asia. As theorised by Ball a mobile middle class with cosmopolitan sensibilities drives international education options in global cities. This proposition is challenged through analysis of the histories of curriculum and class relations in two national settings (Australia and Brazil) and examination of contemporary class profiles (i.e. economic and cultural properties) in expanding forms of international education in these countries. The paper argues that the forms of cosmopolitanism associated with the educational practices of the GMC must be examined within broader historical relationships of cultural domination. We conclude by arguing that broadening the historical horizon is an important exercise to challenge the claim of the GMC to be a novel category involving exceptional forms of cultural contact generated by the dynamics of the 'global city'.

This paper reflects on racial identification in Brazil, considering how concepts of race travel internationally and are transformed locally. In light of the silencing of issues of race in Brazilian public education, we analyse the experiences of student teachers of colour participating in a professional development project coordinated by the authors. We report findings of a qualitative study arising from the project, based on reflective journals and interviews, and focusing on processes of racial resignification and resistance. The narratives produced by participants are situated in relation to dominant discourses of racial democracy and mixing, which deny the possibility of a politicised Afro-Brazilian identity. We show how hybrid identifications, drawing on cultural resources and networks that involve transnational circulation, are part of the construction of new social identities in the context of teacher education.

To fully understand the implications of the global climate of heightened suspicion about Islam we must also be aware of its expression through distinctive national discourses. Media debate leading up to the adoption by the French parliament of a law banning the hijab at school fits into a global discourse, but also presents local strategies of incorporation and silencing. The targets of scrutiny are primarily first and second generation migrants, a large and increasingly visible portion of whom live in rundown public housing and attend 'problem' schools associated with violence and failure. It is important therefore to consider the position, and positioning, of Muslims in relation to media representation. This article analyses the forms the dispute over the hijab has taken in France in terms of the role of the school in Republican ideology; the social and economic position of Muslims; and dominant representations of migrants and Islam.

This article analyses some ways in which racialising discourses around refugees interact with the spatial and social dynamics of marketised schooling. It identifies conflicting discourses that contribute to the polarisation of school social composition and resourcing in the Australian state of Victoria. Media narratives around "ethnic" gangs contribute to wider discourses surrounding working-class neighbourhoods and schools as dangerous and violent "hotspots." At the same time, some elite private schools discursively produce themselves as providing a ladder of opportunity for talented and deserving refugee youth, offering volunteer tutoring and scholarships. These discourses work together to legitimate the funding of socially exclusive sites at twice the rate of the schools that cater to virtually all refugee-background students. The article draws on critical discourse analysis, based on media reporting on refugees, and interviews with parents selecting a secondary school for their children. The findings have implications for the management of school choice as a policy framework, suggesting that its exclusionary effects are heightened in the context of intense media and political attention to refugees as racialised subjects.