Introduction

This chapter elaborates the concepts 'entanglement' and 'orders of visibility', arguing for their potential to illuminate both absences in theory, knowledge, and representation and emergences in social and semiotic practices. It suggests that this dual focus on absences and emergences, following Santos (2014), is essential for the development of a sociolinguistics of the South. The chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book seeks to build on socio- and applied linguistic work that grounds the view from nowhere through historical, ethnographic, interactionist, and discourse analytic approaches to the analysis of language in the construction of social difference and inequality. It aims to illuminate the ways in which different orders of visibility are constructed by conceptual, methodological, and analytical lenses. The book illuminates the ways in which language is used as a resource in constructing, naturalizing, or resisting inequality in everyday interactions and institutional sites.