Introduction

Critical work has to be responsive to a changing world, and a great deal has happened in the last twenty years, from a more urgent need to deal with climate change to the rise of neoliberal political and economic forms of governance. The notion of the precariat has come in for considerable critique: It becomes problematic when it is applied both to mobile aged care workers and, to casual academics, and overlooks the point that in many parts of the world, precarious work has always been the norm. It is clear that the incursion of neoliberalism into so many areas of contemporary life has driven the expansion of critical applied linguistic analysis, from studies of the language of neoliberalism to research on neoliberalism and education and the effects of neoliberalism on how we think and act. Raciolinguistic analyses have brought a new and urgent focus to applied linguistics, but so have other turns toward sexuality, multilingualism, and the Global South.