ABSTRACT
This final chapter pulls together some of the main themes from the book, arguing that a focus on power, praxis, ethics, situatedness, and collaboration surely need to be part of any (critical) applied linguistic project. Critical applied linguistics is a way of doing applied linguistics that helps refresh the conceptual repertoires of the field. It is important that we do not allow critical applied linguistics to become a fixed canon of ideas, methods, or techniques, but rather view it more in terms of temporary assemblages of thought and action that come together at particular moments when language-related concerns need to be addressed. Critical applied linguistics is better seen as a way of thinking, a way of going about applied linguistics that constantly seeks to push our thinking in new and provocative ways. Doing critical applied linguistics (critical praxis) can be an educational, research, or activist project. Across all these domains critical applied linguistics needs to be collaborative, political, and linguistic. It involves struggles over forms of social inequality that directly involve language and therefore needs a version of language open to decolonial critiques and capable of engaging with gendered, racial, and other material disparities. It involves collaborative political and linguistic endeavors aiming to redress social inequalities by decolonizing language while linking it to material concerns around race, gender, place, and disparity.
