Mapping the territory of literacies pedagogies in the Global South

Abstract

<p>In this volume, we attempt to map the territory of literacies pedagogies in the Global South. The metaphor of map and territory was coined by the Polish scholar Alfred Korzybski as part of his General Semantics model in his text Science and Sanity. The relation between map and territory was understood by the author as follows: ‘A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness’ (Korzybski, 1958, p. 58). The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges in his story On Exactitude of Science (1935) describes a map that has the same scale as its territory, a useless but perfectly accurate one-to-one map. The territory that we map in this volume is constituted by porous and rhizomatic discourses whose polyphonic voices share the belief that understanding language, genres, the world and life demands attention to diversity. Diversity emerges in every chapter, from the bottom up, from the local communities that are enacting literacies and multiliteracies pedagogies, not as tokenistic discourses but as grass-rooted attempts to decolonize the field of English language education.</p>