I. Literacies and knowledge

If we propose a wide and indetermined literacy genealogy, we could consider to start from reading as an elite practice preceding the sheer abilities to read and write, from a linguistic standpoint where societies go from rural environments to the settings of the first predecessors to contemporary western cities, to later on go to a functional literacy from a psycho-linguistic approach or what we could call education as discipline in industrialized societies.

Afterwards, we would have to think of a social-cultural approach of reading or literacy itself, where text and context acquire a special relevance, since the discussion is not about reading and writing abilities acquired by individuals, but about the cultural forms in which said abilities are used by the individuals in social practices stemming from the structuring of the social world around us (Barton & Hamilton, 1998) . Nowadays, we are moving from education as discipline to literacy as a domain. A domain in which interconnections among the different disciplines lead us to multidiscipline, interdiscipline and perhaps transdiscipline; therefore we ask:

1. Is it possible to analyze literacy evolution from disciplinary logic and knowledge domains? Or should we think of transdiscipline and complexity scenarios? In other words, when can literacy be located within the development of knowledge?
2. Is it possible to acknowledge literacy as a knowledge domain with some determined disciplines and which would they be?
3. How is literacy pertinent from a science standpoint?
4. What research evidence do we have on literacy constituted as a knowledge domain?
5. What is literacy’s ultimate end if we think of knowledge production through different knowledge development models in specific contexts?
6. In the horizon of complexity, what transdisciplines, transcontexts, transcurriculum, will play an important role in literacy’s development?
7. Could it be said that literacy is a fashion, this is, a new way to teach reading and writing, a “natural” evolution of educations as a science?
8. In the current context (artificial intelligence, pandemics, etc.), is literacy part of education or is education part of literacy?
9. How has the notion of literacy been approached in different contexts and what implications have been brought forth?
10. How has literacy approach changed?
11. What does the notion of literacy mean nowadays?

II. Literacies from a social and cultural perspective

Literacies focus, among other things, on text comprehension and production within specific contexts, where text fulfills a social function and demands that participants be acknowledged, as well as their environment and, in academic and professional fields, of disciplines themselves. Therefore, thinking of literacy invites to include social and cultural elements that tend towards communicative interaction processes, which vary depending on the stakeholders and on discourse genders intervening therein. These elements can relate from aspects such as the symbolic capital at the school and the family, socializations environments, social-linguistic codes (elaborated and restricted) literacy practices (vernacular and dominating) present in the community. Therefore, it is troubling to find possible answers to some of these questions:

1. What literacy practices are taught at home (by the family) and at school?
2. How are pedagogy practices facing said teachings?
3. How are literacy levels related to school performance?
4. What role do school and academic community play at unexpected literacy levels?
5. How do we help students with low literacy levels to achieve desirable levels?
6. How do vernacular literacies relate to school literacies to profit from empirical knowledge?
7. What challenges and opportunities come along with current research in the field of literacy?

III. Decolonizing decoloniality and its relationship with justice

The relationship between literacy, knowledge and social justice shall be also subject to scrutiny due to the dramatic and troubling direction that decolonial thinking boom is taking in our countries, where some governments and political actors are turning the education political agenda into epistemic and linguistic “decolonization”. We need to rethink and discuss, from research and academia standpoints, those reductionist views that seem deny and reject any knowledge, language and literacy practices on account of coming from the outside during European colonialism.

Adopting and reducing decolonial scholars’ claims, that our countries do not only need social justice, but also epistemic justice. Nowadays, all cognitive, linguistic and literacy practices from historically colonized and oppressed groups are honored and celebrated without knowing that some of those practices are the result of oppression and education inequities, as opposed to a free choice or of their ancestors’ traditions and knowledge. Therefore, we propose that in this congress we approach, reflect and debate on questions such as the following:

1. Should we as societies and as governments turn the so-called epistemic justice into political agenda? How do we do this without being reductionist or radically unproductive?
2. Should we neglect and abandon all Western-European knowledge and language and substitute it with the ones that are “authentically ours”?
3. Should the education system place the same value; hence, the same weight and time to the study of the standard language (literate) and to non-standard and quite unliterate variables?
4. Are those decolonial academic discourses coming from European and North American institutions not also colonizing.
5. What is the relationship between literacy, political structures, epistemic justice and social justice?
6. What relationships can be woven among literacy, democracy and social, epistemic, social and linguistic justice?
7. How are written culture, social justice and democracy related?
8. To what extent is literacy a commitment to social justice?