Entre „l’ordre“ et „l’emmêlement“: La complexité sociale vue à travers les recherches sur la littératie

The text adds to current research on social complexity, by adopting a perspective informed by research on literacy. In four episodes, the author traces her own journey as an ethnographer and researcher in several fields related to multilingual education. Staged as an epistemological journey, the text takes us back to fields in Canada, Germany and Luxembourg, from the 1990s to the present. It aims at linking discourses, practices and research on literacies and seeks to shed light on how these literacies provide access to social complexity and the ways in which it is perceived, experienced and actively constructed by social actors in the field. On the one hand, the text interrogates the effects of neoliberal policies on education and
the consequences these create for imagining complex societies. On the other hand, the text confronts us with the epistemological presuppositions inherent to Western conceptual approaches and invites us to reflect
critically on the ethical dimension of our research and the effects of collaborative ethnography.