BODIES, MOVEMENTS AND REFUGE: TOWARD A MAPPING OF LINGUISTIC-PHILOSOPHICAL INTERWEAVINGS IN LANGUAGE CLASSES

Abstract

In view of the finding that the presence of immigrant and refugee students has reconfigured the educational landscape in Brazil, this study proposes to reflect upon the potency of the encounter among the subjects who cohabit the school space from a Spinozan and Deleuzian perspective. To this end, reading routes of literary texts are mapped out to contribute to expanding in languages classes the capacity of teachers and students to affect and be affected, preparing bodies to inhabit difference and, above all, fostering the joy of the good encounter inside (and outside) of school. The perspective of Cartographic Discourse Analysis is adopted in convergence with the Philosophies of Difference, mobilizing concepts such as potency, affect, heterotopia, and deterritorialization to track the discursive functioning and meaning effects within verbo-visual materialities. The corpus consists of the children's and young adult literary works Eloísa e os Bichos and Migrar. The results indicate that these works act as aesthetic-political devices against essentialized readings of immigrant childhood. While Migrar exposes the harshness of the journey and the silencing imposed by borders, Eloísa e os Bichos establishes the school space as a central heterotopic territory for the mutation of bodies and the reterritorialization of the subject.