In writing of the 'economies of abandonment' of neoliberal globalization, Povinelli (2011) also points to the potential for 'spaces of otherwise', those spaces of curiosity and risk, potentiality and exhaustion which open possibilities for more ethical becoming and the emergence of new forms of social life. This symposium brings into dialogue scholars of the global South and North concerned with the material consequences of language, race, and structurally induced (im)mobility. South and North are understood here as labile signifiers whose meaning is determined by everyday material and political processes. The interaction of perspectives from the North and the South creates the opportunity to revisit the limits of representation in mainstream social sciences, reconstituting and expanding dominant theory so that it may become more productive in analysing social and linguistic realities. The symposium seeks, for example, to critically interrogate the affordances of recent concepts such as translanguaging, linguistic citizenship, and raciolinguistics for their power to critique and replace destructive institutional structures, classifications, and the technologies that sustain them. It thus seeks to enlarge knowledges of agents, practices, and processes which could lay the basis for what Papadoupolous (2011) calls 'alter-ontology' – new realities – and maximise the possibilities of hope.