This handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible guide to critical applied linguistics and language education, exploring how power, inequality, and social change shape linguistic issues, educational practices, and research agendas. Bringing together leading scholars and emerging voices from around the world, it equips researchers, educators, students, and policymakers with critical frameworks and perspectives for building more equitable and socially responsible approaches to language and language education. The volume is organized into two parts. The first, Critical Projects in Applied Linguistics and Language Education, highlights established domains operating under explicit critical labels, demonstrating how criticality shapes research, pedagogy, and policy. The second, Critical Perspectives in Applied Linguistics and Language Education, examines contemporary social, political, environmental, and educational issues through a critical lens. Together, the handbook positions criticality as a reorienting force in applied linguistics and language education that confronts inequality, deepens inquiry, and sustains hope for transforming an uneven world.
