While writing the call for this special issue in the summer of 2019, we could not have imagined our work 18 months later: writing this guest editorial months into a global pandemic, newly gripped by the Black Lives Matter movement, and unsettled as a sitting president directed insurgency at the heart of U.S. democracy. Yet, we wrote grateful for the place to which this special issue has brought us in relation both to the field of literacy studies and to, in fact, ourselves as people beyond the field. In the everyday, uncertainty has brought heightened intensities since beginning this special issue, intensities that have stirred anew questions of what it means to live and what it means to bring new life to our work. Uncertainty has brought us differently to life across moments of beauty and pain, calmness and agitation, hope and horror. As guest editors, we have surveyed work in this issue and in the field to find ourselves feeling alive again to new and renewed ideas. We found ourselves thinking again about the continued importance of critical, sociocultural perspectives on literacy and their invitations to unknowing (e.g., Vasudevan, 2011), to mobilized emotion (e.g., Lewis & Tierney, 2013), and to the production of love and presence through traumas (e.g., Dutro & Bien, 2014). We also felt renewed life through the potentials of opening ourselves as interdisciplinary humanists and social scientists to the contingency of our knowledge production practices and to the potentials of being vulnerable—while working with agency and activism—to the uncontrollable in the social, affective life of research and teaching (Boldt, this issue; Truman, Hackett, Pahl, Davies, & Escott, this issue). This special issue explores the latter, presenting articles that resonate robustly with the theoretic potentials of uncertainty that bring a renewed literacy research to life and a renewed life to literacy research.

We wrote this piece at a time when the world has broken open. How will we, as a field, move through this break? What are the imperatives for literacy research in urgently uncertain times? As literacy scholars, and as human beings, we will never be the same. We will never research in the same ways. For us, the question driving this editorial is an imperative bound up in the professional and the everyday: How might affect theory help us hold our vulnerabilities, our uncertainties, in our research, to help us be less certain? We can only be certain that our propensities and desires toward certainty as humans will be unsettled. Then, when uncertainty envelops, the affects shift, intensify. We are living through moments of intensity that will only continue to accrue. As they accrue, and as we explore in this editorial and through articles in this issue, power will have all the more opportunity to seize upon our desires for control. As we look to touch the world more closely through uncertainty, we therefore also ask, How can affect theory help us understand the conditions and mechanisms of power that limit capacities for learning and using literacies, leveraging our own affective tendencies against our interests?

在2019年夏季撰写此期特刊的呼吁时，我们无法想象18个月后的工作：将这位客座社论写成全球性大流行病，新近被布莱克·莱特物质运动（Black Lives Matter）所抓获，但仍未就任现任总统定向叛乱是美国民主制度的核心。然而，我们对这个特殊问题带给我们的有关扫盲研究领域以及实际上我们自己作为超越领域的人们的感激之地表示感谢。自开始本期特刊以来，每天的不确定性都在加剧，这种强度激起了人们对生活的意义以及为我们的工作带来新生活的意义的新问题。不确定性使我们在美好与痛苦，平静与激动，希望与恐怖的时刻不同地带给我们生活。作为客座编辑，我们对本期和该领域的工作进行了调查，以发现自己又对新的和更新的想法充满活力。我们发现自己再次思考关于扫盲的批判性，社会文化观点的持续重要性及其对不知情的邀请（例如，Vasudevan，2011年），调动情感（例如Lewis＆Tierney，2013年），以及通过创伤产生爱和存在（例如，Dutro＆Bien，2014年）。我们还通过跨学科的人文主义者和社会科学家自我开放，了解我们的知识生产实践的偶然性，以及在与代理人和行动主义者合作的过程中易受伤害的潜力，使自己在社会，情感生活中无法控制的潜力，从而重新焕发了生命。研究和教学（Boldt，本期； Truman，Hackett，Pahl，Davies和Escott，本期）。本期专刊探讨了后者，并提出了与不确定性的理论潜力强烈共鸣的文章，这些不确定性将更新的扫盲研究带入生活，并将更新的生活带入扫盲研究。

我们是在世界破裂的时候写这篇文章的。作为一个领域，我们将如何度过难关？在紧迫的不确定时期，进行识字研究的必要条件是什么？作为识字学者和人类，我们将永远不一样。我们永远不会以相同的方式进行研究。对我们而言，推动这篇社论的问题在专业人士和日常工作中都势在必行：可能会影响理论如何帮助我们把握我们的脆弱性，不确定性以及我们的研究，以帮助我们减少不确定性？我们只能确定，随着人类的发展，我们对确定性的倾向和渴望将变得不安。然后，当不确定性笼罩时，影响转移，加剧。我们正在度过只会不断累积的紧张时刻。随着他们的积累以及我们在本社论中以及本期文章中的探讨，权力将有更多机会抓住我们对控制的渴望。因此，当我们希望通过不确定性更紧密地与世界接触时，我们还会问：“影响理论如何帮助我们理解限制学习和使用文学的能力的力量条件和机制，并利用我们自己的情感倾向来损害我们的利益？