1 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. S. Warriner (ed.), Refugee Education across the Lifespan, Educational Linguistics 50, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79470-5_1 Introduction: An Educational Linguistics Perspective on Refugee Education: Bringing into Focus the Language and Literacy Dimensions of the Refugee Experience Doris S. Warriner Refugee resettlement has never been more urgent. With dramatic increases in global ethnic confict, religious persecution, political instability, disasters caused by extreme weather, drought and famine, the number of forcibly displaced persons had surpassed 80 million by the summer of 2020 (UNHCR Press Release, December 2, 2020). In 2020, 80% of the world’s refugees were being hosted (temporarily) in developing countries (UNHCR Fact Sheet, March 2020). Recent news headlines demonstrate that the convergence of multiple global and local forces (political, eco- nomic, environmental) has created conditions of extreme uncertainty and precarity in a growing number of regions – creating unstable or unsafe conditions that have pushed large numbers of people to uproot themselves, their families and their lives in search of safety and security. New displacements are also driven by recent increases in violence in Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, Yemen, and Central America. This volume takes up and responds to the urgency of the moment by bringing together accounts from a wide range of perspectives on refugee education. With a particular focus on the role of language and literacy in educational access, assess- ment, practice, and policy, contributors identify and critically examine the relation- ship between the contexts, priorities, practices, and outcomes of various learning and teaching processes for refugee-background learners from across the life span. They take up questions and debates about language and literacy education, language and literacy policy, language and literacy ideologies, language and literacy social- ization, and language and literacy assessment. And they draw on various subfelds within educational linguistics to examine relevant phenomena in a wide range of contexts (e.g., K-12 classrooms, after-school programs, community-based pro- grams, the workplace, spaces of healthcare delivery, online spaces, or nontraditional spaces of language use/learning). Collectively, authors demonstrate that an D. S. Warriner (*) Department of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: doris.warriner@asu.edu