The ESPecialist

Celebrating 50 years of Professor Maximina Maria Freire's career is more than just paying homage: it's about creating space for deep and affectionate reflection on a life dedicated to education, language, and social transformation. This thematic dossier from the journal *The ESPecialist* presents unpublished texts that engage with the central themes of her work: Applied Linguistics from a transdisciplinary perspective, Morin's complexity, Complex Educational Design, complex hermeneutic-phenomenological research (AHFC), critical teacher training, self-hetero-eco-formation, and transmedia practices.

Maximina is an unavoidable reference when we think about an education that is done with others, research that listens, involves, and is affected, and teaching that integrates body, word, gesture, and world. Throughout her career, influenced by thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Edgar Morin, Basarab Nicolescu, Humberto Maturana, and many others, she has built an academic praxis marked by sensitive listening, an attentive, systemic gaze that welcomes the dialogue of opposites and contradictions, and which takes place within the ecology of action, by ethical rigor, and by the loving transgression of disciplinary boundaries.