Dis/ability in the Americas

This edited volume highlights the rich and complex educational debates around Critical Disability Studies in Education (DSE), critical mental health, and crip theories. Chapter authors use the term Dis/ability to criticize aspects of education research and international development that do not center the experiences of dis/abled students and people with dis/abilities. Through case studies from around the Americas, chapters highlight how top-down approaches to disabilities further oppress rather than emancipate. The volume prioritizes the spaces of resistance where local initiatives speak back to the demands imposed by an ever-globalizing world shaped by colonialism and imperialism, undergird by intersectional ableism. Voices of disabled students and people with dis/abilities counter-narrate the personal, interpersonal, structural, and political ways in which biomedical and psychological models of disability have impacted their well-being throughout education and society in the Americas. Through a critical sentipensante approach that centers the “epistemologies of the south,” this volume challenges global mental health and dis/ability hegemony in the Americas.

“Disability studies has needed scholarship that decenters Western models of medicalization and theorizes disability as a tool of colonial power that is represented, administered, and lived–sentipensante–in Latin America. In this carefully curated book, Figueroa and Hernandez-Saca have given us counternarratives of decolonizing moments of disability in everyday that foreground human agency, transformation, and struggle.  What a necessary and accessible contribution to the field!”
—Nirmala Erevelles, Professor, Social and Cultural Studies in Education, University of Alabama, USA, and author of Disability and Difference in Global Context (2011)

“Heart. Body. Mind. Spirit. The reader is engaged in all four realms by a wonderful ensemble of scholars who collectively share their insightful intersectional perspectives on education, power, and identity. This work is a major contribution to transnational dialogs on disability, calling upon usall to strive for a more socially just, caring, and inclusive world.”
—David J. Connor, Professor Emeritus, Hunter College (CUNY), USA

“In the age of global norming and as we witness the normalization of indifference and intolerance, Chantal Figueroa and David Hernandez-Saca fashion a compelling interdisciplinary framing to understand and transform systems of oppression targeting dis/ability. Integrating social, historical, discursive, material, and critical dimensions, this volume illuminates liminal theoretical spaces urgently needed to create expansive intersectional visions of dis/ability. The authors situate their contributions in the geopolitical asymmetries of the Americas reminding readers the necessity to account for historical memories and deploy decolonial perspectives. These works establish there are many global Souths, and equally important, that global Souths inhabit the global North. The contributions in this volume destabilize canonical biological paradigms and assemble (re)presentations of dis/ability that integrate multiple analytical scales and braid neglected—yet indispensable—identity layers such as emotions and spirituality. Of significance, this volume brings together scholars from the Global North and South embodying multiple intersectional identities to offer heteroglossic insights that interrupt the hegemonic innocent assumption of the essential dis/abled individual.”
—Alfredo J. Artiles, Professor, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, USA

Chantal Figueroa is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado College, USA.

David I. Hernández-Saca is Assistant Professor of Disability Studies in Education at the Department of Special Education at the University of Northern Iowa, USA.