Dis/ability in the Americas: The Intersections of Education, Power, and Identity (Education in Latin America and the Caribbean)

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.

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.