Dis/ability in the Americas: Introduction to a Sentipensante Framework

• In Event: Dis/ability in the Americas: The Intersections of Education, Power, and Identity

Abstract

The geopolitical landscape of the Americas, as well as the category of disability, are built on a Western paradigm that centers individualism, meritocracy, productivity, and rationality as the core standards of human development and able-bodiedness. The coloniality of power that encompasses this worldview (Quijano, 2000) is reproduced in schools, which become sites of pedagogy that uphold and maintain this Western paradigm of domination (Grande, 2004). In other words, schooling naturalizes an array of values and mindsets: an anthropocentric paradigm that classifies the world into binaries within which relationships of domination exist (Lugones, 2007) including the separation of the body into: mind and body; a hierarchical thinking that naturalizes rank and competition, instead of an appreciation for what is; a categorical thinking that silos the social sciences disciplines globally; and a narrative of “Western progress” that understands time (Samuel, 2017) in a forward and linear moving manner. In this paradigm, “disability” creates an “other,” while automatically justifying oppression against this “otherness” through this categorization. As a tool of the coloniality of power, ‘disability’ comes to mean a “failure” of hearts, bodies, minds, souls and spirits. In this paper we present the sentipensante framwork used in the book Dis/Ability in the Americas.

Authors

• David Isaac Hernandez-Saca, University of Northern Iowa

• Chantal Figueroa, Colorado College