RACE, DISABILITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RADICAL AGENCY: TOWARD A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIAL CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS IN LATINX DISCRIT

The present dissertation is a non-empirical methodology project grounded in political philosophy. As a practical exercise, it bridges knowledge workers (e.g., educators, action researchers and other engaged scholars) with activists to explore the situated emancipation possibilities of radical agency at the intersection of blindness and Latinidad. It does so in line with DisCrit and other bodies of literature within critical disability studies, works centered on trans-Latinidades and border-crossing, intersectional decoloniality theorizing, critical hermeneutics, critical race theory and blackness/ whiteness studies. It interrogates performative and movement building spaces for teaching and learning that foster radical exteriority trajectories of decolonial solidarity and emancipation-centered reflexivity. The driving questions that articulate the project are tackled metatheoretically and through a hermeneutic method quite common in critical race theory, the method of counter storytelling. This gets enacted in reflexive counter stories distributed throughout each of the five chapters of the dissertation. Some of the emerging practical lessons from the analysis include: (1) a need to fight lovelessness and ossified modes of movement organizing; (2) the realization that trans-Latinidades often have difficulties conciliating their master ideologies and competing utopias; (3) the understanding that in the current context, LatDisCrit is a proto-utopia, one that remains within the power of the unnamed; (4) the conviction that LatDisCrit will only have meaning if it gets traction as a mutually edifying sphere between knowledge workers and activists in the trenches; (5) the need to avoid the framing of decolonial solidarity as a process circumscribed to communities of sameness; (6) the importance of empowering activists as true experts of their sense of situated emancipation and undoing disciplinary layers of hierarchy between knowledge workers and activists; and (7) a practical imperative for LatDisCrit’s alliance building and organizing to flow through multiple trans-Latinx and pandisability relational links, being mindful to work especially along with those collectivities that generate more tension for the comfort zones of blind Latinx