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.