University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs Education ETDs Fall 11-14-2018 RACE, DISABILITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RADICAL AGENCY: TOWARD A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIAL CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS IN LATINX DISCRIT Alexis C. Padilla University of New Mexico - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds Part of the Adult and Continuing Education Commons, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Disability and Equity in Education Commons, Disability Studies Commons, Educational Leadership Commons, Leadership Studies Commons, Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons, and the Sociology Commons Recommended Citation Padilla, Alexis C.. "RACE, DISABILITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RADICAL AGENCY: TOWARD A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIAL CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS IN LATINX DISCRIT." (2018). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/educ_llss_etds/96 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Education ETDs at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Alexis C. Padilla Candidate Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Ricky Lee Allen. Ph.D. Chairperson Ruth Trinidad Galván. Ph.D. Paulo Tan. Ph.D. Jonathan Bolton. Ph.D., M.D. i RACE, DISABILITY AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF RADICAL AGENCY: TOWARD A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DECOLONIAL CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS IN LATINX DISCRIT by ALEXIS C. PADILLA B.A. in Law, University of the Andes, 1987 M.A. in Sociology, University of New Mexico, 1991 Ph.D. in Sociology, University of New Mexico, 1995 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico December 2018 ii DEDICATION I dedicate the present project as I do all my endeavors, great and small, to Amalia. You are my beloved blue flower, my Queen, my Dulcinea/ Quixotiza, the visionary beacon that enlightens my ideas and my dearest dreams. Because of you, my phenix rises despite so many ashes, so many burdening flaws, so many contrary winds. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to make a very special acknowledgement, expressing my deepest gratefulness to Dr. Paulo Tan. His support has always gone far beyond the line of duty. I also want to thank Dr. Allen for being part of a long process and for remaining till the end. I thank Dr. Bolton for the causes we shared at the north campus and the ideas exchanged throughout these past five years. I thank Dr. Trinidad Galván for furthering engaged Latinx scholarship in my committee and far beyond. Above all, I thank David, my brother, my Compadre, whose living example of generosity has always exceeded all expectations; How much we suffer the injustice of your absence, brother of my soul! I thank my dearest friend Jesse, who together with Amalia and, in their own way, the three musketeers, know and suffer firsthand the process of preparing and writing a project of this nature. I thank Doña Tomasa, Don Amador and the two Ramonas for giving me via example the moral foundations that keep me in this race, despite all my setbacks, doubts and the sinuosity of my detours. I am very grateful to Don Eulogio for challenging me every day with his axiological lighthouse, although I will probably never succeed in emulating him. I thank Rev. Alberto. During his time as a seminarian he chose to visit Arturo in the boarding school, later feeding his insatiable hunger for readings. I thank the educators with thirst for excellence who shaped Arturo’s early critical thinking, especially Flores, Lobos and Sweeney. My thanks go to those of different thinking who nevertheless have known how to debate with Arturo as an equal. Al last, although superlatively most important, I thank the Pantecrator because with his wisdom he spins the loom of the universe and gives meaning to all the nonsense. He allows our souls to face with joy, hope and emancipatory creativity the consequences of suffering oppression and humiliation in their most immanent existential materiality. iv Race, Disability and the Possibilities of Radical Agency: Toward a Political Philosophy of Decolonial Critical Hermeneutics in Latinx1 DisCrit2 by Alexis C. Padilla B.A. in Law, University of the Andes, 1987 M.A. in Sociology, University of New Mexico, 1991 Ph.D. in Sociology, University of New Mexico, 1995 Ph.D. in Language, Literacy and Sociocultural Studies, University of New Mexico, 2018 ABSTRACT 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 v 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 con-text, 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 edify- ing 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. vi Table of Content Chapter 1. Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Thesis ...................................................................................................................... 1 1.2. Purpose and Driving Questions: The Role of Counter Storytelling, Assumptions and Core Interpretative Elements ......................................................................... 5 1.3. Scope of the Problem ............................................................................................ 20 A. First Reflexive Counter Story: Vocational Rehabilitation and the Social Reproduction of the Ideology and Materiality of ‘Dis’Ableism...................... 27 B. Meaning Making: The Relevance of Ideology, Utopia and Performativity ................................................................................................. 33 B.1. Ideology Critique and Critical Hermeneutics: A First Approximation .......................................................................... 35 B.2. A Subaltern Look at Situated Emancipation and Radical Agency ....... 47 B.3. Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic Treatment of Utopian Action as Text and the Problem of Alterity/radical Exteriority Based Performativity ...................................................................................... 52 C. Summary of Problem Dimensions ....................................................... 61 1.4. Key Concepts .................................................................................................... 67 A. Why distinguish between power relations and domination? .................... 68 B. Emancipation, Liberation, Freedom and Love ............................................. 69 C. Revisiting the Conceptual Boundaries of Radical Agency and Radical Solidarity and Micro and Meso-Level Emancipatory Learning .................... 74 D. Political Philosophy and the Problem of Emancipatory Ethics .................... 76 E. Thinking, Doing and the Problem of Emancipatory Knowledge ................. 80 1.5. Chapter Summary and Key Concept Map .......................................................... 83 Chapter 2 Methodology and Epistemology ...................................................................................... 88 2.1. General Considerations on Political Philosophy, Applied Ethics and and Methodology ..............................................................................................