Given the growing strength of the Working Group since its creation in 2016, and in particular, the increasing participation of academic activists with disabilities within it, this proposal includes a co-coordination team and facilitators (six people in total) comprised of three people with disabilities, a criterion considered crucial along with territorial and gender considerations. From our perspective, it is important to recognize that the struggle of people with disabilities (PWDs) and their allies has demanded, since the 90s, greater visibility and the implementation of actions aimed at reversing conditions of subordination, discrimination, marginalization, and so on.

In 2006, the first transnational human rights treaty of the 21st century was signed: the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This legal and political instrument has been ratified by the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean through various laws, decrees, and regulations. This has led to the mandatory incorporation of a social, interactive, and ecological paradigm of disability, enshrined in several national constitutions. At the same time, it serves as a tool for demanding inclusion in the constitutions of countries that do not yet address it, as is the case with the drafting of a new constitution currently under debate in Chile.

Public policies across the region have acknowledged a paradigm shift regarding disability, given that various critical voices have pointed out the persistence of old institutional mechanisms of denigration and a lack of radical transformations in material, symbolic, and social conditions, not only for people with disabilities, but especially for them, because the conditions of exclusion that bind us and prevent us from considering real actions for participation in the exercise of our rights are intensifying. Contemporary capitalist societies are structured upon a socio-cultural and political process of disabling, which guides, governs, and regulates populations and individuals with disabilities.

While we consider this Convention an important social and political achievement, it still stands in stark contrast to the figures on inequality, discrimination, and exclusion toward and against people with disabilities (World Health Organization, 2011), which have worsened in the context of the pandemic and post-pandemic world. Likewise, the predominance of clinical, medicalizing, pathologizing, developmentalist, assimilationist, patriarchal, normalizing, monocultural, and colonialist models in research and/or intervention is evident, resulting in marginal proposals that do not contribute to the field of disability. Therefore, this proposal aims at critical and post/decolonial perspectives framed within an anti-ableist perspective as a fundamental theoretical and practical stance in the field of disability and within the approaches of Latin American social sciences. On this last point, it suffices to review the publications and participation of our Working Group in academic, dissemination, and intervention events. It is important to highlight here that this team is made up of people with and without disabilities, which shows that this academic and political production arises from the recognition of people with disabilities as producers of knowledge, as political subjects and actors of our own transformations.

The World Report on Disability (WHO-WB, 2011) recommends “creating a critical mass of researchers specializing in disability, as research is essential to increase public understanding of disability issues, inform disability policies and programs, and allocate resources efficiently” (p. 22). Our countries allocate minimal resources to “non-conventional” disability research, as well as to our academic institutions, policy guidelines, and even the organizations and networks of the disability social movement. We observe a marginalization of research, along with a widespread absence of policies and institutional practices oriented toward critical, social, and post/decolonial research, despite the presence of researchers, groups, collectives, and academic networks that have been working on this issue for more than a decade in Latin America and the Caribbean. In recent years, theoretical and practical production has multiplied from different collectives, organizations, movements, research groups, etc.: materials arising with, from, by and for disability have increased fivefold since 2018.

It is estimated that 10% of the world's population lives with a disability, and in countries experiencing conflict and war, this figure can rise to 15%. Thus, 80% of people with disabilities worldwide live in so-called "peripheral" countries; however, the production of knowledge situated in these contexts is scarce and limited (WHO, World Bank, 2011). In Latin America, the majority live in poverty, extreme poverty, and destitution, and virtually all studies indicate significant underreporting. This population faces serious disadvantages in accessing their rights and comprehensive care, including education, health, housing, accessibility, employment, and cultural goods and services, among many others.

Intersectional problems and phenomena also emerge, including violence against girls and women with disabilities, ethnic and cultural identities, migration and displacement, sexual exploitation and rape, trans issues and sexual diversity, enforced disappearance, trafficking of men and women (especially young people), the erosion of cultural expectations, silencing and invisibility in mechanisms of civic participation, institutionalization and confinement, and the dehumanization of care work, among others. This widespread situation in the countries of the region, which shows no signs of abating in the short term, should generate, as Stang Alva (2011, p. 63) argues, “cross-border solidarity among groups exploited, oppressed, or excluded by hegemonic globalization.”

In both the Global North and South, cultural and knowledge/power/being frameworks have been constructed to relate to disability—that is, people with disabilities, their families, caregivers, institutions, knowledge systems, practices, regimes of (in)visibility, and so on. Placing disability within the framework and evolution of social, critical, and post/decolonial studies in Latin America has been key to raising debates that challenge the hegemony of the modern Western colonial matrix as the only possible and desirable one in our region. This has given rise to epistemological debates in which we have explored the following questions: Who is the subject of disability? How can we rethink in/exclusion and the social policies it promotes? What critiques and alternatives to disability are emerging in Latin America? Furthermore, Latin American universities, science and technology councils, and research institutes have overlooked the theoretical and conceptual production and creation generated in disability studies. Thus, in Latin American science, there is a prevailing lack of awareness of the creative potential of disability research, as well as its contributions to social issues and themes. It becomes imperative to review the "rules and conventions that define the dominant current, since this draws the lines of in/exclusion" (Rosa, 2012). This leads us to assume the responsibility of influencing the transformation of our societies by problematizing prevailing theoretical perspectives and by developing counter-proposals.

Disability is a historical-cultural, economic, political, contextual, situational, situated, and specific construct that manifests itself in a particular way in each geographical and relational space, as an existence, concept, phenomenon, representation, mentality, and object. It has entailed a transformation of political paradigms, research paradigms, knowledge production paradigms, and epistemes. At the same time, from and with the organization of grassroots communities of people with disabilities and their families, caregivers, and allies, a multiplicity of connections, overlaps, relays, and contradictions have been established with state or public policies, intervention processes, care, education, etc. Research began within the modern-colonial constructions of the Global North from positivist medical-psycho-pedagogical-rehabilitative perspectives. In the last two decades, perspectives and interventions have diversified toward alternative epistemic archipelagos: deconstructionist, postmodernist, critical, post/decolonial, intercultural, anti-oppressive, emancipatory, and de-disciplinary, within a framework of A planetary struggle for epistemic, social, and economic justice and equity, based on the radical recognition and defense of differences, listening to the heart of a planet that yearns for and demands a new post-developmental and post-capitalist era. In the Global South, there exists a powerful North of modern science—colonizing, pathologizing, medicalizing, etc. Thus, we can view the South-North relationship not as a geo-opposition, but as a locus of enunciation—discursive and profoundly ethical-political—that compels us to reflect and debate: the Global North as a colonizing modern medical model and the South as depathologizing Afro-American and Indigenous knowledges, or in other words, pluriversal perspectives on "disability."

The perceptions, symbolic burden, material conditions, and place within the social space that weigh on people with disabilities have varied throughout history, but they all share a common thread: concealment, annihilation, divine punishment, or objectification of assistance, among others. Hence the importance of studying this topic from diverse, unconventional perspectives, in a dialogue and ecology of knowledge that fosters the collaborative and challenging construction of understanding.

This Working Group is woven into the intricate tapestry of critical, social, and post/decolonial currents, trends, and perspectives from both sides of the globe. On one hand, it is reflectively situated in relation to disability studies, or social studies of disability, of Anglo-Saxon tradition. In other frameworks, it is known as the social or political model of disability (especially in the Post-2006 Convention Era). This approach constitutes a condition of possibility for addressing everything that permeates and challenges it, but also what exceeds it and, paradoxically, shapes it. In this sense, recent theories name the ableist system of oppression as the hegemonic historical form of domination over bodies and their potential for existence, encompassing the power of so many forms of oppression over bodies with disabilities. Therefore, a theoretical-practical stance is put forward as a form of resistance that adds to the epistemic foundation of this GT: anti-counter-ableism (Vite Hernández, Monroy Flores, Vallejo Ortega, Aréchiga Córdoba, 2022).

From this foundational location, its analytical, epistemic, ethical, and political limitations and boundaries are discussed and situated from other enunciative positions that are rooted in Latin American critical thought (which, according to Arturo Escobar in 2015, bifurcates into a left-wing, communal, and Earth-centered thought), in postcolonial studies (Spivak, Bhabha, Parry, McClintock), in the decolonial inflection/turn (Mignolo, Escobar, Castro-Gómez), in the Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos, Meneses), in Latin American popular and critical thought, among others. These epistemic coordinates, in the Global South, under-theorize, render invisible, and displace systematic and border-oriented reflection on disability.

We adopt an intersectional approach because social class, gender, sexual identity, racialization, age, and other factors explain how disability experiences are lived and constructed. The idea is to demystify the notion that disability is a single, reducible experience of a homogeneous, oppressed group, highlighting the heterogeneity of the community. It's not about accumulating conditions, but rather about understanding how the fabric of disability is woven as an intersubjective process. This invites us to unveil, describe, and analyze the personal and collective experiences of people with disabilities, and therefore, to approach subjective processes from a structural perspective.

We are convinced that a task of this magnitude requires a de-disciplinary approach, one that accommodates care work; the study of the body and embodiments; the vision(s) of rights and citizenship; advances and setbacks in legal, educational, labor, health or sanitation issues; the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion (in-exclusions) that operate in current societies; theoretical and methodological trends; political and social contributions produced by movements of people with disabilities; eco-sustainable universal design and architecture and accessibility as a necessary political action.

An important aspect for those of us who make up this Working Group is recognizing ourselves as people with disabilities whose academic, theoretical, artistic, social activism, and other forms of productivity—in short, as people whose creative potential germinates in analytical, theoretical, conceptual, and artistic proposals—is significant. We are social and/or philosophical researchers.

The first challenge of the GT is to work within a shared universe of meanings that will lead us to specify and prioritize together what is being done in our countries and the region, which requires greater drive and work: legislative actions, human rights approach, public policies, adversity and cultural strengthening (stigma/ discrimination/exclusion and agency/ resistance/ confrontation), disability productions in academia among others.

Below, we outline some of our practical challenges:

-Approaches to disability must be directed towards the exercise of rights, and this implies challenging privileges. Therefore, the Working Group will focus on proposals that question and shift meanings about disability, normality, and other related concepts; analyze and understand the materialization of the imaginaries, representations, and symbols of disability in the material conditions of existence of people with disabilities (PwD) in order to contribute to justice; search for similar indicators to establish comparative frameworks among Latin American and Caribbean countries; develop guidelines that contribute to understanding the structural violence against PwD; highlight the agency of PwD to understand and disseminate the contributions made to societal perspectives, but above all, the struggles within movements that have led to the creation of treaties, conventions, and even the stipulation of rights. This involves demystifying the notion of PwD as mere recipients and positioning them as fighters for their rights; and conducting analyses that delve into the close relationship between disability and poverty. Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on the living conditions of people with disabilities.