In a global context marked by structural inequalities and neoliberal dynamics, it is urgent to articulate local struggles with critical theoretical frameworks, pedagogical and activist experiences, and other transformative practices. This commitment stems from an ethical and political stance that seeks to dismantle the hegemonic logics that sustain exclusion, paternalism, and dependency, as defined by the Global North (Santos, 2012). Currently, Latin America and the Caribbean are experiencing a resurgence of neoliberalism and neofascism, which, originating in the Global North, threatens progressive governments, the autonomy and sovereignty of countries in the Global South, and even the Global South. The "crisis of democracy" in our region is exacerbated by the rise and strengthening of new right-wing movements. This process is characterized by the consolidation of governments and political actors that promote political destabilization and by the proliferation of ideologies that deny the existence of the climate crisis. These actors support far-right movements, parties, and political organizations, creating an environment conducive to radical and extreme political expressions that even manifest themselves within popular sectors. The rise of the new right translates into the presence of conservative and moralistic ideologies that not only support coup attempts but also adopt antifeminist positions and openly oppose environmental movements. Similarly, they reject policies of justice, the recognition of rights, and social equality, contributing to political and social polarization in the region.

This political scenario exacerbates the conditions of oppression (Abberley, 2008), precarity, and exclusion of and for people with disabilities, their families, social movements, civil society organizations, and activists, as well as for academics and researchers in different countries of the region. This is also evident in the impact it has had on public policies regarding disability, as seen in Argentina with the recent "Emergency Law on Disability." The briefly outlined context illustrates the modes of repression against disability movements, activism, and forms of resistance. In line with the trends in critical disability studies, it is imperative to understand disability within the framework of neoliberalism. This means recognizing the "productions" that highlight disability as constructed from the social relations that unfold in each social formation, at specific historical moments, and linked in a particular way to the logics of social production and reproduction. (Ferrante, 2008, Danel, 2004, Moscoso, 2013, and Sala, Pucci, and Chavez Asencio, 2020). Thinking about disability means observing, in particular, the prevailing social models surrounding bodies, bodily performance, relationships with the state and the market, and participation in economic, political, social, and cultural activities (Pucci and Danel, 2021: 62-63). Similarly, Maldonado (2020) challenges us to "feel disability in neoliberal times," whose manifestations occur in processes of "privatization," "extractivism," "labor flexibility," "financial deregulation," "reduction of social protections," even their disappearance, and all forms of precarity, violence, and human rights violations.

Far beyond CLACSO's promoted platform of "South-South collaboration" (while acknowledging the need to confront shared inequalities and unite the potential of different countries), the proposal to renew the Working Group seeks to give rise to critical anti-ableist epistemologies. This means adopting decolonial and disability-based political, social, and pedagogical stances as dissident and resistant subjectivities against neoliberalism and the neoliberalization of disability itself. This entails repositioning disability and disability struggles from an intersectional, feminist, gender, migration, sexual dissidence, anti-ageist, and anti-racist perspective, as part of the broader Latin American and Caribbean political debate and struggles.

The GT's commitment to proposing a Latin American critical thinking on disability is based on the following aspects:

Disability as a social construct: Critical Disability Studies in the region have challenged dominant discourses that reduce disability to a deficit, highlighting the need for structural and cultural change (Yarza de los Ríos et al., 2019; Revuelta and Hernández, 2021). In the Latin American context, ableism is deeply linked to neoliberal rationality (Mitchell and Snyder, 2015), which values ​​bodies based on their productivity. In Latin America, this logic is intertwined with a welfare and charitable legacy, consolidated through media and institutional mechanisms, such as the Telethon, which have perpetuated symbolic dependency (Ferrante and Brégain, 2023; Brogna, 2023; Pino-Morán and Ramírez, 2023).

Intersectionality: Inequalities do not manifest themselves uniformly; they are intersected by race, gender, class, disability, sexuality, and colonialism (Liasidou, 2013). Latin American feminism (Curiel, 2008) and decolonial perspectives (Espinosa, 2016) provide keys to unraveling the discourses and practices that sustain exclusion. Intersectionality, understood from the Global South, must be situated, political, and transformative (Rodó-Zárate, 2021), avoiding its merely descriptive or imported use.

Activism and resistance: Activism functions as an act of prefiguration (Yates, 2015), where possible futures are rehearsed from the present and becomes a means to resist invisibility and institutional ableism (Mareño, 2021). Likewise, people with disabilities in Latin America and the Caribbean have found in artistic and performative practices a way to contest public space (Romero-Rojas, 2022), make their demands visible, and construct their own narratives, disrupting hegemonic thought and affirming their existence and agency.

Disability is an analytical category, but also an embodied experience, a way of being and existing, a representation, an identity/affinity, a social production, and a perspective that account for a material-semiotic node. This node, according to its relationality and spatio-temporal flows, situations, contexts, and disciplinary fields, as well as the situated knowledge and positionality of the "intersectional political subject of disability" (people with disabilities, family/caregivers/assistants, public officials, academics, and accomplices in resistance), reproduces and reflects epistemes and horizons of meaning that converge, contradict each other, are juxtaposed, and/or complement one another. From this, a wealth of analysis of social reality and theoretical construction in our Latin American region has allowed for the expansion of critical thinking on disability, which is even reflected in the publications that have been part of this Working Group's activities.

At the same time, diverse perspectives, subjectivities, politics, aesthetics, ethics, methodologies, and pedagogies form the crucible of this Working Group, in which its theoretical frameworks, as well as traditions of thought, epistemological shifts, critical theories, and contemporary conceptual scenes, reflect dialogues and tensions between South and South, and between South and North. Initially, we highlight the reception and translation of Disability Studies, of Anglo-Saxon origin, which sparked a structural-political analysis to critique the medical and pathologizing positions that encapsulate disability and its social reality in Latin America and the Caribbean. The perspective of the social model that engages with "citizenship," "social barriers," and "rights," together with the international association movement, fostered the creation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006), the first international human rights treaty of the 21st century, which constitutes a legal framework to guarantee the dignity of persons with disabilities. However, political processes in Latin American countries are eroding the progress that has been gradually and painstakingly achieved over more than four decades. The rise of the far right and neoliberalism not only accentuate a counter-discourse, disability-phobia, and the promotion of individualism, but also confirm that, with or without these circumstances, in analytical terms, the human rights perspective must be decolonized, transcended, and questioned as a hegemonic perspective, and/or made to coexist and be reimagined with other epistemological, ethical, and theoretical frameworks. In this sense, recent theories and interpretations in our region identify the ableist system of oppression as the hegemonic and colonial historical form of domination over bodies and minds and their potential for existence, as it materializes forms of oppression not only on bodies with disabilities but also on other bodies and mindsets. Therefore, a theoretical-practical stance is highlighted as a form of resistance that adds to the epistemic foundation of this GT: anti/counter-ableism (Vite, Monroy, Vallejo and Aréchiga, 2022).

Thus, we intend to continue working to widen the crack in the modern-colonial Western matrix and contribute to ensuring that ableist expression and its interconnections are not the only way to understand and feel the intersectional category and subjectivity of disability, madness, neurodiversity, chronic illness, and other oppressed experiences affected by this matrix. We understand that ableism not only refers to discrimination against people with disabilities, but also constitutes a socially constructed matrix of oppression based on the hegemonic conception of bodies and minds as normal, healthy, whole, productive, and efficient. Likewise, it has been necessary to delve deeper, specify, and intertwine with other forms of resistance and social movements that confront violence, such as those of the "cordial" movement and other processes of disability, emphasizing that there is also the possibility of building a common emancipatory vision without diluting individual perspectives. It is in this tense, yet creative, entanglement that this proposal continues the challenge of overcoming the coloniality of thought (Quijano, 2014) to promote the construction of our own conceptual and methodological frameworks, rooted in local realities and in the knowledge that emerges from the territories (Smith, 2016), positioning ourselves from an epistemic justice where what is created around disability, as well as what researchers with and without disabilities contribute, is understood not only as a contribution to our "feeling-thinking cosmos and social movement," but also to social movements, Latin American thought, and decolonial thought in general. Likewise, while creating our own knowledge, we also engage in dialogue with Latin American references that allow us an inter, de, and interdisciplinarity with feminist (Espinosa, 2016; Viveros, 2016; Korol, 2010), decolonial (Segato, 2013; Walsh, 2017), queer-crip (Butler, 2002; McRuer, 2021), posthuman (Haraway, 1995), and other archipelagos.

Some challenges and intentions of our proposal for the continuity of our GT are the following:

· Continue to promote spaces for dialogue and cooperation between Latin American and Caribbean countries, fostering the construction of a South-South epistemic community

· To decenter the hegemonic discourses of the North and to highlight the contributions of critical disability studies from a regional perspective.

· Promote research practices consistent with the ethical and political principles of situated knowledge production.

· Promote transformative action research, focused on social change and practical impact.

· To promote people with disabilities as researchers, both as epistemic and political agents

• Incorporate the intersectional and anti-ableist perspective into the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies.