Gnosis and counterstories: decolonial disability reflections on delinking as a transgressive social methodology.

Abstract

This essay articulates an innovative counterstory-based methodology of decolonialde linking which disrupts the very epistemic foundations of sociological disciplinary boundaries and ways of thinking about the production and distribution of knowledges. As non-white co-authors, we have opted to follow to adopt an expansive conception of decolonial/border-thinking gnosis and delinking as a way to embrace all knowledges, particularly those which do not conform to disciplinary modes of exposition and rationalist systematicity within the epistemic conceptions of knowledge. Using two disabled counterstories as gnosis illustrations, our essay shows how their enactment transgresses established norms for addressing and engaging with traditional, discipline-bound epistemological concerns. As such, we aim to open theoretical and methodological avenues for decolonial and non-Eurocentric spheres of imagination. More specifically, since the worlds of mathematics and mathematics education are so dominated by rationalist and neurotypical epistemologies grounded on the Cartesian duality of matter vs. ideas, both of our illustrative counterstories will deal with aspects that disrupt such epistemological paradigms through intersectional cripistemologies.