[Recipient of the 2024 Inter-American Philosophy Award] Philosophers have recently debated whether the social identity category "Latinx" picks out a race (Alcoff 2006), an ethnicity (Gracia 2008), or something else altogether (Arango and Burgos 2021). Rather than defending one or several of these ways of understanding US Latinx as a political or social group, my paper focuses on the personal social identity turmoil young US Latinx people feel and explores the history of inter-American thought to seek a remedy for it. (...) Three prominent American philosophers – José Martí, Alain Locke, and Emilio Uranga – combine to teach us that, while the US Latinx strives for belonging, they find themselves in a situation of unbelonging. The tension that results from the desire to belong but the reality of unbelonging produces a deep-seated anxiety that has come to characterize the US Latinx condition. I suggest that an effective tool for coping with this anxiety, affirming our identity, and building community is the activity of doing inter-American, Latin American, and Latinx Philosophy. (shrink)

Buen Vivir is a postdevelopment philosophy enshrined in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution, which offers an alternative to neoliberal development frameworks. This paper examines the distinctive features of Buen Vivir and associated reforms regarding disabled people's rights, alongside Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ analysis of “ecology of knowledges,” to suggest that the outlook offers important resources for theorizing disabled people's active role in shaping shared notions of living well. These reforms uphold epistemic ideals of solidarity and the possibility of developing embodied knowledges that (...) can further contribute to the life of the community. Buen Vivir is both a goal, living with rich, meaningful relationships in a pluralistic society, and a process, developing the knowledges that can inform the expression of those relationships. As such, Buen Vivir motivates creating the conditions that allow for disabled persons to participate in processes creating new knowledges that shape meanings of disability and good ways of living. (shrink)