CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Medical Sociology
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1578464
This article is part of the Research TopicNovel Sociological Methods and Practices of Engagement across Disability CommunitiesView all 8 articles
Gnosis and Counterstories: Decolonial Disability Reflections on Delinking as a Transgressive Social Methodology
Provisionally accepted
- 1Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- 2University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This essay articulates an innovative counterstory-based methodology of decolonialdelinking which disrupts the very epistemic foundations of sociological disciplinary boundariesand 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 versus ideas, both of our illustrative counterstories will deal with aspects that disrupt such epistemological paradigms through intersectional cripistemologies
Keywords: Counterstories, Disabilility, Epistimology, Mathematics, Decolinisation
Received: 17 Feb 2025; Accepted: 24 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Padilla and Tan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Paulo Tan, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.