Using narrative descriptions of the author's own lived-experience of her ethnic heritage, Martinez offers a systematic interrogation of the social and cultural norms by which certain aspects of her Mexican-American cultural heritage are both retained and lost over generations of assimilation. Combining semiotic and existential phenomenology with Chicana feminism, the author charts new terrain where anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work may be pursued.

The Caribbean Philosophical Association’s project of shifting the geography of reason requires five specific commitments of attunement: (1) to the languages we use, (2) to our expressive and perceptive capacities, (3) to the communities in which we are engaged and the ones we aspire to engage within, (4) to building culture through political struggle, and (5) to our situatedness and irreducible interconnectedness. Each of these commitments is developed toward identifying the mutually constructive relationship between communicology and creolization.

An explication of the phenomenological sensibilities found in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and other Latina feminist philosophers offers insight into the problem of bringing philosophy into greater relevance beyond academic and scholarly worlds. This greater relevance entails clear and direct contact with the immediacy of our communicative relationships with others, both inside and outside the academy, and allows for an interrogation of the totalizing perceptions that are at work within normative processes of epistemological legitimation. As a result of this (...) interrogation, it is possible to cultivate perceptual capacities related to culture that intervene in the normatively tacit cultural dispositions that often limit the possibilities of understanding. (shrink)

The study of gender and ethnicity (or, equally, sexuality and race) is complicated by the basic ambiguity regarding the meaning and signifying capacity of each of these designations. A phenomenological approach aids in explicating the specific social, cultural and historical terms in which the designations of gender and ethnicity come to have different meanings and signifying capacities. Such an explication reveals variously contested boundaries of knowledge-production, and allows for a return to concrete world where meaning, culture, and history are embodied. (...) The present work examines the study of gender and ethnicity as it has developed in relation to the postmodern and postcolonial challenges leveled against social science, and argues for an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology that neither ignores the existential and embodied reality as experienced by those who are designated objects of scientific study, nor valorizes the experience of social objectification or dehumanization. The present work argues that an interdisciplinary and decolonial phenomenology, provides the basis for a full recognition of the intersubjective conditions in which human recognition (and non-recognition) are possible, as well as a critical approach in assessing how the relationship between experience and perspective leads to the truly insightful understanding emerging in this particular time and this particular place. (shrink)

The present work considers the communicative dimensions of intellectual practices in an effort to discern how these practices can take full account of their own placement within and accountability to the human communities and cultures they cultivate. The discussion is framed with a focus on intellectual communities who have struggled against the dominance of Euromodern epistemological orientations that have constructed their own cultures and intellectual practices as irrelevant or, at best inferior. This struggle is a decolonial praxis. The development of (...) communicology during the post-World War II period in the United States is taken up as an approach to theory construction that allows for the fullest possible examination of the very human condition in which thought and action emerge. Chicana and Latina phenomenology constitute a further development of this decolonial praxis consonant with the sensibilities of communicology. Chicana and Latina phenomenology is shown to advance our understanding of philosophy as an intellectual (i.e., communicative) practice that takes place in a world of other human beings to whom we are accountable. Theory construction as it relates to boundary conditions is taken as an important point that spans the all too common gap between the existential and the cultural and aids in constituting a theory construction project that is also a decolonial praxis. (shrink)

This Special Issue of Philosophies, entitled “Communicative Philosophies”, intends to push our philosophical reflections into the direction of the embodied realities lived and enacted as we engage in the communicative processes of thinking, feeling, and acting [...].

Con el libro "Poiesis Educativa", la Fundacion Universitaria de Derecho, Administracion y Politica, S.C. Editorial, da comienzo a la coleccion FUNDAp - Educacion, cuyo proposito fundamental es acoger las creaciones de los estudiosos de la educacion desde sus diversos campos y ambitos de desenvolvimiento. Es un libro que desde el titulo nos propone, nos inquieta, nos reta. La autora expone en el su preocupacion por el hecho de que la conceptualizacion actual de la educacion reduce y socaba a esta, en (...) su empeno economicista y politicista de epistemologizar la educacion. (shrink)

In Spoils of War, a diverse group of distinguished contributors suggest that acts of aggression resulting from the racism and sexism inherent in social institutions can be viewed as a sort of "war," experienced daily by women of color.

This essay reports on phenomenological research conducted with people who describe having been harassed, having been accused of harassment, and/or having mediated or adjudicated harassment disputes. The authors review recent legal conceptions of sexual harassment and articulate a methodology for analyzing individual narrative accounts. The analysis of six selected interviews (three alleged harassers and three declared harassees) depicts how, through discourse with others, persons in ambiguous cases of harassment come to perceive themselves as harassers or harasseesgradually, how intention is inferred (...) from conductcontingently, and how perceptions and expressions are often reified as certainties in the effort to secure some sense of justiceinstitutionally. (shrink)