Toward Dissent -- June 2026!

I am pleased to share the release, as part of the series Latinoamericnana at the University of Toronto Press, of Toward Dissent: Accessing Political Struggle from Across the Americas, an anthology I have had the privilege to help shape as both editor and contributor. This project emerges from an ongoing commitment to understanding how sociopolitical struggles across the Americas are lived, documented, and circulated—and how those processes, in turn, reshape the ways we produce knowledge.

In my introduction and chapter, I engage with a central premise that animates the volume as a whole: that global circuits and local pathways are not abstract systems, but are grounded in the material and embodied realities of our lives. The need for access—to archives, to networks, to communities, to care—structures how ideas move and how dissent takes form. Toward Dissent brings together essays, manifestos, interviews, chronicles, and personal reflections to trace these movements, emphasizing that circulation is never neutral. It is shaped by power, by inequality, and by the uneven distribution of resources that determine who can speak, who can listen, and who can be heard.

The volume sits in conversation with recent work in Cultural Studies that foregrounds mobility, mediation, and the politics of knowledge production—particularly scholarship that examines how cultural artifacts and practices travel across borders while remaining marked by local conditions. At the same time, it contributes to Latin American Studies by centering hemispheric and transnational exchanges, highlighting the importance of translation, small-scale publishing, and grassroots networks in sustaining political imaginaries and solidarities.

Equally, Toward Dissent resonates with ongoing conversations in Disability Studies, especially those that challenge normative assumptions about access, participation, and embodiment. By attending to the material conditions that enable or constrain movement—whether physical, social, or intellectual—the anthology underscores how experiences of exclusion and interdependence shape both activism and scholarship. In this sense, the project aligns with recent work that calls for more participatory, situated, and care-centered approaches to research and documentation.

Across its contributions, the book insists that political movements do more than catalyze change: they also transform the very methods and frameworks through which we attempt to understand that change. By placing critical inquiry alongside ideological affinity and activism, Toward Dissent invites readers to consider how scholarship can remain accountable to the communities and struggles it engages.

I hope this volume offers a space for reflection, dialogue, and continued collaboration, and I’m grateful to be part of a collective effort that seeks to rethink how we write, research, and imagine dissent today.