Rehabilitation: A Post-critical Approach PDF

Foreword

Doing Disability Studies of Rehabilitation

Disability studies, as I will define it, aims to uncover the cultural emergence of human ability and difference, with the overall aim of democratic social change. This definition is extremely broad and, accordingly, has numerous advantages. I will outline two of them (and gloss over the deficits). First, it means that we can expand the scope of inquiry from those classified as different, medically or otherwise, to any cultural location where personhood is distributed. The object of inquiry, then, is not deviance from but ability.* The basic question: how is the ability-to culturally allocated? A second, and closely related, advantage of this definition is that we can do disability studies of, well, almost anything—capitalism, medicine, bureaucracy—so long as these or other institutions shape agency, capacity, or ability, then we can do disability studies of them. The book before you is more than simply a case for reflexivity in, and theoretical reflections on, rehabilitation: it is an important contribution to a burgeoning space of inquiry, to disability studies of rehabilitation.

“Disability studies of rehabilitation” is an intentionally ugly name for an extremely important project.† The point is not only to analyze business- as-usual rehabilitation through a predefined theoretical lens, as in “the application of theory to practice,” but to transform the practice of rehabilitation itself. This book makes clear that rehabilitation does more than simply making people’s lives better. Gibson demonstrates that clinical practices and practicing clinicians outline, in whole or in part, what a better life is. It is the responsibility of those who are defining life to admit as much. “Mobility,” “independence,” or “quality-of-life” (Chapters 6, 5, and 3, respectively): these professional concepts do not simply measure patients; they chart the horizons of patienthood. Admitting the worldmaking potential of rehabilitation practice, the unending goal of Gibson’s “post-critical” approach is to think of ways in which patients, practitioners, and their allies can define The Good—and achieve it together.

This book is littered with insights drawn from works of philosophy and social theory, together used to excavate the tacit underpinnings of rehabilitation science. One is left asking: do we need to do theory to do postcritical rehabilitation in the first place? While the sociological theorist in me wants to exclaim “of course!” the disabled person cannot. To require that anyone participating in a life-affirming rehabilitation practice have a firm grounding in abstract theory is to replace one professional prerequisite with another. We are trying to eliminate needless barriers, not create new ones. Theoretical exploration is one kind of language in which this inquiry can take place. It is not the only one; we can do it theoretically, or we can do it in plain English. The important point, once again, is that we do it together