Reframing Childhood Disability: Pushing Boundaries in the Rehabilitation Sciences

The purpose of this study was to critically examine the ways that dominant discourses surrounding childhood disability, as constructed in the neoliberal context, shape knowledge and practice in children’s rehabilitation. I carried out a critical discourse analysis of text within the rehabilitation sciences, including peer-reviewed research, websites, and qualitative interview transcripts. Drawing on disability studies scholarship as well as my Foucauldian conceptual framework, I called attention to complex interactions between discourse, power, and knowledge that shape thought and action in the rehabilitation sciences. My findings suggest that despite a growing recognition of the harms associated with deficit-based understandings of disability, reformulation will require a considerable disruption of the durable neoliberal assumptions which ground contemporary Western society. This work adds to a growing body of literature which advocates for alternative, affirmative understandings of childhood disability through interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly between disability studies and the rehabilitation sciences