EPISTEMOLOGIES OF DISABILITY AND REHABILITATION

This book explores the issues of disability and rehabilitation from the field of Science and Technology Studies. It attempts to reflect on, and theorise about, the multiplicity of materially heterogeneous relations that get enacted during the rehabilitation process of patients with prostheses. Through a detailed analysis of ethnographic data, it tries to problematize the categories of normality, disability and rehabilitation. Instead or assuming these as a priori entities with well defines attributes an d stable boundaries, the book looks ate the way in which these are enacted in practices during the rehabilitation process and develops a critic to the way in which disability is currently approached. The arguments presented throughout this work try to make sense of the diversity of ontological reconfigurations and disarticulations of disability that take place during rehabilitation, pressing on the importance of attending to the situatedness and the specificities of those categories. In this sense, disability and rehabilitation should be analysed through alternative methodologies capable of showing what living with a disability actually means in everyday practices, as well as of incorporating more flexible and politically inclusive understandings of disability and rehabilitation.