Rehabilitation ─ A Post-critical Approach

This author expands the concept of movement in rehabilitation beyond the physical body to social, emotional, and political movements, and re-examines the core concepts and philosophical foundations of rehabilitation to suggest new approaches to care and practice. She considers the limitations of biomedicine as the framework for rehabilitation and draws on postmodern and post-critical ideas to discuss the limits of positivist approaches to rehabilitation, including how they create divisions between disability studies and rehabilitation, and posits a new ethics of rehabilitation that focuses on openness to reforming existing concepts. Each chapter looks at a core philosophical concept in rehabilitation, how it became dominant, its effects, and its consequences--disability, quality of life, independence, development, and mobility--ending with the implications for reforming rehabilitation practices guided by an “ethic of openness” to promote new ways of thinking and doing rehabilitation. Annotation c2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Barbara E. Gibson is an associate professor in the Department of Physical Therapy, University of Toronto, and a senior scientist at the Bloorview Research Institute at the Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She holds the Bloorview Children’s Hospital Foundation Chair in Childhood Disability Studies. She is a physical therapist and bioethicist, whose research examines the sociopolitical dimensions of childhood disability and rehabilitation. She holds cross appointments at the Centre for Person Centred Research, AUT University, Auckland, New Zealand, and the CanChild Centre for Childhood Disability Research, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is an academic fellow at the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research and a member of the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto.