3rd Critical Physiotherapy Course this week – Gail Teachman, Pierre Bourdieu, and the End of Inclusion

This month’s Critical Physiotherapy Course talk comes from Gail Teachman, Assistant Professor,
School of Occupational Therapy at Western University in Canada.

Zoom link: https://aut.zoom.us/j/788298318

As always, the course is free, all you need to do is log in with above Zoom address at the right time.

Here are the times in your local area:

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu was one of France’s most preeminent and prolific sociologists and theorists.  For Bourdieu, all human action and interaction work to reproduce or transform the social order in one way or another. He argued that social relations, including determinations of ‘who belongs where’ are produced through ongoing struggles between persons and groups over power to determine which values, beliefs and norms order social life.  Bourdieu’s core project involved uncovering the invisible mechanisms that produce and reproduce unequal patterns of relative advantages and disadvantages across generations in societies, irrespective of historical or geographical setting. He suggested that only through making these underlying mechanisms visible, can steps be taken toward shaping more humane societies.

In this talk, I begin by outlining Bourdieu’s reflexive theory of practice and defining key concepts to show how Bourdieu envisioned their use as relational analytic tools. Drawing on a study that investigated the symbolic value of walking (Gibson & Teachman, 2012), I will share examples to illustrate how Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ can help surface and contest core assumptions underpinning rehabilitation.

Following this introduction, I shift to discussing how Bourdieu’s work was useful in research with disabled youth about the notion of inclusion. Dominant inclusion discourses reproduce centric worldviews where so-called ‘normal’ bodies are positioned as ‘in’ and impaired bodies are positioned as ‘out’.  I argue the complex interplay of power relations implicated in Bourdieu’s vision of social worlds provides a useful ‘antidote’ to counter idealized and oversimplified notions of inclusion/exclusion. More specifically, I sketch out a framework for analyzing ‘inclusion’ as a stake in struggles over how social worlds are envisioned, and as a practice that, paradoxically, reproduces dominant (and dominating) visions of the social world. My aim in this talk is to open space for considering whether ‘inclusion’ is a useful concept, and whether it is time to move past reified inclusion imaginaries.

YouTube

An introduction to Pierre Bourdieu by Kari Alexander https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flz6shD3g2s

Field Theory – Pierre Bourdieu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FXPnkwSCyE

Suggested Reading

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). New York, NY: Greenwood.

Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory, 7, 14-25.

Gibson, B. E., & Teachman, G. (2012). Critical approaches in physical therapy research: Investigating the symbolic value of walking. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 28, 474-484.

Questions

How does Bourdieu’s theory of practice illuminate social mechanisms that (re)produce the marginalization of some groups and the domination of others?

A Bourdieusian lens reveals the tacit moral hierarchies that underpin rehabilitation practices in relation to, for example, human movement and occupation. How can we disrupt these ingrained values and beliefs in order to value alternative ways of being, moving, and doing?

How might we imagine ‘inclusion’ differently…or is it time to set aside the inclusion/exclusion binary?