Physical Disabilities: An Enactive Exploration of Normal Embodiment

Currently, the two dominant models of physical disabilities are the medical and the social models. While the medical model reduces disability to an impairment of the person’s body, the social model reduces disability to social oppression imposed on the person’s impaired body. Despite their opposing views, both models rely on a conception of the person’s body as only a physiological unit, with objectively determinable functions and structures. By comparing such functions and structures with those of the average body, the body of the disabled person is conceived as abnormal. Two interrelated problems arise from these conceptions of disability: both models overlook the lived experience of the embodied person, and pathologize the disabled person’s body. By studying the embodiment of the disabled person within a framework inspired by phenomenology and embodied cognitive science, in this thesis I develop a non-reductive account of physical disabilities and of normal embodiment. In this account, the disabled person is considered not only as a physical body but also, and primordially, a lived body. Such nonreductive account focuses on how the disabled person relates to a shared environment. The findings in this thesis are based on an experiment that I – as a part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers - designed and performed involving people with cerebral palsy (CP).