Paper short abstract:

Presenting research from Tampa, Florida, USA, this paper describes a collaboration with activity-based therapy—which is often considered deviant and riskier by traditional therapy—which can both challenge and reify the same ontological assumptions underlying the normative rehabilitation model.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes how activity-based therapy—a therapy model often considered deviant and riskier by traditional therapy—can both challenge and reify the same assumptions underlying the normative rehabilitation model. Presenting research conducted in Tampa, Florida, USA, this paper describes the processes involved in bodily recovery for clients with spinal cord injury (SCI)—a condition that, due to the complicated structure of the spinal cord, can create diverse kinds of debilitation resulting in widely contrasting illness experiences. This particular population also includes people who: (1) encounter disability suddenly and traumatically, (2) often maintain hope for complete rehabilitation, and (3) have differing physical and social experiences due to the complicated structure of the spinal cord.

Theoretically inspired by Annemarie Mol, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz, this paper uses a methodological framework that prioritises processes and how bodies, people, and other objects are enacted in practices constituted by ontopolitical negotiations. This allows for a discussion that sees health professionals as creating "bodies multiple" (Mol 2002), while allowing for an analysis attuned to uncovering those ontologies underlying everyday ethics (Geertz 1973:127). Rather than seeing this kind of ethnographic inquiry as outsider evaluations, this approach engages with the everyday processes and the images of thought which they reinforce, including types of normative identities as well as biocultural conceptions of hope, possibility, and well-being. This paper concludes with recommendations for how anthropologists might use these types of insights to not only critique these ontological politics, but show how collaborators could be brought in as 'co-conspirators' throughout these negotiations.