This paper describes how four ‘helping’ professionals came to embrace and teach critical disability studies (CDS) perspectives rather than biomedical approaches to impairment and disability that traditionally inform those professions (occupational therapy, physiotherapy, social work, and speech-language pathology). Sharing examples from our experiences, we describe how we came to question the normative, ableist assumptions of our professional disciplines. We then briefly outline literature demonstrating how critical approaches have been incorporated into professional research and practice and discuss possible obstacles and tensions in adopting more widespread critical approaches into professional spaces. We conclude by suggesting that continued development of connections among scholars and activists within CDS, rehabilitation and social work, and the community, is necessary to ensure that intersectional critical perspectives in relation to disability become a core component of professional training programs.

No abstract

<span>Cochlear implants and auditory-verbal therapy are the latest techniques and technologies used to make deaf people learn to listen and speak. This paper provides a genealogical analysis of the Cochlear Implant Program at SickKids Hospital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and shows how this program exemplifies the medicalization of deafness while denying deaf children the opportunity to learn sign language. Using Foucault's concept of governmentality, the relations between power, knowledge, truth and their influences on the program's practices are revealed in order to provide insight into Canadian society's conceptions of deafness. This analysis reveals the Cochlear Implant Program as a capitalist establishment that is supported by unquestioned reverence of modern medicine and technology, oriented by a quest for normalcy. The paper concludes by encouraging members of the Deaf community and their supporters to challenge the hegemony of normalcy by utilizing alternate research-based knowledge-truths of cochlear implants and sign language.</span>

No abstract

No abstract