Physiotherapy’s necessity for ableism: reifying normal through difference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although critical disability studies has become more widely recognized within physiotherapy scholarship and education, ableism still profoundly influences and directs the physiotherapy profession. We draw from post-structural French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy to highlight how ableism is bound up in the taken-for-granted assumptions of physiotherapy. We outline how ableism is entangled with the profession’s ontology and European notion of human. As a result, ableism is maintained by clinicians through the embodiment of the ideal species typical human, in both the domain of the mind and body. As it stands, to do physiotherapy necessitates ableism. Imagining physiotherapy otherwise, we set out to critique and unsettle the profession’s metaphysical presuppositions, creating the possibility for new generative avenues for physiotherapy. Deleuze’s ontology of difference provides the profession an alternative starting point which makes the notion of ‘normal’, and consequently ableism, unthinkable.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".