Paraplegic women’s emancipation along their vocational pathways: the potential contributions of Freirean, structural and post-structural feminist pedagogies

Elena Pont,Isabelle Collet

doi:10.3384/rela.2000-7426.3985

Abstract

We have recently completed doctoral research on the reconstruction of paraplegic men’s and women’s vocational trajectories in French-speaking Switzerland. Based on three female informants’ life narratives, we analyse issues of gendered vocational guidance, pathways and identities in paraplegic people’s life courses. We shape some emancipating experience models and discourses about action, which empower the female informants on their vocational pathways. Our objective is here to point to the potential support that an emancipatory, feminist pedagogical approach could offer paraplegic women in the further development of personal models, and discourses of self in the conduct of their educational and vocational life.

Highlights

Research background: the socio-politic components of paraplegic people’s vocational rehabilitation in Switzerland, and the relevance of feminist pedagogies in that context
We analyse the vocational life narratives of three among the five paraplegic female informants who participated to our qualitative research on the reconstruction of paraplegic people’s educational and vocational pathways
We highlight the structural and biographical limitations, and the capacitating aspects of our informants’ educational and vocational courses. We suggest that their experience models and discourses can be enlightened by the praxes of feminist pedagogies, and thereby become empowering models addressed to other disabled women

Summary

Introduction

Research background: the socio-politic components of paraplegic people’s vocational rehabilitation in Switzerland, and the relevance of feminist pedagogies in that context. Both paraplegic women’s and men’s working trajectories are projected in administrative support, a traditionally feminine career, thereby implementing a ‘neutrally feminine’ model of vocational guidance (Pont, 2018), which potentially conflicts with their own gendered (self-)representations of professional roles.

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Results

Conclusion