Disability, illness and physical activitya (post)qualitative research

Resumen

This PhD thesis is an assemblage of papers addressing 1) disability, illness and physical activity; and 2) (post)qualitative inquiry. The thesis tackles the case of Patrick, a man living with poor prognostic cancer and paraplegia. Overall, it examines in-depth how narrative and material forces acted by shaping Patrick’s struggle of becoming, and which role physical activity played in his life post-diagnosis. Data was obtained from life-story interviews, participant-produced images in different formats and object interviews, as well as three years of informal interactions with Patrick. The selection of data collection techniques was subjected to ethical considerations meant to preserve Patrick’s wellbeing. Alongside and stimulated by this empirical interest, theoretical ideas are discussed as related to the case and as part of broader debates in the field of sport, exercise and health. The research project derived in four articles. Article 1 explores the stories and storytelling experience of Patrick. Visual research methods were rigorously applied in order to delve into Patrick’s narrative. Visual and verbal data were analysed using a dialogical narrative analysis. The initial results illuminate how Patrick reconstructed his narrative self post-diagnosis in dialogue with Xenophon’s Anabasis. A second phase of analysis showed the ways in which Anabasis acted as an allegorical narrative map of how to cope with cancer and paraplegia. Against this, the paper accounts how Anabasis modulated Patrick’s physical activity (non) participation over time. Key innovations of this article are related to the use of visual metaphors and narrative dialogism in exercise psychology, and to new understandings of narrative mapping. Article 2 offers some ruminations about the newness of new materialism, a philosophy on the rise that emphasizes the materiality of the world without demeaning or ignoring the lessons learned from poststructuralism, nor reinscribing essentialism. Besides discussing whether new materialism is new, I explore how this question relates to different issues, namely knowledge translation and partisan positions. Moreover, I provide a set of recommendations for newcomers to begin thinking with ‘the new’, if they wish. I connect the above to how I was rethinking my research project and practices incorporating the ‘ontological turn’, and how I started to redresses the material gap of Article 1 without giving up my interest in narrative. Guided by a dualparadigmatic framework that combines narrative dialogism and new materialism, Article 3 focuses on three material↔semiotic environments in which Patrick used to do exercise: the hospital gym, the personal gym, and the adapted gym. These environments are considered embedded subcases within the overall holistic case. The findings of this study bring into light how stories and material elements altogether led Patrick to tell and live restitution, rather than another story of rehabilitation. On this basis, an expanded conceptualization or ‘deterriorialisation’ of the concept ‘restitution’ is suggested. Specifically, restitution is reconceived as an assemblage of material and semiotic components that work together to shape the process of recovery from illness and disability. Article 4 accounts Patrick’s process of becoming en-wheeled. Drawing on posthumanist disability studies, the article looks at Patrick’s struggle to become one with the wheelchair within the restitution assemblage. Patrick’s enwheelment is associated with humanist understandings of disability and in/dependence, which emplot the wheelchair not as a part of the body-self, but rather as something to detach from trough ableist rehabilitation. The empirical findings are contrasted with existing literature to build a typology of enwheelment, which is extensible to other cyborgification processes. Taken together, the articles add new, alternative insights that compliment and enrich the existing literature in disability studies, rehabilitation sciences, (post)qualitative health research and physical activity. Qualitative generalisations are offered throughout, and two key contributions of the thesis are highlighted: the combination of different ontologies, and the development of the understanding of restitution. Practical implications and recommendations to professionals are also provided. Finally, some future directions arising from this work are mentioned.