Dis-fare la disabilità infantile: le pratiche lavorative di operatrici e operatori dei servizi, e il ruolo della ricerca

The present thesis states that childhood disability is produced in the everyday practices of health and social workers. Their practices become dis-abling because are strongly tied to the institutionalized forms, material and symbolic, of the therapeutic and educational relation. Through the individualization of the relation with the educator, the habit of taking the “certified” child out of the class, the tendency to orient disable students to professional schools, the impossibility of creating continuous and heterogeneous educational paths, but also through the many documents needed to start school integration programs, disability is daily produced and reproduced, it is enacted. Disability does not pre-exist workers practices, but is part of them. At the same time reproduction always coexists with the possibility of difference and attempts to transformation. This tension is in fact constitutive of “live work in action” implicated in therapeutic and educational relation. Simultaneously in the thesis, the author develops a reflection on the social role of research as a tool for transformation. The research(er) who recognizes this “field of tension” between reproduction and transformation in the practices of health and social workers may choose to sustain, through the method of the research itself, the first or the second tendency. If we decide to choose the second, the practice of research first of all becomes a field of participation and negotiation for alternative possibilities. A necessary step towards change, thus, starts from recognizing that there are common needs and intents between researchers and subjects of research, and between social/health workers and “users”. Only from this common ground it is possible to re-build practices of care, education and liberation.