Enactive Approaches to Disability
摘要
The enactive framework comprises a broad array of theoretical approaches that view action and interactive engagement as foundational to minds and cognition. While enactivism began at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology, in recent years numerous enactive approaches to psychiatry and disability have been developed. All of these approaches are dedicated in some way to the core tenets of enaction: that the embodied and embedded interactions, which occur across the domains of brains, bodies, and environments, not only enact minds and cognition but also enact individuals themselves in terms of their experiences and their understandings of who they are and the world they live within. Centralizing these tenets, enactive approaches to psychiatry more generally, and disability specifically, aim to develop new means of conceptualizing disability and practically engaging with disabled individuals and their socio-material environments. Nevertheless, a key point of ongoing discussion within the emerging literature of enactive approaches to disability, and a point of contention amongst enactivists, is how to balance the focus between individual embodiment and experience of disability and how environmental (material, social, and political factors and forces) impact and shape disabled individuals. Aiming to address all of this, this chapter outlines and reviews several central enactive approaches to psychiatry and disability and sketches out these key discussions within this developing field.