Championing Demedicalization: How Paralympic Disability Sport Transcended Medical Rehabilitation

• In Event: 20820 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1. (De)Medicalization Processes

Abstract

While sociologists have extensively theorized medicalization processes, the forces and mechanisms underlying demedicalization remain underexamined. Over the course of 65 years, Paralympic sport’s transformation from rehabilitative therapy for spinal cord injuries into non-medical, high-performance disability sport provides substantive insights into how demedicalization is achieved. I focus on the 1980’s as a period marked by intensified challenges to medicalized structures and regulations to investigate the demedicalization of Paralympic sport. I draw from 34 interviews with Paralympic actors, archived records of Paralympic and national sport organizations, as well as contemporary disability sport media. Preliminary findings suggest that endogenous institutional entrepreneurs and exogenous practice-based organizations coalesced in performing institutional work that demedicalized Paralympic sport. Paralympic actors mobilized multiple demedicalization strategies including practice innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational dissent, and counter-conduct. Meanwhile, influential national-level organizations advanced demedicalization by altering the international Paralympic field. Findings demonstrate how entrenched medicalization may successfully be displaced through a confluence of internal and external forces that operate at the micro- and meso-levels. This research furthers perspectives on demedicalization as a bottom-up process and elucidates its dynamics.

Author

• Evan Tobias Baughman, University of California-Davis