Reinvenções na vida de pessoas com deficiência visual: caminhos à reabilitação inclusiva?

Abstract

As a result of the advances in the conquest of rights for people with disabilities during the first years of the 21st century, a greater participation of people with different types of disabilities has been observed in various sectors of society, however this advance has not been observed with the same proportion in the subgroup of visual impairment. One path used by such individuals to reach new levels of life is rehabilitation. Assuming that the spaces and practices of rehabilitation enable the reinvention of life in the face of loss of vision, in this study we aim to analyze the reinventions of life of the person with visual impairment along the rehabilitational path. In this trajectory, we weave a dialogue with the deepening of interdependence based on the theoretical-conceptual contributions developed by Elias (1994), Kittay (2011) and Butler (2015). Methodologically, we undertake an exploratory research with a qualitative approach, supported by dialectics and reflectivity, aiming at potentializing different knowledges. The subjects of this research were fifteen people over eighteen years of age, blind or with low vision, who have undergone or are undergoing visual rehabilitation and members of a university extension group focused on people with disabilities, as well as a key informant linked to the management of the health care network for people with disabilities in the state of Rio Grande do Norte (SESAP) and also a member of the board of directors of the Institute of Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind of Rio Grande do Norte (IERC). To capture the empirical data, we conducted three sessions of heterogeneous focus groups that took place between the months of September and October 2019 and two semi-structured interviews with managers during the same period. Later, the data were analyzed with subsidy in the thematic contente analysis (MINAYO, 2008). The research obtained ethical approval for its execution in accordance with current regulations involving research with human beings. As for the results, the emerging categories emerged primarily from the inductive and ascending analysis of the data and were constituted in three main axes: 1) spaces and practices of rehabilitation for the constitution of new enclaves, 2) challenges to rehabilitation; and 3) subject's rehabilitation and reinvention. It was possible to know the extent to which reinventions constitute and permeate the material and symbolic daily lives of those who have lost their vision, and the advances and challenges in this construction. Additionally, we propose an inclusive model of rehabilitation with a view to better understand the instances for action between the subject-subject-society, whose main characteristics are: biopsychosocial, interdependence, accessibility, acceptance of diversity and appreciation of the protagonisms of the subjects. The findings of the research lead us to consider as necessary the refusal of the negative approach to visual disability, based on the ideas of lack, deficit and defect, transmuting it to a notion of inventive power that propels emancipation, in order to bring out a common and heterogeneous world open to dialogue with diversity and permeated by the model of social inclusion.