Rethinking posthumanism in rehabilitation science: Lessons from Indigenous, Black, and decolonial thought

Health (London). 2025 Jun 13:13634593251345082. doi: 10.1177/13634593251345082. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Posthumanism is a theoretical paradigm in Western continental philosophy with emerging significance and popularity in the health disciplines. Rehabilitation science scholars in fields like occupational therapy and physical therapy have taken up posthumanism, valuing its interventions into the harms of European humanist conceptualizations of the “(hu)man” which perpetuate individualism, ableism, and anthropocentrism. This paper responds to the pervasive use of posthumanism in the rehabilitation science literature-particularly among white scholars in the “Global North”-and its omission of sustained engagements with forms of dehumanization (specifically racism, colonialism, and anti-Blackness). For posthuman healthcare and rehabilitation scholarship to have utility beyond white, globally elite populations, we invite fellow rehabilitation science scholars to engage with the important critiques of posthumanism made by Black, Indigenous, and Latin American decolonial scholars. We synthesize these critiques and warnings about the forms of epistemic colonial violence embedded within popular approaches to posthumanism, and query rehabilitation scholars’ responsibilities to pause and center theories of the human and posthuman that have long been developed and lived by racialized and Indigenous scholars, activists, and knowledge holders.

PMID:40513020 | DOI:10.1177/13634593251345082