Critical Inquiry Across Disciplinary Divides: Methodological-Ethical Reflections on Conducting Discourse Analysis Across Disability and Rehabilitation Studies

Abstract

This article offers a methodological-ethical reflection on the challenges of conducting a Foucauldian discourse analysis across the fields of disability studies and children’s rehabilitation. Although both fields engage with the lives of disabled children, they operate through distinct epistemologies and power relations that shape interdisciplinary research encounters. Drawing on our experiences within a cross-disciplinary Canadian-Aotearoa New Zealand research team, we examine how disciplinary dominance, positionality, and divergent ethical commitments materialized within the research process itself. We show that these tensions are not merely logistical obstacles but constitutive features of cross-field inquiry that require sustained reflexivity, relational ethics, and attention to the affective labor of collaboration. Situated within existing lineages of disability studies, critical rehabilitation, and relational scholarship, the article articulates how ‘conversation as method’ emerged as one praxis through which difference, friction, and discomfort could be worked with as resources for knowledge production rather than barriers.