Paraplegic women’s emancipation along their vocational pathways: the potential contributions of Freirean, structural and post-structural feminist pedagogies

We have recently completed doctoral research on the reconstruction of paraplegic men’s and women’s vocational trajectories in French-speaking Switzerland. Based on three female informants’ life narratives, we analyse issues of gendered vocational guidance, pathways and identities in paraplegic people’s life courses. We shape some emancipating experience models and discourses about action, which empower the female informants on their vocational pathways. Our objective is here to point to the potential support that an emancipatory, feminist pedagogical approach could offer paraplegic women in the further development of personal models, and discourses of self in the conduct of their educational and vocational life.