Recontextualization At Work: How Equine-Assisted Therapy Professionals Authorize Their Practice

With nearly 900 therapeutic horseback riding centers in existence worldwide as of 2020, equine-assisted therapy has become an increasingly popular form of psychological and physiological therapy for people with disabilities. Equine-assisted therapy nonetheless remains an alternative, as evidenced by the fact that it is not covered by most US insurance providers ( Ballard et al., 2020 ). This presents a dilemma for its practitioners, whose expertise is caught between medically ratified approaches and claims of innovation. Our data consist of 12 in-depth interviews conducted with practitioners during several months of fieldwork by the first author at an equine-assisted therapy center in the southeastern United States. Adopting discourse analysis, we investigate how staff members at one equine-assisted therapy facility navigate this dilemma. We outline how these professionals engage in interactional strategies of recontextualization to situate their practice within medical discourse while simultaneously distinguishing it from this discourse. We conclude with a discussion of what this means for those who can claim expertise in treating disability and how they might go about it, as well as pointing to whether disability can legitimately exist outside the professional discourse of medicine.