Recontextualization at work: How equine-assisted therapy professionals authorize their practice.

This article examines how practitioners at Appaloosa Farm, a nonprofit equine-assisted therapy (EAT) center in the southeastern United States, navigate the tension between alternative and biomedical models of disability treatment. Through discourse analysis of interviews with staff, the study identifies strategies of recontextualization whereby practitioners simultaneously align their work with medical legitimacy and distinguish it as a superior, experiential alternative, notably by positioning the horse as a central therapeutic agent. The findings highlight how these professionals create a hybrid discourse that blends medical and alternative therapeutic paradigms, thereby renegotiating expertise and authority in disability care. This hybrid approach reflects broader calls within disability studies to move beyond the binary of biomedical and social models toward more nuanced understandings of disability as experienced in complex social and therapeutic contexts.