Aesthetic Mediation and the Deconstruction of the Social Imaginary of Epilepsy: A Pedagogical Approach to Inclusive Education.

Epilepsy has been predominantly understood within a biomedical paradigm focused on neurological crisis and treatment (WHO, 2024; ILAE, 2017; Engel & Pedley, 2007). However, this perspective is insufficient to explain how the condition is socially constructed and symbolically signified. Across multiple contexts, representations associated with danger, incapacity, fragility, and abnormality persist, generating exclusionary practices independent of the clinical condition itself. Epilepsy does not constitute a disability in itself. As a neurological condition, its meaning is not intrinsically deficit-based. It becomes configured as disability when specific social, legal, medical, and institutional frameworks produce it as such through devices of classification, regulation, and naming, whether in relation to the type and severity of epilepsy or the coexistence of concomitant diagnoses (Foucault, 1967; 1976). This qualitative study approaches epilepsy as an experience configured within the social imaginary from a social constructionist perspective (Castoriadis, 1998). Perception surveys were conducted with sixteen participants (n=16), complemented by participant observation and experiential immersion among individuals living with epilepsy. Interpretative analysis identified recurring symbolic structures of stigmatization and contrasted them with lived experience narratives. As a pedagogical intervention, aesthetic mediation through narrative resources was implemented as a process of deconstructing naturalized social categories. Narrative encounters enabled processes of intersubjective mirroring that destabilized fixed classifications and reconfigured prior interpretative frameworks. Findings revealed three dominant patterns: association with unpredictability and risk, overprotection grounded in presumed fragility, and invisibilization of everyday normality. Following aesthetic mediation, interpretative shifts, reflective empathy, and resignification of difference emerged. The study concludes that inclusion depends not solely on medical information or institutional adjustment but on symbolic transformation of interpretative frameworks. By articulating social constructionism and pedagogical deconstruction, aesthetic mediation functions as a device capable of intervening in the social production of disability.