A call to resist occupational therapy’s promotion of ableism

Abstract

Background

Critical occupational therapists have exhorted their profession to engage with disability studies’ scholarship, curtail occupational therapy’s promotion of ableism and amend its disabling practices. These appeals have largely been ignored despite their importance for a profession that researches, theorizes, assesses, and intervenes in the lives of disabled people.

Aims and objectives

To interrogate occupational therapy’s collusion with an ableist neoliberal agenda; and call for occupational therapists to resist their profession’s disabling practices.

Material and methods

This paper draws from critical disability scholarship to expose, critique and contest the ableist ideology underpinning occupational therapy.

Results

Interlinked with racism, heteronormativity and gender binarism, ableism upholds certain bodies as normal and appropriate. Ableist values shape occupational therapy, with clients classified according to their proximity to ‘normality’, and exhorted to minimize their occupational performance deviations from dominant norms.

Conclusions

Collusion with colonialism’s binary classificatory systems and neoliberal ableist norms, and avowed aspirations to improve bodies, ‘normalize’ performances, promote individualism, self-reliance, independence, self-care, and productivity contribute to the perception that ours is a disabling profession.

Significance

This paper calls for occupational therapists to resist their profession’s promotion of ableism, and refuse to collude with colonial practices that contribute to the oppression of disabled people.

Keywords:

• Disability studies
• decolonial
• disablism

Acknowledgement

This paper is based on a presentation at the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists’ Annual Conference, May 2022, in Whistler, BC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).