Extending the paradigm: Occupation in diverse contexts

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Ampliar el paradigma: Ocupación en distintos contextos

Positionality is a key issue within occupational science. Appropriately, this issue of the Journal of Occupational Science brings perspectives from researchers located outside the Anglophone contexts that have dominated the discipline’s literature. The first seven feature articles break new ground for the journal, being simultaneously published in both Spanish and English. They originated as presentations to the first Occupational Justice and Social Inclusion Symposium, convened by Eugenia Paz Pizarro in Valdivia, Chile in 2016. Valdivia is in the southern region of Chile, known for its rainy climate and beautiful landscapes. Despite its natural beauty, there are enduring occupational justice challenges, with significative levels of poverty and unemployment as well as socio-environmental issues.

The purpose of the Symposium was to bring together scholars and local community leaders to establish a dialogue regarding occupational justice and social inclusion. The event was funded by the School of Medicine of the Universidad Austral de Chile and organized by its Occupational Study Group, with the invaluable help of occupational therapy students. Over two days, local leaders, government representatives, and members of the University shared their diverse knowledge of occupational justice. Local authorities acknowledged the need for social inclusion, researchers presented perspectives on the various contexts that shape occupational injustice in Chile (and the world), and leaders of local organizations shared the work they do to improve occupational opportunities for the citizens of Valdivia.

Dr Lilian Magalhães, Brazil

Dr Shoba Nayar, India

In addition to evidencing different ways in which occupational justice and social inclusion might be promoted at the local level, the symposium provided opportunities for the people involved to meet, some for the first time. That facilitated a process of networking to build knowledge, foster collective action towards community development, and showcase the experiences of future generations of professionals committed to promoting occupational justice. Carrying that networking forward, the keynote speaker, Professor Gail Whiteford from Australia, alerted the JOS Board to the significance of the event and raised the question of publication of selected presentations.

That idea was picked up at the annual face-to-face meeting of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Occupational Science in Portland, Maine in the US in 2016. As part of a strategic planning process, the Board identified the value of having greater reach into South America by providing a venue for Spanish speaking occupational scientists to publish in their own language. The vision was to receive, review, and revise manuscripts in Spanish, translate them into English once accepted, and publish the final papers in both Spanish and English. Dr. Lilian Magalhães was recruited as the JOS Spanish Associate Editor to work with Eugenia Paz Pizarro and the journal’s Executive Editor to bring the vision to fruition.

Little did we know the layers of work that would be involved. First, we approached our publisher, Taylor and Francis, to secure their support with dual submission, production, publication, and archiving of the completed papers on the JOS website. That involved working through the details of online and hard copy publication, whether the Spanish and English version of the papers would have a unique doi number, how the papers would be linked electronically, and how the existence of the papers in Spanish could be made visible on the website and marketed to potential readers. We are indebted to Taylor and Francis for their openness to working with us to solve the technical and legal issues, and for accommodating the additional workload for their typesetting service and production staff.

The first step in the editorial process required the author guidelines, reviewer’s forms and instructions to be translated into Spanish in order for the reviews to be conducted in the authors’ first language. New systems were created to support the review process, which had to occur outside of the usual online system, and reviewers fluent in Spanish were recruited. Second, after papers had been reviewed and revised by authors, they were edited in Spanish. Third, the accepted papers were then professionally translated into English, edited and fourth, English translations were checked to ensure that meaning had not been lost or distorted in the translation process. Questions raised about the precise meaning in Spanish or most accurate translation into English, at times, prompted further refinement of the Spanish version.

To complete the process, information inserted into manuscripts had to be translated into Spanish (Acceptance date, an alert to the existence of the alternate language version), and proofs checked by the author(s), the English editor (formatting and layout) and the Spanish editor (to check how typesetters, fluent in English, had split Spanish words across lines). The Editorial Board is pleased to bring this innovation to occupational scientists who write in Spanish, enabling them to disseminate their work to a wider audience, and for non-Spanish speaking occupational scientists to have access to knowledge produced in a language other than English. This strengthens occupational science knowledge production across the globe and may be extended to other languages in the future.

Chilean Perspectives in Occupational Science

Turning to the papers themselves, the importance of positionality is the main point of the first article, by Apablaza (2018a, b), who examines Chilean school inclusion policies from an occupational injustice standpoint. While the author recognizes some social progress, she argues that an ontology of deficit, which relies on diagnostic technology and asserts its rationality on economic discourses, in fact imposes marginalization and occupational apartheid to atypical children and youth. Following on, Pizarro, Estrella, Figueroa, Helmke, Pontigo and Whiteford (2018a, b) propose a new form of occupational injustice: occupational displacement. In this case, the circumstances of the Mapuche people, indigenous inhabitants of South-Central Chile expelled from their territory by urban sprawl, provide an appalling example of how economic interests and geography may contribute to identity conflicts and cultural insecurity.

Olivares-Aising (2018a, b) sustains a provocative theoretical discussion framed by the works by Portuguese scholar Souza Santos and Chilean economist Max-Neef. Working from critical understandings of social phenomena, the author deeply disputes some commonly held assumptions of occupational scientists on contemporary global reality. Then, a meticulous examination of the narratives from representatives from five social organizations from Valdivia, the site of the Chilean occupational science symposium, is the basis of the article by Muñoz (2018a, b). Topics such as human rights, diversity, social exclusion and citizen participation are interrogated to explore the course of actions pursued by each narrator/organization in search of occupational justice.

The Participatory Occupational Justice Framework (POJF), originally published in 2005, is revisited by Whiteford, Jones, Rahal, and Suleman (2018a, b) to reflect on the multi-layered instances of social injustices. This keynote address, presented by Professor Whiteford on behalf of all four authors, illustrates the possibilities of transformative action through three case narratives that evidence the power of POJF as a tool for collective collaboration aiming to bring about social change. Drawing from these examples, Whiteford challenged the audience to articulate local ways of thinking and acting to fight social injustice.

Carrasco (2018a, b) articulates the concept of occupational apartheid to governmentality theories to unpack the sometimes disregarded limitations of health care practitioners in the contemporary Chilean mental health field. Similarly, Yañez and Zúñiga (2018a, b) contemplate the foundations of the Chilean legal structure regarding disability, to explore the longstanding medical approach and its influence over the accomplishment of occupational justice by persons with disabilities. It should be noted that these seven articles clearly illustrate how some of the foundational concepts explored by occupational scientists can be relevant and powerful, despite contextual discrepancies. They are beautiful examples of diverse and socially committed scholarship.

Beyond a Western Paradigm

The remaining three feature articles in this last issue of JOS for 2018 were submitted in response to a call for papers addressing the theme Occupation: Beyond a Western Paradigm. In promoting this theme, we anticipated that occupational scientists might be positioned to push beyond Western assumptions of individualism, autonomy, purposefulness and meaning, progress and dominance over the environment. Our hope was that enough of us had shifted out of the ‘comfort zone’ to undertake research that challenges, acknowledges, and celebrates the diversity in which people live and ‘do’. Of the small number of submissions received, three were accepted and are published in this issue.

The restrained response raises questions such as: Is research that moves beyond a Western paradigm valued as a priority within the discipline? What needs to happen to raise awareness of, and discussion regarding, occupation beyond the hegemonic white discourse? How do we access the voices of those who are undertaking such research? It appears more time and conversations are required. However, we remain hopeful that we will receive increased submissions in the future, particularly from researchers from the global south whose everyday experience and research can enrich our science with broader perspectives of occupation.

The first article, by Barcelos Pontes, Pereira de Almeida, Polatajko, and Davis (2018), considers how the context within which children are raised influences their choice of occupation. Ninety-eight children from Brazil and Canada completed the Pediatric Activity Card Sort (PACS). From a macro perspective, it would appear that children’s participation is similar in both countries. Cultural influences are evident, however, with Brazilian children undertaking more personal care occupations and Canadian children favouring hobbies and sports. This study underlines the importance of examining the influence of cultural context on occupation both across countries and within cultural groups. Because it presents findings relevant to Brazilian occupational scientists, this paper will be translated into Portuguese over the next few months and published on the JOS website.

Moving from a direct comparison of occupation as influenced by Western and non-western contexts, Chisman and Brooks (2018) explore how meditation, an occupation with roots in the East that is becoming increasingly popular in the West, sheds light on the nature of being and belonging. Interviews with meditators of the Buddhist Triratna tradition reveal that what could be seen as ‘individual’ occupation, is actually an opportunity for developing a collective identity so that being and belonging are experienced as interconnected and co-arising. This study points the way to how researching non-western occupations can facilitate greater understanding of concepts, such as being and belonging, which have arisen out of a Western paradigm.

Next, Huff, Laliberte Rudman, Magalhães, and Lawson (2018) utilise the theoretical lens of Africana Womanism to reconsider implicit assumptions regarding gendered, specifically women’s, occupations. In what can only be described as a thought provoking and eloquent argument, these authors explore notions of situationality, holism and collectivity to reframe understandings of women’s occupations. In doing so, they challenge occupational scientists to move well beyond the Western paradigm; to evaluate the very foundations upon which understandings of occupation are constructed and to use this knowledge to be catalysts of change in responding to social injustices.

Looking Forward

Join us in celebrating the fruition of our plan to support Spanish speaking authors to submit and refine their ideas in their native language, then to make their insights accessible to readers reliant on English. Supplemented by the work of authors who took up the challenge to submit perspectives from ‘beyond a Western paradigm’, this issue of JOS showcases the rich understandings emerging from parts of the world that have been relatively silent in the occupational science discourse. It is the intention of the Board of the Journal of Occupational Science to extend the dialogue, both in accepting submissions in Spanish in the coming years and through future Special Issues of JOS: one featuring papers from the 2017 Occupational Science Europe symposium and one with papers drawn from the 2018 World Federation of Occupational Therapists Congress in 2018. These ongoing developments will push the boundaries of current understandings, fulfilling the journal’s purpose in promoting the growth of occupational science as a distinct and valuable body of knowledge.

ORCID

Lilian Magalhães http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3666-3685

Eugenia Paz Pizarro http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5787-7642

Mandy Stanley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7958-5181