JOS Special Issue: Things people do: Toward a comprehensive understanding of human occupations

Research in occupational science has frequently explored health promoting and socially desirable occupations while neglecting occupations that are not socially sanctioned or detrimental to health and well-being. Further, most occupational science research focuses on the occupations of white, western, and middle-class people. There is a need to expand occupational science research to incorporate a plurality of experiences that are representative of diverse populations from diverse geographic locations and that reflect participation in occupations that have been historically neglected or socially stigmatized. Such research is necessary for the discipline of occupational science to fulfill its mission of being socially responsive and addressing occupational injustice. Studying hidden and neglected occupations will allow occupational scientists to challenge assumptions regarding the relationship of occupation, health, and well-being, while providing a more nuanced view of diverse occupational processes that occur through diverse contexts.

The purpose of this special issue in the Journal of Occupational Science is to present a plurality of perspectives regarding occupations that have been historically neglected, silenced, or negatively sanctioned. The issue is comprised of nine feature articles representing research on the occupations of persons from Switzerland, Tanzania, the United States, Denmark, South India, Brazil, and Australia. The articles focus on working mothers, sex work, doing gender, gendered occupations, occupational injustice, and the social construction of passion and desire. Together, these articles situate occupations in social, legal, cultural, and historical contexts; demonstrate the inextricability of occupational processes from those contexts; and explore how people use occupations to challenge normative expectations for occupational participation that are generated by those contexts.

The first article uses narrative inquiry with seven women professionals who returned to work within 18 months of giving birth (Berger et al., 2022). The study revealed that these educated Swiss women experienced complex social pressures around their roles as mothers and as professionals. Not all of this pressure was external; rather much of it came from the women’s internalized concepts of what they were expected to be and do. The women felt that they were expected to be primarily mothers, focusing on that role rather than their careers. They also saw that reactions to fathers were different from those they were getting, in terms of hours worked or time taken off for childcare responsibilities. Using the framework of doing, being, becoming, and belonging, the authors demonstrate how viewing the occupation of working mothers adds nuance to how we understand motherhood as a socially constructed role. To us, this raises a concern that occupational science research may inadvertently reify some aspects of occupation at the expense of others. This study explored the social construction of the role of working mothers including how women in the study had internalized sociocultural concepts of doing motherhood in a manner that affected their occupations.

Next, Huff et al. (2022) add to the emerging decolonial approach to understanding occupation with their study of gender, womanhood, and occupation in Tanzania. Using a critical decolonizing ethnography as a method and gendered occupation as a theoretical tool, they engaged with five women to develop understandings of “gender, womanhood, and collective resistance through occupation” (p. 21). They argue that a history of colonialism and neocolonialism must be taken into account in the chosen research methodology to understand people who live with that history. Occupation is situated, not just in the here and now, but also in the past and the ways norms and expectations have developed. Specifically, gender relationships were disrupted by colonial interests that replaced collectivity with a patriarchal system that subjugated women to the will of their husbands and men in general. Motherhood was the most highly valued aspect of being a woman, adding an additional layer of gender inequities for women who were childless. The study documented how occupation was used as a means of collective resistance to the inequities of the system, in the ways women helped each other to develop sources of income though savings groups and business enterprises. Having an income and the support of other women was seen as a way to combat gendered inequities and effect social change. This paper has implications for both the methods used by occupational scientists and the ways the science conceptualizes occupation. It demonstrates how social expectations of doing gender and gender norms in Tanzania are socially constructed and situated within colonial history. Occupation is portrayed as a way of resisting/challenging socially constructed norms.

Social norms, including gender norms, vary by context. People are aware of these differences and purposefully challenge socially constructed norms though their occupations (i.e., doing nonbinary gender, undoing gender). McCarthy et al. (2022) used interviews and photo elicitation to explore the impact of the environment on the occupational experiences of nonbinary persons. Study findings revealed three themes: environmental factors, navigating binary spaces, and undoing gender. Participants reported experiencing binary environments that reflected dominant binary culture and safe spaces that were inclusive of non-binary persons. In response to these factors, participants reported navigating binary spaces by doing gender and avoiding unsafe spaces. Participants also reported wanting to undo gender and to challenge gender expectations through occupations such as doing dress and dancing or singing in ways that challenged norms. McCarthy et al. concluded that doing nonbinary gender was reciprocal with environmental factors where the presence or absence of binary symbols in the environment contributed to occupational experiences of undoing gender or being nonbinary. McCarthy et al.’s contribution adds to understandings of the co-constitutive relationship joining humans, environment, and occupation.

Almeida (2022) adds to the discussion on gender through an ethnographic study of five nightclubs in the young LGBTQ+ pop scene in São Paulo using post-humanist Queer Theory and intersectionality. Findings describe how youth attending these nightclubs performed gender through gender technologies such as clothes, accessories, images, music, and other artifacts and discourses. Youth combined these technologies in complex arrangements to generate a “subjective prosthesis” (p. 64) where they challenged heteronormativity through denaturalization of their bodies. Young homosexual individuals in São Paulo attended nightclubs as a means to form their sex and gender identities. Despite creating spaces that encourage experimentation and expression of non-normative gender identities, the study also demonstrates that LGBT sociability can reproduce oppressive practices based on social differences such as classicism, misogyny, and racism. Social differences based on race, class, age, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class shaped and were shaped by occupation.

Sex work is legal in Denmark and sex workers must register as self-employed and pay taxes, yet many of the benefits of employment are denied to them through various laws. A study with six female sex workers in Denmark (Huglstad et al., 2022) looked at how they experience meaning in this work—practiced in brothels, as a private escort, or “privately and discreetly” (p. 68). Notably, these women found positive meaning in their work. On one hand, they spoke of it as fulfilling their own sexual interests and needs. Some of the women reported benefits of learning about new types of people, finding increased self-confidence through their work, and learning to set boundaries. Being self-employed and successful was empowering for some. Workers developed relationships with clients over time and expressed joy in pleasing their clients. They perceived themselves as professionals. On the other hand, all the women addressed the challenges of social prejudices, some of these born out in legislation that did not recognize sex work as a profession. Most of the women spoke of risking losing friends if they revealed this work and the paradox of loving what they do while feeling like they had to conceal it in social worlds outside of sex work. This article demonstrates that, even when sanctioned by the highest political and legal institutions, social norms continue to operate by stigmatizing and repressing occupational expressions. Nonetheless, the authors point out that sex work can “be a meaningful and engaging occupation, contributing positively to … perceived balance, well-being, satisfaction, and quality of life” (p. 79).

Hurriedness may be a new term for occupational science but its close association with the concepts of occupational balance and imbalance and its relationship to stress make it a natural addition to the many concepts with which occupational scientists grapple. Pointing out that studies of occupational imbalance and hurriedness and their effects on well-being of mothers have not focused on African American mothers, Parnell’s (2022) study identifies patterns of occupational imbalance among 91 hurried African American mothers. She describes the ‘typical woman’ in her study as married, with 2 children, a regular church goer, having a bachelor’s degree and a full-time job, and describing herself as middle class. The four categories of imbalance identified were in physical energy expenditure, cognitive load, roles, and satisfaction with occupations. Parnell’s work serves to further develop the construct of occupational balance at the same time it adds to the limited amount of occupational science research with middle class African American women.

To provide an opportunity for research participants to express themselves authentically, Benjamin-Thomas et al. (2022) engaged in a participatory action research project using film making with children with disabilities in rural South India. Using a critical theoretical analysis, the authors highlighted the forces that contribute to occupational injustice, occupational marginalization, restricted occupational possibilities, and occupational degradation. Their work highlights the utility of using inclusive nontraditional research methods, such as participatory film making, to achieve diverse understandings of a phenomenon that move beyond hegemonic and dominant understandings of occupation. Study findings illustrate the complexity and multilayered nature of occupational injustice involving an intersection of sociocultural, economic, and systemic forces. The authors demonstrate how occupational injustices affect communities as a whole, instead of being solely an individual issue. They support conceptualizing occupational choice as a socio-political phenomenon instead of an individual act, since participants’ occupational choices were inextricably nested in family and sociocultural practices. Benjamin-Thomas et al.’s contribution demonstrates the importance of using participatory methodologies and critical perspectives to challenge hegemonic understandings of occupation and embrace pluralistic understandings that reflect different worldviews and ways of being. The study also demonstrates that social norms and expectations are pervasive but often hidden. It is necessary to garner a plurality of perspectives regarding lived experiences to discover how those norms are perpetuated, challenged, and experienced.

This issue turns to methodology and the principles supporting critical decolonizing ethnographic research, illustrated with examples from a doctoral study in Tanzania (Huff et al., 2022). Such research methodology not only recognizes the need to counter Western concepts of occupation and justice, but also the ways Western and colonial ideologies can permeate research endeavors. The authors provide an up-to-date review of literature arguing for the need for decolonizing perspectives in occupational science research and theory, and outline the principles for such research. Identifying the non-Indigenous researcher as the settler researcher, the process for decolonizing ethnographic research is described from start to finish, including the tensions that arise during the endeavor. Occupational science needs the knowledge discovered through decolonizing research and the tools to do that work. This paper addresses this need and will challenge students and scholars in the field to take on this work.

The issue concludes with a theoretical article in which Barlott and Turpin (2022) employed Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and desire to highlight the social construction of passion and impulse to conceptualize occupation as a creative process that generates a social landscape. Barlott and Turpin describe occupation as an assemblage—a complex, dynamic, and interrelated configuration of nature and social formations. Desire is the impulse to create occupational assemblages, which are linked to other occupational assemblages through relational processes that connect individuals and the social world. Humans desire particular occupational assemblages: however, desire is also shaped by the assemblages through which a person exists. Barlott and Turpin argue that applying the concepts of desire and assemblage can contribute to critical perspectives in occupational science to understand how desire can be constricted and repressive within restricted assemblages, while also being revolutionary and liberating in its ability to be creative and construct new assemblages. Barlott and Turpin’s contribution offers a different worldview for understanding occupational processes. Their perspective provides one view regarding how to unpack experiences of repression and liberation through occupation. Occupational assemblages are socially constructed and creative. They can repress occupational expressions through perpetuation of socially constructed norms or liberate occupational expressions through creative acts of assemblage.

Together, these articles demonstrate the utility of exploring non-sanctioned, stigmatized, and neglected occupations to obtain a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the multiplicity of factors that are entangled in occupational processes. Research participants involved in the studies in this issue were keenly aware of the various sociocultural forces which generated normative expectations for their occupational expressions. Across studies, participants actively used their occupational participation to challenge, resist, reconstruct, and reimagine sociocultural norms. These studies suggest that people are often aware of how their occupations are repressed in normative environments and often desire to change those norms with their occupations. The issue demonstrates the collective power of occupation to stimulate sociocultural change for the benefit of being more inclusive to diverse populations. We hope this issue will further stimulate explorations of neglected or non-sanctioned occupations to continue to challenge repressive norms and liberate persons across the globe to freely and fully express their occupations.

Acknowledgement

We give homage to the tribes who first inhabited North Carolina prior to colonization from European powers. The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation that resided in Chapel Hill, and the west and northwest regions, before the University of NC at Chapel Hill and Duke University were built. As well as the tribal communities that resided across all the ‘small’ and large towns of NC prior to colonization: The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Sappony, Catawba, Tuscarora, Waccamaw Siouan, Lumbee, Coharie, Halawa-Saponi, and Meherrin.

Disclosure Statement

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