Special Issue: Challenging boundaries within occupational science: A pluriverse agenda for our scholarship

Scientific dialogue is often confined to professional spaces in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. These spaces allow scholars to interact to exchange ideas and share findings. The enactment of “research” in these spaces is guided by traditions and ways of doing that are practiced by scholars and, in turn, taught to new scholars (Aldrich et al., 2022). In occupational science, there has been an increasingly critical turn in examining the phenomenon of occupation, in all its complexity, as well as the ways in which we approach our work. This includes reflecting on our practices and examining our biases, as they support how we construct and pursue our studies. As Williams (2023) notes, biases allow us to function quickly and efficiently in situations but also can underlie discriminatory behavior:

Advances in neuroscience and social science demonstrate that everyone has biases. Having biases is part of being human. We are naturally inclined to make microsecond decisions about other people based on very little, superficial information. It is how we make decisions about whether we are safe. Unfortunately, most of the time we are not even aware of our biases. With startling frequency, we are unconscious of our biases and the consequent discriminatory behavior we exhibit against one person and in favor of someone else. Our unconscious biases can lead to considerable problems as we unwittingly and unconsciously cause harm – especially to those who are depending on and expecting our objectivity… (p. 27)

While we rely on our unconscious to quickly guide decision-making, it does not mean that we are consciously making these choices based on well-considered values. Dasgupta (2013) described how everyday exposure to community values and beliefs passively tread into our unconsciousness to become biases:

Commonly held opinions of social groups are known by everybody immersed in a given community through hearsay, media exposure, and by passive observation of who occupies valued roles and devalued roles in the community. Passive exposure to commonly held attitudes and beliefs register in individuals’ minds and get incorporated into their mental representation of a given group without their active consent. As a result, people’s implicit attitudes toward social groups often mirror the societal hierarchy of privilege and disadvantage. (p. 237)

The repetitious exposure through a cacophony of media, streams of information, prior research, and participation in traditional constructed conferences influences occupational science research as well—the construction of what is valued and should be studied and how it should be studied. This may contribute to the distance between the traditional scholarship and the so-called real world, where people live, act, face challenges, and thrive together or individually. Many authors have voiced that the academe is cloistered and that there are geographically constraining invisible fences that keep authors isolated within their areas, preventing relevant exchanges from happening and increasing inequities (e.g., Kessi, Marks, & Ramugondo, 2020). More than that, it seems that within our very domain, occupational science, researchers are often unaware of their own bias or assumptions.

In this collection of papers, both early-career and advanced scholars put forth critical views of occupational science theory and scholarship to challenge current common biases and assumptions that we may subconsciously hold and extend these conversations beyond geographical boundaries. Wijekoon and Peter (2023) undertook a content analysis of JOS’s last 5 years of articles, looking at the status of its published scholarship on underrepresented racialized groups or, in their own words, the commitment of JOS’s authors to address “epistemological antiracism” (p. 322). They identified a concerning and pervasive absence of reporting data on ethnicity, race, and historical and contextual aspects of the studies’ participants within the selected papers, and a lack of information on the positionality of first authors. However, Wijekoon and Peter note that gender was often given meaningful consideration within the papers’ discussion of data, showing that gender categories were privileged in the body of scholarship reviewed. As Wijekoon and Peter further note, it becomes evident that gender aspects were held in greater account among JOS authors than other factors that often are articulated in scholarship on inequities, such as race, ethnicity, class, and cultural underpinnings. Huot, Bulk, Damiano, Delaisse, Kardeh, Ogura, and Forwell (2023) too noted the need to increase awareness of bias; their work illustrates how education can serve to counter bias in emerging scholars. In the description of a collective learning experience that they share, these authors worked together to develop an advanced seminar fostered emerging scholars’ capacities to “‘read the world’ and understand how implicit values, beliefs, and assumptions influence everything from popular conceptions of health and disability to policy decisions” (p. 520). Among the studies assembled here, it seems a move toward a much more socially responsive occupational science can be sensed.

Social change is conceived through community action, rooted in the courageous scrutiny of current realities and circumstances. This issue presents remarkable accounts of collective action presented by a number of authors beginning with Lévesque, Kutcher, Linton, Trapper, Torrie, and MacDonald’s (2023) work. The Eeyou/Eenou (meaning The People) of Eeyou Istchee (Land of the People) are among the 11 First Peoples who inhabit the Canadian Province of Québec. Since 2013, this community has moved to regain full control around identifying, planning, and implementing strategies to enact miyupimaatisiiun, “being alive well” for the whole of their community, rooting it in their traditional practices. This group of authors, composed of members of the Cree communities and non-indigenous scholars, describe how after extensive consultation and dialogue among community leaders many actions were implemented to begin decolonization of their health system and its social practices.

A similarly culturally affirmative process is described and explained by Ramirez, McCarthy, Cabalquinto, Dizon, and Santiago (2023). Indigenous tattooing, an ancient practice across the world, has been and continues to be stigmatized, being portrayed as shameful and uncivilized by Christian colonizers. Working with individuals who identified as Filipino and who had engaged in a Batok ceremony and received a Batok (tattoo), and community members interested in talking about its meanings, the authors create a detailed account of tattooing as a resistive occupation and describe the social reclamation of this cultural practice. Another thought-provoking discussion is brought forward by Müllenmeister, Maersk, and Farias (2023), who examined the lived experience of individuals who identify themselves as activists. In their work, they show the tensions faced by individuals who chose to dedicate their time to social change through community organizing, raising social awareness, and advocacy. The authors point out that there is a price to pay when one’s main occupation is to dialogue with others about the dilemmas in the community and articulate some implications of these findings.

A strength of this issue is the authors’ thoughtful use of theoretical and critical perspectives to examine the structural and societal features that support and impede occupational possibilities for individuals and groups who are navigating challenges imposed by health conditions or life circumstances across the lifespan. For example, many children around the world experienced severe occupational disruptions or alterations in the availability, configuration, and participation of partners in daily occupations due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This prompted Zogogianni, Whiteford, and Siaperas (2023) to explore these underpinnings among 275 Greek children aged 6-12 years old. This very innovative project had children report their own experiences through responses to the online Children’s Assessment of Participation and Enjoyment (CAPE). The analysis uncovers patterns of daily occupation, clarifying individual and interpersonal components of the children’s occupational engagement. Similarly, Engelbrecht, van Niekerk, and Shaw (2023) unpacked the socio-political contexts that often lead to un/underemployment of young adults with intellectual disabilities in South Africa. Noting how employment serves as an important steppingstone to greater occupational possibilities and occupational justice, these authors used critical ethnography and gathered interviews with multiple informants positioned as consumers and service providers to identify systematic societal barriers that need to be addressed.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Bratun, Asaba, and Zurc (2023), Cahill, Galvin, and Pettigrew (2023) and Peoples, Varming, and Kristensen (2023) all examined elder’s occupations, a time in life when many in capitalistic cultures may experience losses, pruning, and reorganization of occupations necessitated by health or imposed by social conventions. Not surprisingly, the first two papers framed their studies within a doing, being, and becoming conceptual framework. Bratun and colleagues (2023) examined the motives of retirement-eligible workers who continued to work via a systematic review of qualitative studies. Their findings reveal a web of interacting motives that are cogently explained within the doing, being, and becoming dimensions, unmasking how work both locates and engages an older worker or elder within a social sphere, bolsters or is attuned to their health, and fosters community belonging. They apply the concept of gerotranscendence to this process, noting that elders are increasingly selective and intentional in their choices of daily occupations, focusing on more meaningful and altruistic ones. Cahill, Galvin, and Pettigrew (2023) further elucidate a nuanced view of the retirement process by examining Irish academics’ experiences over one year’s time using an innovative longitudinal approach. Their findings illuminate the dis/continuity and adaptation within academics’ daily lives in their selection of occupations and reforming of routines given their new-found abundance of time and freedom from prior work obligations. Next, Peoples, Varming, and Kristensen’s (2023) work scrutinizes the realities of the experiences of persons with dementia who strive to be full citizens, living in “ordinary places” and “doing ordinary things.” Using a meta-analysis of qualitative research, their work strongly counters social discourses that infantilize people with dementia, which constrain the occupations afforded them and fail to see them as contributing societal members.

Shifting the focus to groups charged with responsibilities for the well-being of others, Reid, Holmes, Laliberte Rudman, and Johnson (2023) conducted a critical interpretive synthesis of occupation-focused research of caregivers for adults. They employed a unique approach to select studies for their critical review, expanding their search beyond the four English language journals from the Global North to include a Brazilian one, using Google Translate to create an analyzable text. In their analysis, they highlight the relational and transactional nature of caregiving, providing an essential critique of the biomedical and Eurocentric origins of occupational science that have at times studied or portrayed occupation as separated from its context or co-participants.

Forced displacement is a disturbing reality of our times. In response to the many challenges imposed by the phenomenon, Khangura, So, Yekta, and Huot (2022) explore the experience of immigrant service providers, while trying to enact the integration of newcomers into Canadian society. Applying a secondary analysis of previously conducted interviews, the authors were able to problematize the enactment of occupational opportunities within the scope of immigration by pointing out the shortcomings of economic integration alone to support integration in its full sense. Nevertheless, a shift to collaborative actions that would value the immigrants’ protagonist role in their own integration, combined with regaining social capital to network and build social skills, was suggested as the way forward to enabling respectful and meaningful immigrant resettlement.

While acknowledging that occupations are situated within spatial boundaries, Delaisse and Huot (2023) assert that scholarship around immigration and occupation has been framed from restrictive uprooting perspectives that often fail to reveal its transnational nature. The authors state the need to recognize migrants continuing connections with their sending countries and, in that sense, suggest transnationalism as an important approach to provide occupational scientists with tools to advance the understanding of how occupations reveal connections between spaces and places. They argue that there is great potential for the theorization of transnationalism within occupational science and urge occupational scientists to integrate interdisciplinary theory into occupational science and contribute to advancing knowledge on the subject, as we can certainly contribute much to a well-rounded understanding of the spatiality of occupation.

We hope that this issue spurs deeper engagement and discussion on these critical issues among our academic community, causing a reckoning with our own biases and how they may be embedded in the work we do. Luckily, the authors on this issue provide insightful and concrete considerations for researchers and authors to use to expand their perspectives on essential aspects such as race, ethnicity, positionality, radical inclusion, and critical perspectives, in addition to antiracist epistemologies, which will certainly move our scholarship toward a pluriversed landscape.

Acknowledgement

The University of Wisconsin-Madison occupies ancestral Ho-Chunk land, a place their nation has called Teejop since time immemorial. In an 1832 treaty, the Ho-Chunk were forced to cede this territory. Decades of ethnic cleansing followed when both the federal and state government repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, sought to forcibly remove the Ho-Chunk from Wisconsin. This history of colonization informs our shared future of collaboration and innovation. Today, UW-Madison respects the inherent sovereignty of the Ho-Chunk Nation, along with the eleven other First Nations of Wisconsin.

Brazilian society has a historical legacy of disregard for the lives of indigenous peoples and women and men captured by the Atlantic slave trade that brought millions of Black Africans to South America, causing an involuntary diaspora. These groups often still face harsh conditions, despite a Federal Constitution recognizing all individuals’ rights on Brazilian soil. Respectfully, I would like to express my gratitude to those who advocated for the freedoms I have today, acknowledging their struggle. Plain citizenship is still not extended to every Brazilian, and that is why we should all join our voices and actions to eliminate oppression and racism.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.