Editorial

This issue’s contents may appear, at first glance, to present an assortment of topics and inquiries that have little in common; however, threads related to the situatedness of occupation and conceptual and methodological approaches in occupational science provide warp and weft for the second 2024 issue of the Journal of Occupational Science. The issue’s contributions reflect perspectives across many global locations, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, the Philippines, and the United States of America, and the topics taken up – such as community wellness planning, occupational impacts of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, or military-civilian transitions – have broad relevance. Whether you engage with the issue’s contents in their presented order or take them up in topical groups, I believe you will find many opportunities to question, extend, and reflect on understandings about occupation and the ways in which occupation can be studied, analyzed, or centered in actions in your own global context.

Drawing on and Extending Transactional Perspectives on Occupation

Many articles in this issue connect with the transactional perspective on occupation originally expressed by Dickie et al. (2006). Some contributions, such as Smith’s (2024) proposed concept of Social and Environmental Determinants of Occupation (SEDO), illustrate how a transactional perspective has come to be adopted by many occupational scientists as a fruitful path for moving beyond the individual plane of understanding and analysis. Other contributions, such as Lévesque et al.’s (2024) community-based study of participation in Miyupimaatisiiun (wellness) planning committees among Eeyou Istchee Cree Nation members in Canada, Sy et al.’s (2024) analysis of media portrayals of hidden Filipino occupations, and Tironi et al.’s (2024a, b) exploration of the pre-incarceration life stories of young girls in Brazilian juvenile detention facilities (published in English and Portuguese), go one step further to investigate and illustrate the complex contextual influences that shape meanings of and opportunities for occupational participation. With Smith (2024), these articles exemplify and extend understandings about occupation as a situated process (Madsen & Josephsson, 2017) that occurs at both individual and community levels (Lavalley, 2017; Lavalley et al., 2023), complementing a transactional perspective with concepts such as occupational consciousness (Ramugondo, 2015), conscientization (Freire, 1970), and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Ribeiro, 2016) to illustrate the melioristic (Baranek et al., 2021), resistive (De La Fuente Pérez, 2019), and reproductive (Galvaan, 2015; Ramugondo, 2015) potential of occupations situated through power relations.

Pugh and Heatwole Shank’s (2024) article builds from critiques about existing occupational science applications of a transactional perspective (e.g., Bailliard et al., 2022; Bunting, 2016) to propose the utility of non-participatory visual methods, offering a compelling argument regarding the potential of such methods to transcend researcher reliance on verbal forms of data. By providing a different window into embodied, situated action, Pugh and Heatwole Shank argue, such methods offer a more comprehensive post-humanistic (Nayar, 2014) accounting of transactional entanglements that move beyond a focus on human experiences, thus locating people more completely as part of the natural world. In describing the rhythmic and patterned emphasis of selected non-participatory visual methods, Pugh and Heatwole Shank's paper provides an interesting complement to Keptner et al.’s (2024) case study of occupational therapy students’ habits and reconfigurations during the first wave of the COVID-19 lockdown. Keptner and colleagues draw on aspects of a transactional perspective to continue this Journal’s focus on the occupational impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Stanley & Prodinger, 2022). Although Keptner et al. rely on written and verbal accounts as part of their data set, their use of photovoice, wellness wheel, and time geography data serve as a reminder of the myriad ways in which occupational scientists might understand occupation as an evolving process situated through natural phenomena.

Approaches for Assessing and Understanding Occupational Disruptions and Transitions

Continuing the focus on COVID-19 as a natural phenomenon that fostered occupational disruptions on a large scale, Modanloo et al. (2024) used data from a cross-sectional Canadian survey to look at the relation of stress and occupation-based coping strategies during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. With theoretical coding and categorization informed by Moll et al.’s (2015) Do-Live-Well Framework, this article illustrates the challenge of making occupation visible using data that did not originally draw on an occupational perspective (in this case, a survey developed using Skinner et al.’s 2003 framework of coping strategies). Yet articles like this, along with contributions from Edgelow et al. (2024) and Kerr et al. (2024), show the importance of endeavoring to understand occupation’s role in experiences of disruption and transition. Edgelow et al. and Kerr et al. both focus on experiences of transitioning between military and civilian life, showing how the departure from highly structured military living can foster challenges in filling daily life and reconfiguring identity in the civilian sphere. Focusing on another experience of transition – that of becoming a parent – Crawford et al. (2024) explored how a Neuroprotective Developmental Care (NDC) approach impacted parent-infant co-occupations. In contrast to prevailing approaches that emphasize adherence to structured routines and rapid prescriptive responses to infant communication, NDC provided a contextually situated approach focused on flexible orchestration of parent-infant co-occupations, enabling parents to adopt a more holistic lens of taking the entire day and balance of occupations into account. Taken together, these three articles show there is still much to be learned about the role of and impact on occupational participation in situations fraught with disruption and transition.

Critiquing Conceptual and Methodological Approaches

Moving into the final set of contents for this issue, it is important to keep in mind that, consistent with a transactional perspective (Aldrich, 2008; Cutchin et al., 2008), the use of headings in this editorial to frame sets of articles is not meant to imply mutually exclusive categorizations of their contributions. Thus, as you are introduced to these final three articles, I encourage you to think back to articles previously discussed and the ways in which the spirit of conceptual and methodological critique is evidenced in their pages.

Brooks and Reynolds’ (2024) study of links between yoga practices and identity development produced a critique of how ‘becoming’ has been predominantly conceptualized in occupational science. Rather than reinforcing existing conceptualizations of becoming as a goal-oriented process of development, this article demonstrates that the process of engaging in occupation over time may instead foster self-acceptance, detachment from goal-driven ways of thinking about personal development, and an opportunity to understand becoming as a process of fluidity and receptivity.

Park and Lee’s (2024) systematic review of the psychometric properties of five occupational balance self-report outcome measures found that no instrument displayed high evidence for sufficient psychometric properties. Similar to Modanloo et al.’s (2024) finding of no significant association of stress and occupation-based coping among Canadian survey participants, Park and Lee’s finding demonstrates a need for enhanced conceptual clarity and consistency and measures that fully situate occupations relative to other phenomena of interest.

Mirmiran et al.’s (2024) development and inquiry about an arts-based pedagogical tool for first-year occupational therapy students shows a continued need for modalities that facilitate deep and broad ways of knowing. Like Pugh and Heatwole Shank’s (2024) call to illuminate the embodied, experiential aspects of occupational participation, Mirmiran et al. used art developed by people with acquired brain inquiry to elicit emotional responses and explorations of neurorehabilitation topics, moving beyond verbal discussions and challenging the dominance of non-disabled narratives in higher education to amplify the relational, affective, and critical aspects of transformative learning experiences.

Concluding Remarks

After reading this issue’s wide-ranging contents, you may find yourself thinking of different ways to weave them together than the approach I have taken in this editorial. To me, this is one of the beauties of occupational science: the ever-expanding perspectives, ideas, and approaches that constitute the discipline are so rich that they can be brought together in many different arrangements, and it is through this arranging and rearranging that so many ‘aha!’ moments emerge.