The unsustainability of occupational based model diagrams

Occupational therapy's oversight: How science veiled our humanity

BACKGROUND

Occupational therapy's connection to positivist science predates the profession's formal beginning, with important contributing knowledge sources coming from mathematics, physics, psychology, and systems theory. While these sources of objective knowledge provide a rational, defendable position for practice, they can only explain a portion of what it means to exist as an occupational being.

AIMS/OBJECTIVES

This article aims to reveal some of the history of science within occupational therapy and reveal the subjective, ontological nature of doing everyday activities that the profession's preoccupation with positivist science has obscured.

METHODS

This research used a history of ideas methodology to uncover how occupational therapy perceived people and how practice was conceptualised and conducted between 1800 and 1980s, as depicted in writing of the time.

CONCLUSION

Analysis showed that, through history, people were increasingly categorised and delimited. Practice also became systematically controlled, moving occupational therapy into a theoretical, scientific, and abstract realm.

SIGNIFICANCE

The emphasis placed on objectivity diminishes the attention given to human ways of practicing, where the subjective experience is central to our thinking.

Occupation in the Anthropocene and Ethical Relationality

Purpose. Occupations have "implications for individuals, societies, and the earth". This article focusses on implications of occupation in relation to the earth and examines the potential to expand occupational justice beyond anthropocentric viewpoints to honour interspecies justice. Approach. A 'theory as method' approach is used to explore the literature. Transgressive decolonial hermeneutics informs analysis. Key issues. The discussion advances understandings about human occupation in relation to more-than-humans, intersections with human occupations and animals, and ethical relationality. Implications. Occupational justice includes honouring interdependence of species, engaging in occupations in ways that are sustainable, considering future generations, and refraining from occupations that have a destructive or detrimental impact on the earth and more-than-humans. The profession has a collective responsibility to honour Indigenous worldviews and Indigenous sovereignty, recognising and welcoming the potential for Western conceptualisations of occupation to be transformed.

Doing, being, becoming and belonging at the heart of occupational therapy: An analysis of theoretical ways of knowing

Background: Theoretical ways of knowing in occupational therapy include paradigms, conceptual practice models and related knowledge. Despite the diversity of models available to guide practice, there are few examples of analyses which compare and contrast their respective core concepts.Aims: The aims of this paper are to describe how the dimensions of occupation described in the Pan Occupational Paradigm pervade conceptual practice models, and are embedded within case reports of occupational therapy.Materials and Methods: A framework analysis was undertaken, using the dimensions of occupation - doing, being, becoming and belonging - as core concepts. The alignment of concepts from four widely utilised occupational therapy conceptual practice models with these dimensions were investigated and described. Four case reports developed in reference to these specific conceptual practice models were also analysed, and their expression of the core concepts and dimensions discussed.Results: The dimensions of occupation were embedded in all reviewed conceptual practice models and case reports. The dimensions are explained in discrete, relational and embedded forms, with each conceptual practice model adopting a specific terminology and structure to describe them.Conclusions and Significance: The presence of all four dimensions of occupation, regardless of form, terminology or structural arrangement, is proposed as a hallmark of an occupational therapy conceptual practice model.