669458
editorial2016
OTJXXX10.1177/1539449216669458OTJR: Occupation, Participation and HealthEditorial
Editorial
Occupational Justice: Moral Imagination,
Critical Reflection, and Political Praxis
Occupational justice is a term that has made its way onto the
conceptual scene in occupational therapy and occupational
science over the last two decades (Durocher, Gibson, &
Rappolt, 2014; Durocher, Rappolt, & Gibson, 2014; Stadnyk,
Townsend, & Wilcock, 2010; Townsend & Wilcock, 2004a,
2004b; Whiteford & Townsend, 2011; Wilcock, 2006;
Wilcock & Hocking, 2015; Wilcock & Townsend, 2000). As
a relatively new construct, debates are ongoing about its the-
oretical underpinnings, conceptualizations, definitions, and
its relationship to related constructs such as social justice,
human rights, and political practice. The articles in this spe-
cial issue reveal the theoretical “fruitfulness” (Kuhn, 1977)
of the construct of occupational justice for illuminating jus-
tice issues from an occupational perspective.
Advances in the Field: A Call for
Micro and Macro Perspectives to
Occupational Justice
Two reviews in this special issue build on a previous review
by Durocher, Gibson, and Rappolt (2014; Durocher, Rappolt,
& Gibson, 2014). Malfitano, de Souza, and Lopes (2016)
make important contributions to understandings of the ori-
gins and precursors of occupational justice, showing early
work dating back to 1974 in related fields. Their article traces
the publication trends of the occupational justice literature,
and analyzes the historical trajectories of the emergence of
the construct of occupational justice and related concepts
such as occupational rights, occupational alienation, occupa-
tional deprivation, occupational apartheid, occupational
deprivation, and occupational marginalization. They also
highlight three categories of occupational justice publica-
tions: individually oriented approaches, collective
approaches, and approaches that attend to professional edu-
cation and research methods. A review by Gupta (2016)
maps out literature published between 1980 and 2014 to
examine how occupational justice and related concepts have
been applied to occupational therapy practice. Both reviews
call for greater attention to approaches that conceptualize
occupational justice from broader collective, contextual,
structural, and systemic perspectives (macro level). As
exemplified by many of the articles in this issue, occupa-
tional injustices that are experienced at the individual level
frequently point to larger structural issues of injustice, and
conversely broad systemic issues of occupational injustice
are played out and revealed in the day-to-day occupational
lives of individuals. As Young (1990) points out, “the call to
OTJR: Occupation, Participation and
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‘be just’ is always situated in concrete social and political
practices” (p. 5). The articles in this issue support calls for
pluralistic epistemological approaches (Kinsella, 2012a) to
occupational justice; approaches that overcome dualisms,
view both micro and macro perspectives as relevant, and rec-
ognize the relative merits and limitations of each to knowl-
edge generation (Bailliard, 2016, Kinsella, 2012a).
The move to increase attention to macro perspectives of
occupational justice parallels calls to consider this construct
in relation to various domains such as human rights (Frank,
2012; Galheigo, 2011; Hammell, 2016a, 2016b; Hocking,
2015; Hocking & Townsend, 2015; Stadnyk et al., 2010;
Thibeault, 2013); social inclusion (Pereira & Whiteford, in
press; Whiteford & Pereira, 2012), human capabilities
(Bailliard, 2016; Hocking, in press), community develop-
ment (Thibeault, 2013), social occupational therapy
(Galheigo, 2010; Malfitano, Lopes, Magalhães, & Townsend,
2014), social justice (Bailliard, 2016; Hocking, in press;
Hocking & Townsend, 2015), and political practice (Pollard,
Sakellariou, & Kronenburg, 2009; Sakellariou & Pollard,
2013). These areas point to promising lines of ongoing schol-
arship related to macro-level perspectives, political praxis,
and occupational justice.
Unique Moral Claims: Revealed
Through an Occupational Perspective
on Justice
The articles in this collection are also compelling in showing
the moral claims that arise from an occupational justice per-
spective (Frank, 2012; Hocking, in press). The articles draw
attention to how occupational perspectives bring injustices to
light, make them immediate and understandable, and suggest
a unique moral purpose for articulating and advancing occu-
pational justice as a construct (Hocking, in press). The article
by Angell, Frank, and Solomon (2016) shows how the occu-
pational lives of Latino families are seen to matter in terms of
how programs for children with autism are enacted, and in
relation to the evaluation of the effectiveness of specific pol-
icy designs. Their attention to the situated and occupational
accounts of families reveal how structural issues are played
out in the enactment of policy, and how these can contribute
to unintended occupational injustices. Mayne, Lowrie, and
Wilson (2016) adopt an occupational perspective to analyze
discourses and occupational experiences of refugee and asy-
lum seekers in the Australian context to reveal occupational
deprivation and injustice as perpetuated through discursive
164 OTJR: Occupation, Participation and Health 36(4)
systems. Persuasive moral claims are also raised in the study
by Durocher, Kinsella, McCorquodale, and Phelan (2016).
Therapists’ accounts of ethical tensions reveal broader sys-
temic and policy issues that interface with workplace occu-
pations to create barriers to care. These accounts reveal the
dangers of occupational alienation in health care settings
where structural and policy issues shape practices in ways
that preclude ethical practices. Aldrich, White, and Conners
(2016) show how the introduction of an occupational justice
theoretical perspective shaped a student’s perspectives on
police-involved shootings of young African Americans, cata-
lyzed new ways of seeing the world, and informed transfor-
mative action for social change (praxis). Their analysis is
morally persuasive in its call for greater attention to occupa-
tional justice education, a perspective in line with the World
Federation of Occupational Therapists’ (World Federation
of Occupational Therapists, 2016) emergent educational
standards.
Two articles invoke persuasive moral claims related to
research practice. Farias, Rudman, and Magalhaes (2016)
contend that epistemological perspectives are implicated in
the ways research is constructed. They call for critical reflex-
ivity about the frameworks used, and argue for the fruitful-
ness of critical epistemological perspectives in research
oriented toward occupational justice. For Crabtree, Wall, and
Ohm (2016), the occupation of engaging in participatory
action research in a prison context reveals justice issues.
They draw on constructs of occupational justice and occupa-
tional deprivation to highlight the occupational conditions of
prison life, the possibilities and challenges of enacting par-
ticipatory research, and the intricacies of insider/outsider
research relationships.
Critical Reflection/Critical Reflexivity:
Advancing an Occupational Justice
Agenda
Another major theme in this issue is the use of critical reflec-
tion or critical reflexivity to advance research, education,
practice, or policy oriented toward occupational justice.
Critical reflection involves ideological critique and is linked
to emancipatory human interests, the interrogation of ideo-
logical commitments, and the identification of, and libera-
tion from, oppressions and hegemonic conditions related to
everyday life, work, and labor (Kinsella, Caty, Ng, & Jenkins,
2012; Ng, Kinsella, Friesen, & Hodges, 2015). Crabtree
et al.’s (2016) examination of insider/outsider researcher per-
spectives in the conduct of participatory action research in a
prison setting invokes critical reflection to reveal how occu-
pational injustice can be made visible, and how transforma-
tion can occur through participatory action research. Their
critical reflections offer fruitful suggestions for working
toward occupational justice when undertaking research in
settings of occupational deprivation. Aldrich et al.’s (2016)
case study examines how occupational justice education fos-
tered critical reflection on taken-for-granted assumptions
regarding race relations, power, oppression, and a call to
social action that incited a student toward a change in con-
sciousness, and toward praxis. In the study by Durocher et al.
(2016), critical reflections show how individually situated
experiences of therapists in their practice can point to broader
oppressive structural conditions that become matters of
occupational justice in professional practice.
Three articles in the special issue offer salient examples of
critical reflexivity. Critical reflexivity is an approach to inter-
rogate the social and discursive conditions in which knowl-
edge is produced: it involves interrogating the conditions
under which knowledge claims are accepted and constructed,
revealing taken-for-granted assumptions by making the
familiar “strange”, and recognizing the situated nature of
knowledge generation (Kinsella, 2012b; Kinsella &
Whiteford, 2009). Farias et al. (2016) engage critical reflex-
ivity to interrogate epistemological commitments embedded
within research frameworks. They argue that such an exami-
nation is vital if we are to move toward frameworks congru-
ent with calls for occupational justice. Mayne et al. (2016)
engage critical reflexivity to examine prevalent discursive
constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the
Australian context. Their article shows the insights that may
arise when critical reflexivity is used to question taken-for-
granted discourses, and how these may shape the occupa-
tional possibilities of new immigrants. Angell et al. (2016)
critically interrogate discourses relating to Latino families’
low uptake of state-funded programs for children with
autism; their work shows the families as knowledgeable,
agentic, and making deliberate decisions based on family
needs, thus revealing new interpretations. The cultivation of
critical reflection and critical reflexivity in practitioners,
educators, students, researchers, and policy-makers offers
important possibilities for realizing an occupational justice
agenda.
Engaging the Moral Imagination
Through an Occupational Justice
Perspective
Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1977) reminds us that
“a theory should be fruitful to new research findings: it
should, that is, disclose new phenomena or previously
unnoted relationships among those already known” (p. 322).
The application of an occupational perspective to justice is
seen to reveal how situations of occupational injustice are
dialectically related through individual experiences of injus-
tice (micro perspectives), and broader contextual, collective,
community, systemic, structural, political, discursive, and
policy conditions (macro perspectives) that shape the pro-
duction of injustices. The exemplars in these accounts reveal
compelling morally persuasive claims that illuminate the
Editorial 165
power of an occupational perspective to bring injustices to
light. The articles also reveal critical reflection and critical
reflexivity as methods for illuminating occupational injus-
tice, and for working toward justice through changes in con-
sciousness, transformative action, and political praxis.
In light of these insights, we argue that an occupational
justice perspective has the potential to invoke and cultivate
our moral imaginations (Greene, 1995), to make us aware of
a “variety of possible framings” (Johnson, 1993, p. 12) of
occupational situations, and to imagine what other trajecto-
ries of action “ought to be possible” (Babbitt, 1996). In
thinking about the moral claims embedded in what the con-
struct of occupational justice allows us to see, we are invited
to engage our moral imaginations in the interests of a better
world. In this way, the pragmatic, theoretical, political, and
moral significance, as well as the conceptual power of “occu-
pational justice,” as a construct pregnant with possibility, is
revealed.
Elizabeth Anne
Kinsella, PhD, OT Reg. (Ont.),
Associate Professor, Faculty of
Health Sciences, School of
Occupational Therapy; Research
Scientist, Centre for Educational
Research & Innovation, Schulich School
of Medicine & Dentistry; Associate
Professor, Women’s Studies & Feminist
Research, University of Western
Ontario, London, Canada
Evelyne Durocher, PhD,
OT Reg. (Ont.),
Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health
Sciences, School of Occupational
Therapy, University of Western
Ontario, London, Canada
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