Occupational therapy and the progressive neoliberal trap: challenges for anti-oppressive praxis

Abstract

Understanding the contradictions that involve neoliberalism, and its progressive pretensions, it is necessary to ask ourselves about the possible traps that these social configurations can "build", in order to disguise their wickedness, making unfeasible a radically anti-oppressive therapeutic-occupational praxis, which does not be fooled by the hegemonic narratives that all try to co-opt. Part of these traps, for us, is designed in relation to the phenomenon of empty identity politics. More explicitly, these articulated movements – progressive neoliberalism and empty identity politics - represent a risk for contemporary professional action, reducing the understanding of subjects to the immediate, visible, individual and subjectivism, by an action that reads the path of identity recognition (placed as fixed and separate from social dynamics) via, exclusively, individual/empty/symbolic empowerment, being able to reaffirm a meritocratic discourse. Therefore, it is urgent to undertake the struggles for the recognition of identities in dialogue with the reading of the social subject in an unequal structure and together with the struggles for redistribution. Thus, the objective and concrete social dimension, which is consolidated in the social structure, takes place in the therapeutic-occupational praxis, and goes against the movements that try to deny (by force or consensus) our action committed to anti-oppression and social transformation.