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Embracing And Enacting An ‘Occupational Imagination’: Occupational Science As Transformative, Debbie Rudman

Occupational Therapy Publications

This paper addresses the question of how occupational science can move forward in its development as a socially and politically engaged discipline. It is argued that a transformative approach to scholarship needs to be embraced, and that enacting such an approach requires a radical reconfiguration of the sensibility underpinning occupational science. After reviewing the key defining characteristics of a transformative paradigmatic approach, key insights regarding how to foster a radical sensibility in occupational science are drawn from C. Wright Mills (1959) conceptualization of ‘the sociological imagination’. Embracing an occupational imagination premised on these key insights would foster the transformative potential …