Abstract:
My inquiry into writing concerns the place of arts-based inquiry in the occupational therapy
profession and ways in which auto-ethnography can potentially contribute to a critical
reading of an occupational therapist’s published body of work. I am using writing as a
method of inquiry, re-reading my publications written over two decades
as occupational therapist at a metropolitan children’s hospital and, more recently, a regional
university. My new writing intends to be fictive and poetic, problematising those
institutional ways of knowing (and writing) that I have taken for granted. The
autobiographical story boards are entitled “Always a writer”, “Being a therapist” and
“Becoming academic”. The new corpus will be a collection of untold stories from an autoethnographic
inquiry into my published body of work. My hope is that these untold stories
may recover a counter-historical imagination for occupational therapy, opening space for
more reflexive, ethical practice.
