Towards an auto-ethnography of an occupational therapist's published body of work

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.