From an ethical and political commitment to the design of a professional project in occupational therapy: a debate necessary to social assistance work

Abstract

Occupational therapists compose technical teams in social assistance services before the formalization of their insertion in the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS), which occurred in 2011. As a result, the discussion about the work in this sector and the social question has gained relevance in the profession from an interventional and theoretical-academic point of view. In this study, from a Marxist perspective, we reflect on how the social question determines the demands observed in social assistance work. Next, we present the concepts of societal projects – understood as collective projects that express class intentions for society, and of professional projects – defined as collective projects related to professions composed of ethical and political principles, which are theoretical and methodological references for professional practice, and that establish bases for their relationships with service users, other professions, and organizations and institutions. We conclude by proposing that social occupational therapy is a theoretical and methodological framework that can be adopted to construct a critical-transformative professional project: critical of the structure and dynamics of capitalist society that continually replace the expressions of the social question, touching the everyday life of subjects; critical of the neoliberal model of State management that weakens rights and makes people’s lives precarious; critical of the conservative trends of work in social assistance that individualize, medicalize, psychologize, and moralize the reading of problems presented as professional demands; critical of the role and social function of occupational therapy in its relationship with society, breaking with a technical and supposedly neutral view of the profession.