Whiteness and the dimensions of the unsaid in/of occupational therapy

Abstract

The reflections presented in this essay are part of the investigation path of the research 'Racism, Whiteness and the production of knowledge of/in Occupational Therapy', a composition of different fluxes, experiences, constructions and encounters, mobilized by the technical, ethical, aesthetic and political contribution to the debate on Racism, putting into analysis the Whiteness of/in Occupational Therapy. Under the clues of the cartographic intervention research, this work had as main material, analyzes that emerged from the BranquiTOde study group, organized to discuss the proposed theme. Inspired by the “Critical Studies of Whiteness” we challenge ourselves to look at our own whiteness and our own racism as white women, researchers, and occupational therapists, and from this inflection several debates were made about racism and whiteness that engender the relations of/in the field. By deepening the understanding processes on how hegemonic systems produce and reproduce racist colonial logics, based on the idea of racial supremacy of white people, we propose some reflections on the ways in which exclusions and inequalities directly interfere in the human activities of people and collectives of subjects. that we have the privilege of accompanying in the most different fields, practices with Occupational Therapy. Furthermore, we understand that producing questions about racial inequalities in the University/Occupational Therapy, means questioning the epistemologies of the fields of knowledge and opening cracks to other cosmovisions, other perspectives of the world, of life, of the university, is a bet on the invention of others. ways of producing practices, knowledge, and possible worlds.