Invisible in plain sight: envisioning opportunities for transformation

Abstract

[Abstract] In this keynote address to the Occupational Science Europe Conference 2023, I invite the audience to share a pretend journey that begins in Europe, visits Spain, and ends returning to the delegates’ countries. Then I position myself as a young female scholar with a working-class and migration background in Southern Europe and disclose the journey’s aim: contributing to the collective effort of expanding the critical agenda and constructing pluralistic knowledge in occupational science. In our first stop, I describe challenges that situate our daily life in Europe and invite the audience to question our privilege in an unfair system. Doing otherwise is presented as an alternative to challenge the status quo. Then, we travel to Spain, where I share experiences of doing occupational science differently and how that triggered the emergence of the concept of ‘occupational struggles’. I explore the potentiality of this concept to do otherwise from an occupational perspective by revisiting some studies conducted in Spain and sharing some insights. The journey finishes exploring witnessed or experienced occupational struggles by the delegates in their contexts. I report examples of their answers that might illustrate the diversity of hidden realities in our daily occupations. I finalise encouraging the audience to continue the dialogue together.