Con la PPT de Costa Rica en el SICA primer semestre de 2013 y siendo El

A THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK FOR LIVING COMMUNITIES

“To question your own process is a necessity. If you don’t question yourself, it’s impossible to improve.” – Alejandro G. Iñárritu (2014)

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the theoretical framework which informs both my understanding of my experience as a researcher in the field as well as the lens through which I collected and analyzed data. I will describe the significant theoretical concepts that were incorporated into my understanding of community relationships and social engagement through the lens of occupation. Beginning with a foundation of the transactional perspective of occupation, I proceed to identify theoretical gaps existing within occupational science discourse in relation to communities and population level occupation. Using insights from sociology, anthropology, and Deweyan philosophy, I describe the ground map I used for analysis and my conceptualization of community experiences of occupation.

A Foundation: The Transactional Perspective of Occupation

The transactional perspective presented a theoretical framework based on the philosophy of John Dewey that encouraged a shift toward a pragmatist and relational

perspective of occupation (Dickie et al., 2006). This challenged the culturally individualistic assumptions latent within the occupational science approach to studying and understanding occupation (Aldrich & Laliberte-Rudman, 2016; Dickie et al., 2006; Hammell, 2009; Hocking, 2012; Kantartzis & Molineux, 2011; Madsen & Josephsson, 2017). Further, the

transactional perspective asserted an understanding of occupation as co-constitutive and relationally emergent through complex situations involving cultures, people, history, the physical world, and many other influences. Based in the anti-dualistic philosophy of Dewey (1896, 1925/1998), the transactional perspective of occupation encouraged occupational scientists to reject an ontology that views individuals as autonomous and separate from their situation and experience.

The transactional perspective of occupation understood occupation as socially

emergent and continuously co-constitutive among its situation. Occupation develops through embodied habits and experiences of cultures and communities (Aldrich & Cutchin, 2013). The history and cultural milieu of a situation are incorporated into the actions of the people living through that situation. Analyses used by occupational scientists are shifting toward situational understandings of human experience (Aldrich & Laliberte-Rudman, 2016). We understand habits and ways of doing as intimately connected to sociopolitical and historical situatedness of occupation. The experience of doing is integrally connected to and

inseparable from the social, cultural, political, and personal happenings around it. The transactional perspective of occupation shifted the focus of occupation-oriented inquiry to transcend individual experience and acknowledge the inextricable relationships constantly transacting around everyday doing.

However, Dickie et al. (2006) stopped short of providing a conceptual ground map for how occupational scientists might be able to study emergence of occupation at the

community level. Authors who have employed the transactional perspective to conceptualize occupation continue to analyze occupation through an individual lens, albeit socially situated (Aldrich & Laliberte-Rudman, 2016; Madsen & Josephsson, 2017). When the transactional

perspective was initially proposed, it challenged the dichotomy of individual and society, but did not articulate theoretical implications for studying communities. Fox and Dickie (2010) offered the beginning seeds of community-level study of occupation in their exploration of a small theatre group. The authors examined the relationships and functioning of the group that influence how members participate in theatre, but they did not theorize occupation at the community level. To engage in community-level work, occupational scientists need

occupation-based theoretical frameworks that incorporate multi-faceted conceptualizations of a situation that involves a living and dynamic community. Occupational scientists do not have a sturdy theoretical strategy for articulation of community level phenomenon (e.g. economic mobility, structural racism, political revolution). A relational perspective would understand and account for both societal and individual contributions to the continual

construction of communal relationships. However, there was no occupation-based theoretical lens that offered this vision. Occupational science theory is inadequate for conceptualizing the living and changing relationships across communities.

Recently, Cutchin et al. (2017) highlighted Dewey’s understanding of social reconstruction and inquiry to encourage occupational scientists to understand occupation through a community lens, furthering the scope of the transactional perspective of occupation. Aldrich (2018) also deepened this understanding by more deeply analyzing Dewey’s concept of associated living as a political and social construct, encouraging occupational scientists to analyze community level associations and their influence on community growth. I have articulated how Dewey’s theory of associated living and

communal consequences may be useful in conceptualizing and characterizing the emergence of community occupation (Lavalley, 2017). By returning to Deweyan philosophy and

developing the transactional perspective of occupation specifically for communities, I offered a conceptual ground map for studying phenomena that occur at the community level

(Lavalley, 2017).This supports the viability of the transactional perspective as a founding theoretical framework through which the question and objectives of this research were examined.

Learning from Other Disciplines

To develop these ideas further, I have sought perspectives from other disciplines such as sociology and anthropology. Social theory perspectives regarding communities and social phenomena informed my approach, including the formation of social relationships and structures among groups. Insights from the following theoretical perspectives broadened the historical tendency toward the individual within occupational science (Dickie et al., 2006) to encompass the emergence of action at the community level in a way that incorporates individual, societal, communal, and political perspectives.

Mapping the Levels of a Community. The socio-ecological model developed within public health (McLeroy, Bibeau, Steckler, & Glanz, 1988) recognized that many layers and relationships influence the unfolding of human behavior among communities. This model depicted a cross section of societal layers, including individuals, groups, organizations, communities, and public policies, through which human behavior and public health are negotiated. The socio-ecological model reveals how occupational science theory has

overlooked the complexities of the communal formation of action. Occupational analysis has historically focused on the personal and immediate factors of individuals rather than the broad and scoping situation through which their occupation occurs. The socio-ecological model also provided a helpful theoretical skeleton on which to build a deeper understanding

of community occupation. This model encouraged the use of varying methods (e.g.

participant observation, document review, individual and group interviews) within my study to capture data across different levels of the community. However, the socio-ecological model of public health has mechanistic and compartmentalized understandings of the layers of a community.

Co-creation of Communities. Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain (1998) offered a concept of figured worlds in anthropology that can be used to resolve the problematic mechanistic aspects of the socio-ecological model. The theoretical separation of levels within a community often leads to practical neglect of the relationships that exist across those levels.

Figured worlds offer an understanding of dynamic social processes that transcend “levels” of a community and exemplify the social norms that are communally created and obeyed among social groups (Holland et al., 1998). This concept was based on the philosophies of

Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu (Holland et al., 1998) which all have philosophical

parallels to the transactional perspective of occupation. In approaching this study, the concept of figured worlds helped to stitch together the levels of the community by recognizing

relationships of practice and doing across those levels. I was able to acknowledge the culturally and socially held beliefs that shape and figure social groupings and therefore reflect on the dynamic relationships among the personal, organizational, political, and community levels of the senior center during analysis.

Space and Place for Communal Occupation. Similarly, Schatzki (2003), a

geographer and philosopher, suggested analysis of human action through sites to identify and characterize the organization and communal relationships of a community. He attested that this organization can be revealed through observation of participant practices at the site.

Practice exists as a relational action among participants, neither based in individuals nor distinct social structures. Additionally, a site is not required to be a physical location, but instead can be any location where practice occurs. According to Schatzki (2010), the doings of humans are enmeshed among social, material, historical, and relational complexes through which practice emerges. A site of practice becomes a focal point for analysis of this

enmeshed life and action. This theoretical perspective is different from the transactional perspective in that it purports a conceptualization of action, practice, as a dynamic phenomenon that exists at the communal level. Practice emerges from a site. The transactional perspective, when first introduced, offered a solid foundation for a parallel perspective within occupational science literature but did not go so far as to conceptualize occupation emerging from a community. My preliminary suggestion of developing the transactional perspective further through Deweyan philosophy (Lavalley, 2017) could be informed by Schatzki’s (2003) understanding of social living. Therefore, Schatzki’s (2003, 2010) conceptualization of the practice of a site informed my understanding of community occupations during this study.

Community Change and Social Transformation. While the previous theoretical perspectives suggested a way forward in understanding how communities exist, the

sociologist Bayat (2013) more explicitly attended to how communities change as a whole. He explored the social processes through which social movements were born in the Middle East. Through observation, participation, and documentation of a variety of aspects of everyday life, he recognized the natural communal formation and change processes within

communities. He investigated phenomena such as the silent encroachment and systematic change of poor communities through the subtle illegal redistribution of resources (e.g.

electricity and water) (Bayat, 2013). He highlighted the passive networks that form among humans as they simply go about everyday business together (Bayat, 1997, 2013).

Bayat (2013) understood everyday life as politics and challenged sociologists to understand social movements as communal phenomena emerging from a long history of mundane everyday experiences. This perspective is congruent with occupational science and its emphasis on everyday activity. His conceptual understandings guided analysis in this study toward understanding individual acts as existing among and coalescing into a

communal process of change. While Schatzki (2003, 2010) emphasizes the communal aspect of practice in sites, Bayat (2013)forefronts mundane and everyday activities as a primary milieu through which community relationships are formed during social transformation. Bayat’s (2013) theoretical perspective offers a clear instance of research that explored community level transformation without separating or neglecting the individual experiences within a community. His perspective encouraged more purposeful attention to the mundane happenings of the senior center as potential conduits for the social construction of the community as a whole.

Defining Occupation

The convergence of the above theoretical perspectives leads me to a definition of occupation that is abounding and fluid. Occupation becomes the ever-evolving process of living together through the world, transacting among all its relationships. Human occupation is an effervescent movement of relationship and meaning among human, environmental, cultural, political, and communal associations. Occupation is any movement that is aimed toward functional recoordination in a situation, spanning from movement to adjust in a seat to a society’s movement toward equality for women. Movement can be repetitive and

reinforcing or dynamic and changing. Occupation is occurring across our bodies and our societies because movement and change are consistently emerging from the aforementioned relationships. Occupation is the meaning-filled movement of those relationships. This meaning is contingent on the situation from which it emerges and can simultaneously manifest in positive, negative, and other multifaceted ways. Therefore, I understand community occupation as the communal construction of relationships occurring across multiple non-distinct and continuously co-constitutive dimensions of a community, including the individual, interpersonal, organizational, community, physical, public policy, and others yet to be identified (Lavalley, 2017).

Defining Community

Using a ground map of Deweyan philosophy (Aldrich, 2018; Cutchin et al., 2017; Lavalley, 2017) and informed by the critical and sociological perspectives mentioned above, I am able to examine occupation at the community level. A community, in this theoretical framework, is a group of people doing together. The boundaries of communities are porous and members often move through various communities as they participate in everyday life. Communities are consistently situated among other communities and relationships and therefore, can only be studied separately through abstraction. Community relationships span across the globe. This unit of analysis only exists as an abstract for analysis. Therefore, boundaries of the community in this study were constructed through identifying influential relationships and natural edges during the research process that facilitated the generation of knowledge that met the study’s aims.

While the construction of community boundaries offered scope to the study, it remained important to contemplate the infinitely mixed, interrelated, and transacting layers

of the community. Individuals were engaging with and influencing societal structures while societal structures were also impacting individual experiences (Lavalley, 2017). An

embedded understanding of community relationships encouraged me to not lose sight of one level of the community while delving into another. Shifting focus across dimensions of the community revealed relationships that were continuously affecting and being influenced across the community. This provided a more comprehensive and critical view of the changing occupations of the senior center.

Recognizing varied relationships among community members, sub-groups of the community, and other organizations was important during this exploration. For example, informed by critical perspectives (Fine et al., 2003; Laliberte-Rudman, 2013; Lassiter, 2005; Marlowe, 2010), I sought to position Spanish-speaking elders as neither autonomous

individuals nor subjects of structural rigidity. Instead, I understood the experience of a

population facing social prejudice, injustice, and discrimination (Bailliard, 2013a) as part of a larger community that is forming and being formed by their presence. This rejected

individualism as a philosophy while allowing agency to persist, focusing the investigative gaze on the situation and community as a whole rather than its parts.

Exploring shifts among relationships across this community over time (Lavalley, 2017) highlighted observable changes in activities, perceptions of positionality, and policies that occurred during continued community occupation. This theoretical approach encouraged me to focus on the relational construction of the occupation of the community rather than only individual perspectives. Documenting these communal changes facilitated the characterization of community occupations (Lavalley, 2017). An analysis of communal relationships provided an opportunity for analysis of the “growth-promoting and growth-

inhibiting natures of various associations” (Aldrich, 2018, p. 342). Continuous consideration of the emergent, historical, and political relationships that contributed to beneficial or