Occupational Punk Vol 3:
Everyday odyssey
The need for transformative change across healthcare and society is well recognized in light of diverse social, ecological and health crises. With this Call for Stories for Occupational Punk Vol 3, we specifically invite occupational therapy students, clinicians, educators, researchers, professional representatives, policymakers, and service users from around the world to send us: fictional stories located anytime in the future, in which the work of health and social care is deliberately focused on responding to social and ecological challenges and supporting better ways of living and being healthy together.
To envision such futures is also to wonder how the occupational therapy profession might facilitate harmonious everyday lives in our diverse, and even multispecies communities; how we might view and support everyday odysseys through a lens of possibility and change. It is to envision new ways to navigate our everyday odyssey amidst rapid societal, ecological, and technological disruption, and to explore dynamic, malleable and transformative ways of occupying space and time.
A little more about healthpunk
Out of an introductory public health module for first-year students in the physiotherapy Bachelor’s program at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, healthpunk emerged as an approach to imagine diverse futures for more socially and ecologically responsible physiotherapy and healthcare in general. A collection of stories written by the first cohort of students was published bilingually in Physiopunk Vol 1 alongside an introductory editorial and a series of multilingual commentaries. One year later, this was followed by the publication of Healthpunk Vol 2 which invited healthcare professionals and students from around the world to contribute their visions for future health and care.
One intention of experimenting with this kind of writing was to open up healthpunk as a new genre, and possibly methodology in transformative healthcare research and education. Drawing on the philosophies and genres circulating around speculative fiction and diverse international futurisms, we suggest healthpunk as a genre that can help us envision hopeful yet radically different possibilities for future health and social care beyond the parameters, logic, and politics of siloed professions, clinical environments and scopes of practice. Healthpunk is an invitation to let go of established conventions and imagine otherwise health and social cares filled with creativity and genuine care for everyone and everything we share this planet with.
To adequately respond to the diverse, past, present and future social, ecological and health challenges, we will need many different visions, conjured up and communicated collectively, in many different places and many different languages. For this reason, healthpunk is not about the creation of unifying master narratives but the diversification of health and social care futures; not the promotion of futures based on Western colonial ideas of progress or development but pluriversal imaginaries. Healthpunk stories should not aim to present narratives intended for a new global healthcare profession of one or another type, but stories for and ideally with their local social, and ecological communities, while keeping in mind both local and global issues affecting their health.
In light of ongoing global environmental change, healthpunk draws inspiration from the genre of hopepunk. There, hope stands for the recognition that ongoing global ecological change will lead to some undesirable changes but that aspiring to better ways forward nonetheless remains valid, while punk indicates the need for something different than today’s status quo.
Insofar as there are globally relevant themes like environmental change then, other recommended anchor points to consider in the fabulation of healthpunk stories include social and ecological challenges impacting the health of people and planet, technological and digital disruption, the need to find new ways to coexist and enjoy health with all non-human forms of existence that share our world, changing demographics, changing healthcare economics and changing professional landscapes, and the central importance of traditional and indigenous knowledges and ways of life to envisioning better pasts, presents, and futures.
We look forward to reading your story and conjuring up future health and social cares with you.
Your Occupational Punk Vol 3 editorial team