Occupational therapy and social inclusion: social cooperative approaches in Entre Ríos Province, Argentina

Abstract

This article is part of a collaborative ethnographic research developed with organizations of the Red de Cooperativas Sociales (Social Cooperatives Network) and aims to investigate the ways in which these organizations promote social inclusion. The objective of this work is to present a first interpretive analysis of the enacting frameworks that occupational therapists construct in their daily work. For this purpose, we selected three occupational therapists who work or have worked in social cooperatives. We carried out a semantic analysis of their discourse in interviews. The analysis was triangulated with a corpus of photographs, fieldnotes and other records generated during fieldwork. In this way, we present a situated interpretation of the characteristics of occupational therapists’ approaches and how they contribute to sustaining processes of socio-labor inclusion. We conclude that this approach is part of a social tradition in community mental health. To maintain it, it is necessary to create synergistic links with people from the same profession and from other professions. It is also a position to be taken in concrete situations, such as the encounter with materiality. Finally, the practices generated from this perspective affect the patients and the professionals themselves.