Critical reflections on positioning as a “decolonial act”

Recent work in the Journal of Occupational Science advanced the premise that critical reflections on Minoritized writers’ social locations as racialized occupational therapy academics in the Global North constitute a decolonial act, with the ability to disrupt dominant ways of thinking and knowing. This paper critically interrogates the multiple hierarchical binaries through which coloniality assures dominance and guarantees unearned advantages to those socially located—not solely as white, upper and middle class citizens of the Global North but as gender-conforming, heteronormative, neurotypical, and abled—contending that the necessary work of decolonizing occupational science is not advanced if some forms of oppression are named and resisted while others are ignored, obscured, minimized, and perpetuated. The paper engages with critical scholarship that views statements of social identity as complicit with colonialism in re-centring white dominance, advances an anti-categorical approach to ‘positionality’, and contends that decoloniality requires more than a simplistic, performative listing of marginalized social identities; all co-existing locations of privilege need to be interrogated critically. Advocating a commitment to South-North scholarship that contests structures of power and the injustices inherent to the status quo, the paper concludes by outlining the need for fusions of resistance, wherein critical activist occupational science and occupational therapy scholars work together towards decoloniality, across all colonialism’s constructed binaries—utilizing everyone’s social locations, leveraging all our privileges and power, and exploiting all our resources and knowledges—to counter epistemicide, and resist, disrupt, dismantle, and transform all colonial ways of disciplinary thinking, knowing, and acting within occupational science.