Decolonial feminism and Occupational Therapy: an experience report of a curricular internship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

This experience report is a theoretical deepening of the practices of remote internship in Occupational Therapy (OT) at the Social Assistance Reference Center (CRAS) of territory in the municipality of Pelotas, State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The practices are based on the Occupational Therapy of the South and decolonial feminist perspectives. During the internship, individual interventions, a virtual group with women users of the CRAS, and a training group focused on workers from the same institution were carried out. Through these interventions, we had access to life stories marked by gender oppression. Supported by Patricia Hill Collins’s theory, we understood how the images of control impacted those women’s daily activities, especially those related to care. The interventions found support in the Amerindian paradigm of translation, underlining misunderstanding as the foundation of care in OT. We proposed Cultural Translation Activities as a method of occupational-therapeutic intervention that foresees and uses the cultural difference in favor of new forms of experimentation, awareness, collectivization, and incitement to face oppression.