Crafting a Foucauldian Archaeology Method: A Critical Analysis of Occupational Therapy Curriculum-as-Discourse, South Africa

Abstract

South Africa has a colonial and apartheid past of social injustice, epistemological oppression, and exclusion. These mechanisms are historically inscribed in the designs, practices, and content of higher education—including in occupational therapy curriculum. If these historical markers are not consciously interrogated, patterns of reproduction are reified along the fault lines that already exist in society. The focus of this article is to demonstrate how an archaeological Foucauldian method was crafted from foundational Foucauldian archaeology analytics and existing approaches of Foucauldian discourse analysis to unearth the rules of the formation of the occupational therapy profession. These rules pertain to the formation of (a) the ‘ideal occupational therapist’; (b) who had a say about the profession; (c) the ways of preferred reasoning; and (d) underlying theoretical themes and perspectives about the future. Data sources for this archaeology analytics included commemorative documents of universities on the origin of their programmes; historical regulatory documents; and the South African Journal of Occupational Therapy archive from the period 1953–1994. The analysis rendered two subthemes for each of the rules of formation including ‘white exceptionalism’, white male national, and international, regulatory bodies, the profession’s know-how practical knowledge, and its need for recognition within a bio-medical paradigm. Unearthing the historical markers of a curriculum and viewing it as discourse may enable a conscious reconfiguration thereof.