Deborah Laliberte Rudman

Western University | UWO · School of Occupational Therapy

Developing effective, sustainable strategies that promote social inclusion, reduce isolation, and support older adults’ wellbeing continues to be important to aging communities in Canada. One strategy that targets community-living older adults involves identifying naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs) and supporting them through suppor...

Participatory action research (PAR) is an effective means of collaborating with older adults to support community change. Limited PAR literature exists in which older adults catalyse social change within neighbourhoods, particularly using virtual methods. In this paper, we discuss a virtual PAR process with older adults that occurred during the COV...

This paper illustrates the importance of critical reflexivity in guiding socially and ethically responsible participatory research through an analysis of reflexive notes pertaining to the process of a participatory filmmaking research project with children with disabilities. Within this process, numerous ethical tensions emerged in the field regard...

Drawing on Arthur Frank’s conceptualization of narrative repair, we consider how pediatric oncology nurses restore and re-story the narratives of patients and families whose biographies have been thrown off course by the diagnosis and death of a child from cancer, as well as their own narratives as caregivers. Frank argued that when one’s life stor...

Committed to the necessity of international dialogues in occupational therapy and occupational science, we have developed a proposal for alliance between social occupational therapy and critical occupational science based on a series of theoretical dialogues between Brazilian and Canadian researchers. Through these dialogues, we have aimed to under...

Comprometidos com a necessidade de diálogos internacionais na terapia ocupacional e na ciência ocupacional, nos voltamos para o desenvolvimento de uma proposta de aliança entre a terapia ocupacional social e a ciência ocupacional crítica baseada em uma série de debates teóricos entre pesquisadore(a)s brasileiro(a)s e canadenses. Por meio desses enc...

Background: Community pharmacists are expected to uphold ethical duties to patients and society while maintaining independent businesses or fulfilling expectations of corporate owners. Canadian pharmacy colleges provide only indirect guidance on the retail setting of the profession. Little is known about whether pharmacists identify ethical issues...

Drawing from 108 qualitative interviews with 38 participants from an ethnographic study investigating older adults' experiences of inclusion and exclusion in two increasingly socio-economically diverse neighbourhoods, this paper employs a queer approach to identify how older adults construct and narrate socio-cultural change in the neighbourhood, a...

Background: Many taken-for-granted expectations for parents in Western societies are situated in normative assumptions. Social constructions of 'good' parenting may be a poor fit for parents whose children's development varies from a so-called typical trajectory. Normative assumptions about parenting can have harmful effects for parents of autisti...

As a term used in nursing and other health professions to describe when one is prevented by institutional constraints from pursuing the right course of action, moral distress has gained traction to examine the effects of restructuring on health and social care providers. Using a critical narrative methodology, this paper presents the counter-storie...

Although research has shown that parenting an adolescent with a visual impairment may present unique challenges, a few studies have examined how parents negotiate such challenges and the meanings they derive from their parenting experiences. Using a constructivist narrative inquiry approach, this study explored how four parents of adolescents with...

Purpose Strategies for preventing and ending homelessness are frequently measured by their effectiveness on indices of tenancy sustainment. To shift this narrative, we conducted research to identify what is needed to “thrive” following homelessness from the perspectives of persons with lived experience in Ontario, Canada. Methods Conducted in the...

In January 2022 the new Dutch Civic Integration programme was launched together with promises of improvements it would bring in facilitating the ‘integration’ of newcomers to the Netherlands. This study presents a critical discourse analysis of texts intended for municipalities to take on their new coordinating role in this programme. The analysis...

Objective: The objective of this study was to identify essential aspects of exemplary post-discharge stroke rehabilitation as perceived by patients, care partners, rehabilitation providers, and administrators. Design: We carried out an exploratory qualitative, multiple case study. Stroke network representatives from four regions of the province...

Background: Most older adults want to age in place, in their homes and communities. However, this can be challenging for many, frequently owing to lack of supports that allow for aging in place. Naturally occurring retirement community supportive services programs (NORC-SSPs) offer an approach to help older adults age in place. Although qualitative...

Over the past 40 years, positive ageing discourses that speak to an expectation of continued productivity have gained prominence within research and policy. Such discourses have been critiqued as placing disproportionate value on the extension of older adults' working lives, while obscuring other valuable forms of work performed by older adults. De...

Congregate living among older adults aims to enhance important aspects of well-being, such as sense of community and social engagement. Such settings, however, involve a complexity of social and power relations, and inclusion and exclusion along lines of occupation and place can occur. In this paper we develop a concept of contested occupation in p...

Within the current demographic and political context, it is likely there will be increasing reliance on informal caregivers in the provision of care to older adults in Western nations. This critical interpretive synthesis explored how informal caregiving has been conceptualized and researched in the occupation-based literature. Five occupation-focu...

Research aimed at identifying and evaluating approaches to homelessness has predominately focused on strategies for supporting tenancy sustainment. Fewer studies focus on strategies for enabling thriving following homelessness, and the perspectives of service providers and organisational leaders (SPOL) on this topic are rare. We conducted this stud...

Purpose: To support primary care physicians (PCPs) and their patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA), we created a series of evidence-based whiteboard educational videos for patients with knee OA. In a previous study we piloted these videos with patients to understand their acceptability and impact. The purpose of this study was to explore PCPs' pe...

Background: As stroke can result in functional impairments that impact driving ability, many jurisdictions mandate a 30-day period of driving restriction post-stroke. However, between 26% and 38% of clients drive against medical advice during this period. Purpose: Informed by critical reflexivity of the literature and the first author's practice, t...

With an aging population, have federal and provincial governments acknowledged the diversity of the policy needs of older adults? This contribution analyzes administrative and policy documents across ministries to study the frequency and the depth of engagement involving older adults with a disability, older immigrants, and those living in poverty....

Background: Naturally occurring retirement communities (NORCs), unplanned communities with a high proportion of older adult residents, offer a model to support older adults to age well in place. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive description of the methods used to identify and engage NORCs appropriate for the development of suppor...

Despite a recognition of religion as a resource for coping in later life, few studies have examined how religion is summoned to cope with the stressors of late-life immigration. Drawing upon data generated in a phenomenological study of the aging-out-place experience, this article presents a hermeneutic analysis of textual extracts addressing 10 Sr...

Purpose: Studying humor in the rehabilitation professions is important given its positive effects on health and well-being. We conducted a scoping review to understand how the use of humor has been explored in the existing literature in four rehabilitation professions. The rehabilitation professions included audiology, speech-language pathology, p...

Background: As social and health inequalities deepen around the world, scholarship in occupational therapy and occupational science has increasingly emphasised the role of occupation as a powerful tool in transformative processes. Objective: To explore how opportunities for everyday doing together may contribute to processes of social transforma...

BACKGROUND The majority of older adults want to age in place, in their homes and communities. However, this can be challenging for many, frequently due to a lack of supports that allow for aging-in-place. Naturally occurring retirement community supportive services programs (NORC-SSPs) offer one approach to help older adults age in place. While qua...

Background Most older adults want to age in place, in their homes and communities. However, this can be challenging for many, frequently owing to lack of supports that allow for aging in place. Naturally occurring retirement community supportive services programs (NORC-SSPs) offer an approach to help older adults age in place. Although qualitative...

Age-related vision loss (ARVL) has been shown to interfere with older adults’ occupational engagement. The primary purpose was to examine the role social networks play in facilitating/constraining engagement in desired occupations for older adults with ARVL. This study adopted a constructivist narrative methodology. Five older adults, ≥ 60 years of...

The subjectivity of qualitative researchers can be a contribution to qualitative research which at the same time requires commitment to on-going critical reflexivity regarding one’s positionality. More specifically, we address how to navigate the possibility that researcher subjectivity can culminate in role-confusion when the researcher is highly...

Occupation-based scholars are striving to mobilize socially responsive scholarship to address occupational injustices from local to global scales. Moving forward involves expanding beyond Western, Anglophonic, female, able-bodied, adult perspectives on occupation, with critically informed participatory methodologies providing one key means to incor...

Immigrating and aging in a foreign environment, or aging out-of-place, is part of the late-life experience for a growing number of older adults. Examining how everyday occupations are part of late-life immigrants’ relationships to multiple places, cultures, and identities can expand upon scholarship addressing immigration in occupational science. T...

Engaging in human occupation is complex, often involving commonplace practices that cannot be readily articulated. Accordingly, a growing number of occupational science and occupational therapy scholars have called for expanded qualitative methodologies and methods to support enhanced understandings of occupation in context. In this paper we respon...

Aims Many older adults with Parkinson’s disease experience challenges negotiating identity, often with negative implications for wellbeing. This study explores how older adults with Parkinson’s disease negotiate identity post-diagnosis, specifically addressing how they recount their management of identity and its impact on their occupational engage...

Low vision assistive devices are often positioned as enabling continued social participation and engagement by older adults in everyday activities; however, previous research suggests that the use of such technologies is restricted by various environmental factors. With little attention previously paid to the discursive environment, this critical d...

As occupation-focused discussions and applications of critical theoretical perspectives increase, attention must also be paid to how different spaces of knowledge dissemination, exchange, and production support critically informed learning and knowing about occupation. This paper presents the reflections of a group of international scholars and lec...

While unhoused, persons who have experienced homelessness are frequently consumed with securing the necessary conditions to meet their basic needs including finding a place to stay for the night, finding food, and keeping safe. It is frequently assumed that when individuals secure a tenancy following homelessness, that their life naturally improves...

There have been marked policy shifts within many nations towards ‘extended work lives’, with such shifts often underpinned by an assumption that individual aging citizens can make the responsible choice to prolong work and thereby avoid dependency on the state. However, possibilities for extended work lives are inequitably distributed, and older wo...

Background Given the sociopolitical roots of widening occupational, social, and health inequities, it is imperative that occupational therapy move forward in mobilizing occupation for social transformation. Purpose Three key aims are addressed: articulating the imperative to mobilize occupation for social transformation; highlighting the political...

European civic integration programmes claim to provide newcomers with necessary tools for successful participation. Simultaneously, these programmes have been criticised for being restrictive, market-driven and for working towards an implicit goal of limiting migration. Authors have questioned how these programmes discursively construct an offensiv...

This paper contributes to diversifying and situating understandings of occupational injustices through presenting findings from the knowledge generation phase of a participatory action research (PAR) project that utilized participatory filmmaking with children with disabilities in rural South India as co-researchers. Centering on situations of occu...

Purpose To optimize non-operative management and decision making surrounding TKR we created educational whiteboard videos for patients with knee OA. The purpose of this study was to pilot our educational videos with end-users (patients) to determine patients’ experiences and perspectives regarding the content and clarity of videos and to better und...

This paper aims to contribute to more comprehensive understandings of occupation by: 1) conceptualizing gendered occupation as a theoretical tool to aid scholars in unpacking the gendered and politicized nature of occupation, and 2) sharing findings from the first author’s critical decolonizing ethnographic dissertation research in Tanzania to illu...

In response to calls for challenging coloniality and imperialism within occupational science, this paper outlines central tenets of decolonial theory and decolonizing methodological approaches to illustrate their relevance to transformative occupation-based research. Through describing the first-author’s dissertation work enacted in Tanzania, we il...

The 2008 recession had long-lasting economic effects that made everyday experiences of precarity more prevalent in many countries. Within a broader neoliberal context, however, the prevalence of precarity and its social production tends to be obscured, leading to a need for actions aimed at enhancing social awareness and informing social change. In...

Background and objectives: With the global population aging, there is demand for older adults to age in place, that is, to live and age well in their home and community with some level of independence. Community-based housing models exist and may support this process. This scoping review aimed to describe and synthesize the ways in which community...

Inquiries that rely on temporal framings to demarcate long-term unemployment risk generating partial understandings and grounding unrealistic policy solutions. In contrast, this four-phase two-context study aimed to generate complex understandings of post-recession long-term unemployment in North America. Grounded in a critical occupational perspec...

Purpose Assistive technologies and digitalization of services are promoted through health policy as key means to manage community care obligations efficiently, and to enable older community care recipients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia (D) to remain at home for longer. The overall aim of this paper is to explore how community he...

A community-based participatory research design informed the development and conduct of a needs assessment with street-level sex workers within a mid-sized city in Ontario, Canada. The research question was: What would help street-level sex workers to live with enhanced safety and dignity within their community? Twenty-four women who accessed a pee...

Background As front-line service providers who often work in systems regulated by governmental bodies, occupational therapists can be conceptualized as “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980/2010) who effect and are affected by policy. Purpose Drawing on understandings from a study of long-term unemployment, this article proposes that occupation...

Research with older adults aging with vision loss has typically been informed by a biomedical theoretical framework. With a growing focus, however, on critical disability perspectives, which locates disability within the environment, new methods of data collection, such as participant observation, are needed. This article, which reports on the find...

Children with disabilities often experience exclusion within their communities, and this exclusion can extend into research processes. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, however, emphasizes that children of all abilities need to be involved as decision makers in matters affecting them. This article provides an in-depth descri...

Statement of context: Despite recognition of the potential of occupation for enacting social transformation, occupational therapy continues to struggle in developing and enacting practice approaches that address sociopolitical barriers to people’s right to engage in occupations. Critical reflection on practice: Ways of thinking and writing about pr...

Background and objectives: Given population aging, the meaningful involvement of older adults in influencing policy and programs through participatory action research (PAR) is increasingly vital. PAR holds promise for equitable participation, co-learning, community mobilization, and personal and social transformation, however, little scholarly att...

Purpose: There is a pressing need to develop strategies to keep older adults safe, active and engaged in the community. The Oasis Seniors Supportive Living program is an innovative seniors-driven model of aging in place (AIP) that has been running successfully for 10 years in an apartment building in Kingston Ontario. This model integrates health a...

There are a growing number of older adults with age-related vision loss (ARVL) for whom technology holds promise in supporting their engagement in daily activities. Despite the growing presence of technologies intended to support older adults with ARVL, there remains high rates of abandonment. This phenomenon of technology abandonment may be partly...

Introduction: Implementation of the Canadian Stroke Best Practice Recommendations has improved inpatient rehabilitation. As attention is turned to the design and allocation of rehabilitation after hospitalization, examination of their implications for post-discharge rehabilitation could help optimize service planning Methods: Critical discourse ana...

Purpose/Rationale: With an aging population, there is a pressing need to develop strategies to help older adults stay safe, active and engaged in their communities, and live where they choose. The Oasis Senior Supporting Living program is a model of active aging-in-place created by seniors to respond to the needs of residents of a specific apartme...

Initiating Participatory Action Research with Older Adults: Lessons Learned through Reflexivity—ERRATUM - Carri Hand, Debbie Laliberte Rudman, Colleen McGrath, Catherine Donnelly, Michele Sands

RÉSUMÉ La recherche-action participative (RAP) apporte une perspective intéressante pour la recherche abordant l’exclusion et l’inclusion sociale des personnes âgées. Les exemples et réflexions sur la RAP impliquant des personnes âgées sont rares, en particulier à l’étape de l’initiation de la recherche, lorsque l’action participative cyclique est...

Introduction and objectives: Participation in meaningful activities has psychological, physical, social and cognitive benefits for older adults living in continuing care homes. The subjective experiences of the process of participation for cognitively competent older adults living in a continuing care home and how personal and environmental feature...

Background. Globally, occupational therapists are taking up the transformative potential of occupation to mobilize the profession’s commitment to social change. Purpose. This study examined ideal constructions of occupation-based social transformative practices and challenges that may arise when enacting these practices. Method. Five participants w...

This article provides a reflection on the 2017 Occupational Science Europe conference through a critical occupational science lens. I first provide a synopsis of lines of arguments forwarded in a keynote talk I delivered at this conference, titled ‘Embracing a critical turn in occupational science: Contributions and future possibilities’. I then dr...

Within research addressing issues of social justice, there is a growing uptake of participatory action research (PAR) approaches that are ideally committed to equitable participation of community members in all phases of the research process in order to collaboratively enact social transformation. However, the utilization of such approaches has not...

Occupational therapy is underpinned by the premise that engagement in occupation is fundamental to health and well-being. Through occupations, people are able to orchestrate their lives in ways that enable them not only to survive, but also to experience human flourishing. Through occupation, people can develop and maintain their families, neighbou...

Background: Advances in surgical techniques combined with multimodal analgesia and early rehabilitation have potentiated early mobilization in patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty (THA). Given an increasing push from patients to accelerate recovery and health care budgetary limitations, there has been growing interest in the implementation o...

Within research on ageing in neighbourhoods, older adults are often positioned as impacted by neighbourhood features; their impact on neighbourhoods is less often considered. Drawing on a study exploring how person and place transact to shape older adults’ social connectedness, inclusion and engagement in neighbourhoods, this paper explores how old...

This paper addresses the need for methodological expansions that enable critical examination of the situated nature of occupation and enact transformative research agendas. Participatory digital methodologies offer a potential way forward given their critical underpinnings and have been proposed as particularly appropriate to facilitate engagement...

This paper responds to the call for occupational scientists to advance understandings of occupation beyond a Western paradigm by considering the implications of drawing upon Africana womanism as a theoretical underpinning to explore gendered occupation. The uptake of Africana Womanist theory can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions tacitly embed...

Occupational science has made tremendous strides in establishing a theoretical and empirical knowledge base grounded in the study of occupation. Yet given its origins in occupational therapy, a health profession aimed at enhancing health and well-being through engagement in meaningful and purposeful occupation, there has been sustained focus on the...

Occupational science has made tremendous strides in establishing a theoretical and empirical knowledge base grounded in the study of occupation. Yet given its origins in occupational therapy, a health profession aimed at enhancing health and well-being through engagement in meaningful and purposeful occupation, there has been sustained focus on the...

Complex social issues, sometimes referred to as ‘wicked problems’, influence the conditions of everyday life and the occupations these conditions afford, which are key determinants of health and well-being. Education is an important arena through which social transformation of oppressive conditions can be promoted and enacted. At the same time, int...

Positive ageing discourses have proliferated in Western nations, forming key aspects of structured mandates for how to think about, and act towards, ageing bodies. As interpretive resources, positive ageing discourses shape how adults growing older think about themselves, their bodies and the bodies of others in relation to the process of ageing an...

Background: Calls for embracing the potential and responsibility of occupational therapy to address socio-political conditions that perpetuate occupational injustices have materialized in the literature. However, to reach beyond traditional frameworks informing practices, this social agenda requires the incorporation of diverse epistemological and...

Background: Calls for embracing the potential and responsibility of occupational therapy to address socio-political conditions that perpetuate occupational injustices have materialized in the literature. However, to reach beyond traditional frameworks informing practices, this social agenda requires the incorporation of diverse epistemological and...

Occupational therapy and science are facing calls for social transformation based on the growing awareness and concern with widening occupational inequities and growing occupational injustices apparent at local and global scales. This paper addresses the potential for occupational therapy and science to form productive, critically-informed alliance...

Although high school graduation is important for living conditions and health throughout life, many students do not complete. In Norway’s northern most county, Finnmark, up to 45% of students do not complete high school. Contrary to prior research that has primarily focused on causes for dropout, this study’s aim was to deepen understanding of fact...