Experiences of epistemic racism among occupational therapists
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Objective Epistemic racism establishes the knowledges and ways of knowing of a dominant group as legitimate, invalidating those of groups marked by racialization. Professions are demarcated by their knowledge claims, making epistemic racism a powerful mechanism of exclusion within professions. This paper examines experiences of epistemic racism in occupational therapy across Canada. Method Using a critical interpretive qualitative approach, ten therapists from racialized groups were interviewed (in-person or telephone), with transcripts coded and analyzed iteratively. Results Participants routinely experienced epistemic ‘mis/fit’ with the profession, rarely seeing themselves reflected in the profession’s knowledge base, leadership, values or assumptions. Racialized therapists were routinely denied expertise and authority, by students, clients and colleagues. They walked a tightrope between professional assimilation and marginalization. Conclusion The presence of racialized therapists is insufficient, when their authority is consistently delegitimized and they are required to assimilate. Leadership roles for racialized therapists must be accompanied with epistemological multiplicity, destroying the domination of whiteness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".