About Michael

Dr Michael Iwama

Professor & Chief Program Strategist

Occupational Therapy Doctorate Division, School of Medicine

Duke University 

I am a Canadian Occupational Therapist, born and raised in Japan. My practice specialty was in ‘return to work/vocational occupational therapy’. I returned to Japan to teach OT in 1995, and
discovered the cross-cultural challenges of OT theory and practice. My work as a teacher and academician has taken me to professorial appointments in 7 universities in 4 countries. I am
passionate about DEI and interested in the nexus between culture and theory construction.

Session Title

Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion; the impetus for the creation of the Kawa Model

Session Details

The Magnificent Promise of Occupational Therapy is – to enable people from all walks of life to
engage and participate in activities and processes of daily living that matter. Occupation -as the culture of contemporary (Western) occupational therapy has constructed it, and the conceptual models that support and explain it are cultural artefacts; they mirror the worldviews and shared experiences of the people that created them. How universal and inclusive is our idea of occupation? What happens when our core concepts and models cross cultural boundaries of meaning? T his is not simply an international concern, as these same patterns of oppression can be seen in our domestic practices – in our very own communities. Occupational therapy continues to advance and evolve worldwide. New conceptual models and frameworks like the Kawa Model are needed to progress OT from the Modern era to the Postmodern condition.

About John

John Knight

Doctoral Candidate – Service Design Practice

Department of Design, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, FINLAND

I studied at Newport College of Art in the early 1980s under Roy Ascott – who is a pioneering artist using networked technology. Then I worked in the creative industries for fourteen years before taking a year out to study Human-computer interaction. For the last twenty years I’ve split my focus between working as a practitioner and an academic in design. My academic work has culminated in doctoral studies at Aalto University in Helsinki.

Session Title

Digitally Occupied: Alienation, Autonomy and Resilience

Session Details

This session will cover the learnings from a number of years research into digital workers’ occupational experience. Findings from a four-week diary study, using online data collection and a variety of elicitation methods will be presented in detail. The data points to a need to extend Wilcock’s framework in order to account for the knowledge component, implicit to this type of work. Lastly, a number of tools and frameworks developed in the course of the overall research project to help build autonomy and resilience are presented. These tools were developed with the research cohort over a number of collaborative workshops but have never been presented or published so far.