Imagining occupation through embodiment and emplacement

This paper is adapted from the Wilma West Lecture at the 2025 Occupational Science Symposium hosted by the University of Southern California’s Chan Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy. The paper invites readers to imagine occupation using the concepts of embodiment and emplacement to challenge traditional representational theories of cognition that separate mind, body, and environment. It draws from critical, transactional, and phenomenological perspectives supported by research with immigrants and adults with serious mental illness to establish sensory health as foundational to perception and occupation. Sensory habits, sensory anchors, pre-reflective perception, aesthetics, and intentional arcs are introduced to describe how meaningful occupations in particular sociocultural and historical environments become a part of a person and their subsequent occupations. These complex ideas are illustrated through research participant quotes as well as the author’s personal occupations of guitar playing and cooking. The paper introduces the Sensory Health: A Relational and Emplaced (SHARE) framework to emphasize the lived sensory experience as selective, relational, embodied, political, polysensorial, aesthetic, and habitual. Implications for occupational science and occupational therapy are discussed.