Teaching Occupational Therapy Ethics Through Speculative Fiction

Like many others navigating the skies this week, I ran headlong into the perfect storm of weather delays, FAA flow restrictions, and cascading cancellations. By Wednesday it became clear I wasn’t getting to the AOTA Education Summit - at least not physically. I made the error of having too short a window for connecting flights...

Rather than let the workshop vanish into the ether, I decided to take a different path and record the full presentation from home. In some ways this feels appropriate, because the talk itself is all about imagination, accessibility, and democratizing ethical inquiry. If people couldn’t gather in one room, then why not open the room to everyone?

The presentation - “Teaching Occupational Therapy Ethics Through Speculative Fiction” - explores how narrative forms can help students engage with complex moral problems in ways that feel emotionally safe and intellectually honest. Ethics education today often unfolds in a climate where students worry more about saying the wrong thing than about thinking deeply. Speculative fiction offers a way out of that trap by giving us a heterodox, imaginative rehearsal space for ethical reasoning.

The talk also draws on my contribution to Occupational Punk Vol. 3, part of the international HealthPunk project, where my short story The SoulCraft Rebellion was published earlier this year. I use that story - a future world of “Human Optimization Engineers” aka occupational therapists and one group's resistance - as a launch point for ethical reflection and narrative practice.

If you’re interested in OT education, pedagogy, moral imagination, or just curious how speculative fiction can help us teach professional reasoning, I hope you find something useful here.

Below is the full video recording:



As always, I welcome thoughts, reactions, disagreements, and stories of your own.

The best conversations in OT have always come from people willing to think beyond the edges of the expected.

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