Re-imagining and transforming therapeutic recreation: reaching into Foucault’s toolbox

Abstract

ABSTRACTAs an introduction to this special issue of Leisure/Loisir on re-imagining and transforming therapeutic recreation, I reach into philosopher and historian Michel Foucault’s “toolbox” to discuss a critical theory and practice of therapeutic recreation. The true identity of therapeutic recreation can never be settled once and for all, because therapeutic recreation is a social construction, not an objective necessity, leaving it open to being something different than it presently is. Because there are different ways of telling the truth about therapeutic recreation, knowledge is not an inevitably enlightened path, but rather a creative and controlling power that can produce positive and negative effects in the lives of people. Disciplines like therapeutic recreation attempt to control practices and practitioners through the production of knowledge (discourses), which can constrain other perspectives on truth and ways of living. Dominant discourses of therapeutic recreation can be understood, challenged, re-imagined, and changed through historical understanding, critical reflection, ethical self-formation, and action. The papers that follow not only use some of Foucault’s tools to re-imagine and recreate therapeutic recreation, but demonstrate how critical theory may be just the medicine the field needs for the sake of freedom and justice.