This blog post has been sitting in my drafts folder for some time now, since ‘decolonisation’ became a “new” buzzword for the occupational therapy profession via The 2018 WFOT (World Federation of Occupational Therapy) Congress in Africa which catapulted the concept into the spotlight, causing murmurs of controversy in the international occupational therapy community. The long delay from idea to…
Category: Social Justice Commentary
Privilege is not a Bad Word and “Checking Your Privilege” is not a Bad Thing
I’ve encountered a fair number of people who get incredibly defensive when the word “privileged” is used to describe them. I think a lot of it boils down to misunderstanding of the word, or perhaps they lack awareness of how they are situated in the world relative to everybody else around them. I have also encountered people who perceive the term…
Underemployment among B40 graduates in Malaysia
Underemployment among Malaysian graduates has been an issue for some time now, yet we don’t seem anywhere close to resolving the issue. I used to teach B40 students, some who were ineligible to study in government higher education institutions. I also used to hire staff who are from this population. There are several young people from this population I continue…
B40 afraid of starting businesses? Only want money?
I personally think it is much harder for people from the B40 communities to start businesses due to having less insulation from risk. They would also typically lack the means to acquire the social capital needed to make a business succeed. So when our Entrepreneurship Development Minister made comments about the B40 community as per the headline, I decided to…
Start with Stigma: talking about mental health
Talking about mental health and illness is starting to be a thing in Malaysia, people are becoming better informed and our government is also actively talking about the matter. I *was* of the opinion that the more we talk about these topics the closer we would be to developing some solutions. I was wrong. Recently a friend of mine starting…