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Objectives and Significance: Inclusive schools teach children skills to engage with each other and do things together in classrooms, playgrounds, and other places, disregarding differences in abilities, gender, race, class, and language. Inclusive education is contextualised within local systems, varying across socio-historical and cultural settings. Efforts to promote inclusive education increasingly focus on children in their social context at school, with growing awareness that inclusive education needs to be human rights-based. However, research to date has predominantly canvassed teachers’ perspectives and focused on academic outcomes, excluding broader concerns of doings together, experiencing participation and subsequently, social inclusion. The guiding research question was: From an occupational perspective, how is inclusive education facilitated in mainstream schools? Method: Following a scoping review of international research findings encompassing social, health and educational standpoints on inclusive education, case study research was conducted at two Swiss primary schools. Both methods explored the experiences, views, and interactions of children, teachers, other staff, and parents in a specific context shaped by the school environment, culture, politics and attitudes. The cases were analysed individually and comparatively using an interpretive approach. Impact / Results: Attending to all voices revealed a more holistic understanding of social interaction, inclusion and doing things together at school. Preliminary results suggest how children’s and adults’ views on inclusive education can be respected and actioned in practice, policy and society. Conclusion / Outcomes: Bringing an occupational perspective, underpinned by human rights, to inclusive education can contribute to educating for diversity, building inclusive societies for the future.

As a human science that is also part of administering and supporting bureaucracy, occupational therapy functions in multi-layered networks of power that support many different social structures. Occupational therapists’ work often involves operationalising health, education and social services at the street-level, positioning them between the aspirations of both policy and social activism and material life outcomes. Through a genealogical critique, this thesis problematises the practice of occupational therapy through a Foucauldian lens that views everything as dangerous. By viewing occupational therapy practice as dangerous, the power relations at the street-level of the mundane and taken-for-granted have been problematised as part of much larger social structures of power and discourse. Several Foucauldian tools were deployed in order to ensure that a focus on occupational therapy practices was maintained; three distinct research methods were utilised to access a range of heterogeneous genealogical information. Firstly, an historical archival analysis of the four iterations of the Competencies for Registration for occupational therapists document (1990 to the current day) produced by the regulatory authority, the Occupational Therapy Board of New Zealand, was carried out. Secondly, practice observations of occupational therapists working in different practice settings were analysed as three individual case studies. Concurrently with these two methods, a critical action method using a research blog was developed to create a medium for public discussion of practice through an open engagement with the profession. The combination of these three methods enabled access to a range of elements for analysis. Many of these elements inter-linked, overlapped and connected to historically contingent networks of dominant power that have formed through the processes of colonisation, the establishment of the health system and normalised medical practices, and economic forms of go