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Introduction: Although the social service is the historical action field of the occupational therapist in Brazil, only in 2011, the profession was recognized as one of the qualified professional categories to act in reference teams and/or social services management of the Brazilian Public Social Service System – SUAS. Thus, it is relevant to identify and understand the characteristics of such insertion, in the context of the action of such professionals in social policies. Objective: To describe and characterize the insertion of the occupational therapist in the SUAS, from 2011 to 2016, based on official data. Method: It is a descriptive study performed from secondary data obtained by the SUAS Census. The data were extracted selecting the category of occupational therapists and the respective variables available in the survey. We used a descriptive analysis by simple frequency. Results: In 2016, there were 1.323 occupational therapists officially registered working in the different services provided by the SUAS. From 2011 to 2016, homogeneous characteristics were identified as predominant in the professionals regarding the region of higher prevalence (Southeast), workload (20-30 hours/week), gender (female), and function (member of the technical team). However, there is a variation in the employment type among the different social service units (from civil servants to employees from the private sector). Conclusion: An increase in occupational therapists working in social service was verified, and the organization is required from the profession to meet such demand. It is very important to demonstrate the technical-professional capacity in these spaces, as well as to include an appropriate academic education to perform in this context.

This work presents, as an experience report, the proposal which has been presented since 2015 as teaching, research and extension activity in social occupational therapy for undergraduate and graduate students from the Federal University of São Carlos – Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar). Starting from the proposal of working with poor young people from the urban area of São Carlos city, connected to the METUIA Program, which performs an extension program in such region since 2005, we weekly performed Workshops, Dynamics and Projects with the purpose of promoting spaces for interaction and socialization in a public square. The work methodologically used analyses from the participant objectivation at the workshops process, recorded through the production of academic papers and field journals, along with interviews made with participants. The results have shown the use of public spaces as a strategical possibility for the territorial and community work with the youth. The conclusion is that the squares can be a place for living and one of the elements on the constitution of social support networks for the young people from that neighborhood.

The population that finds on the streets an alternative for their own survival and for sorting out their identities, is marked by a number of disruptions and violation of rights, resulting in vulnerability processes and social disaffiliation, given the current socioeconomic conditions and the neoliberal rationality. There is a need of innovative work that can add different sectors and knowledge, which defend the strengthening of a support network and services that aims the enfranchisement of the individuals, promote social participation and respect their diversity. Therefore, it is reported the experience of an extension project that promoted creative strategies to operate with the homeless from an arts and culture perspective. In order to do so, the weekly activities workshops promoted experimentations for the participants, aiming to express their potentialities, from the themes and requests relevant to the group, producing art, dynamics, and products that reflected the culture of the streets. Sensitive displacements were produced, noticeable to those involved, making the participants protagonists of their own expressions. The encounters took on creative proportions and composed new experiences of occupational therapeutic formation and practices in the social field. In defense of respect, appreciation of the human dimensions and capacities, especially of the groups in a vulnerable situation, associated with actions that aim to promote and extend their human and social rights.

This essay presents the purpose which took place from 2011 through 2014, by the Professional Trainning of Social Occupational Therapy of the Occupational Therapy Course at Federal University of São Paulo in the city of Santos, SP. Aligned to the National Politics of Social Assistance as well as Social Occupational Therapy practical/theoretical assumptions, was designed territorial actions - individual and collective - to strengthen, to create and to form family and people relational networks, and people from Santos served by a social protection network - basic and/or special of medium and high complexity -, based on the demand presented through a process of creating bonds of trust between occupational therapist and subject/group. In this sense, it is described and reflected on five experiences: the support to the Regional Meetings from a Social Assistance Reference Center (CRAS), the work composition of a CRAS with a Social Service for young people and three individual and territorial support. This experience reveals the challenge of educating the student based on the other one need, as well as based on its territory and intersectoriality as a practice with efficiency.

The “Elaine Viviani” Youth Center is a social institution aimed at young people in the South region of São Carlos (SP). This Center is located in the poorest area of the city where is found a high social vulnerability. This text derives from a piece of research whose general objective was to know and analyze the profile of the public served by the CJ, since its inauguration at the end of 2008, as well as to raise the proposed activities and its institutional dynamics. Initially, the data sought were age, gender, schooling, and neighborhood of origin, followed by participant observation, during the second half of 2012, of the activities, offered to their customers, as well as informal conversations with managers and youths in order to get to know the institutional dynamics. All the information provided was related to the procedures established by its “Pedagogical Politician Project” and the National Youth Policy. It was proved that different ages attend activities in the Institution besides teenagers and young adults. Moreover, girls’ attendance was smaller than boys’ attendance and the majority of users live in the surrounding areas. Among the activities, it was offered mainly technical and professional courses and sports-related activities. It is noted that although the “Pedagogical Politician Project” prioritizes its objective and proposals on young people, the reality observed and the data found pointed out that this population was not, in fact, prioritized.

Academic research in social occupational therapy has presented an interface with the theme of Africa, from a cultural diversity perspective to emphasize the need to include new forms of research. This study proposes a panorama of the academic research in Brazil in the context of occupational therapy in different interfaces: human mobility, human rights, religiosity, children’s cultures, gender, etc. This multiplicity reveals a perspective of appreciation of African themes. In this context, the concept of cultural diversity is presented as a perspective to expand the discussion of new views, decentralization of technical knowledge and new dialogues required for researchers and professionals. It was proposed to think, experience and produce new forms of research, themes and subjects that cover different ways of life, problems and issues that dialogue with the transformations of the contemporary world, which are also implications of social occupational therapy. Moreover, along with the ethnography and its research tools, one can think of multiple, unique and rich ways to do research. These aspects, in the present work, make interconnections with the diverse productions on Africa and occupational therapy, revealing the potentiality of these elements for the profession.

Ethnographic exercises are discussed - as proposed by the Metuia Project/ USP between 2007 and 2013 - as an activity able to enhance the recognition of the compound, plural and sometimes contradictory knowledge, but produced creatively in the intellectual and social do, in the interaction among students, occupational therapists, researchers and homeless people. It starts from the need to develop an understanding of the significant activities of artists working in the public spaces in São Paulo, as it persists as a plurality of meanings that the street acquires amid disputes of interests and cultural tensions, but also interconnections and creativity. The itinerant life and social areas’ characteristics, combined with reflections of urban anthropology and ethnographic research favored the theoretical and practical teaching in dialogic territorial shares of social occupational therapy. This article is the result of reflections built from the research Circuits and religious practices in life trajectories of adult homeless people in city of São Paulo, associated with university extension project linked to Metuia Project/USP, called Point meeting and culture: social networks, culture and social occupational therapy. In conclusion, on the one hand, there is need for renewed reflection about the occupational therapist’s place, considering the asymmetries of the relations in the construction of knowledge. On the other hand, it indicates that the produced activities, necessarily, in dialogical relations, only share meanings when inserted into the experience of the difference in consistent proposals with its own plasticity and in the middle of specific social and cultural contexts.

Introduction: Occupational therapists, throughout the history, faced the need to offer actions pertaining to socio-cultural issues in different populations with whom they interact, being required to develop actions relevant to these contexts. In addition, interventions specifically within the scope of culture have also been understood as the scope of this work. Objective: To report the METUIA experience of the ‘Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo’, illustrating, from the perspective of social occupational therapy, cultural workshops and individual and territorial follow-ups during six months, in the cultural context of a suburb neighborhood in the city of Vitoria, ES, Brazil. Method: The activities collective development aimed at expanding the support of social networks, the empowerment of children and youth participants and the joint construction of processes of autonomy, social participation and life projects to their own cultural identities. Results: The cultural workshops provided the identification of different demands by the children, adolescents and young people, based on the articulation between different views and reflections that were placed in shock through the recognition of alterity between the groups and occupational therapists. Conclusion: It is hoped that the experiments described here can contribute to the consolidation of occupational therapists actions in culture, bringing elements that can promote reflections for a field that still needs to be systematized as a producer of professional practice and research, especially in the social area.

This article aims to discuss the need to revise education and professional action, in the context of social occupational therapy, facing the growing phenomenon of international migration, especially in the current construction of the municipal policy for immigrant populations in São Paulo, SP. The discussion is methodologically structured into three complementary lines of analysis results from documentary research accompanied by field study, visits, participations in meetings, inter-institutional forums, public hearings, thematic debates, in addition to literature review. In the first analysis axis, we discuss the current legislation in Brazil, the construction of migration policy at the municipal level and civil society articulations about human mobility, understood as a fundamental right. In the second, we discuss people care services, families and groups in migratory situation in São Paulo, SP. Finally, on the third axis, we discuss the cultural developments in social occupational therapy for professional action and training in the field of human mobility. As a result it was observed that the current panorama poses new professional challenges, forcing the occupational therapist to review its technical-political position face to the new realities of the contemporary world.

This study aimed to understand, considering the experience of four young people who called themselves “transvestites” at some point during the research, residing in São Carlos (SP), the main techniques and strategies used by them for the manipulation of their own characteristics regarding their body, subjectivity and identity, in order to participate in certain spaces of sociability. Their aspirations and ethnographic contributions remain as clearly important methods to provide the demand for answers to questions of this research. This paper considers the multiplicity of ways to construct signs of what is considered feminine in bodies assigned as male. We discuss the strategies used by young transvestites to participate in different contexts such as family, school and prostitution. And in this context of these stories of protections and exposures these different realities are configured as an important issue for occupational therapy, specifically for social occupational therapy. These young transvestites, at different levels of awareness, identify the areas in which they can move more freely and the spaces where they should be more cautious, shaping your body, and subjective identity characteristics. Be accepted in different areas reverberates not “just” the inclusion or participation restriction and exercise of rights and citizenship itself, but especially reverberates in their own subjectivities therefore explain possibilities and impossibilities of “coming and going” in private or public spaces and especially the possibility to exist in these places.

Introduction: The number of studies involving children and their lifestyle is increasing, although still insufficient. Childhood specialists seek to understand a child’s lifestyle through the daily life and specific contexts of cultures to which they belong, seeking the non-universalization of childhood as a normative. African children, in turn, are set forth as “out of place”, for not following the standards and norms of European and North American children. In order to contribute to changing this paradigm, this article aims to discuss the child in a community located on the outskirts of a city of Mozambique, southern Africa. Objectives: To describe and discuss children’s socialization relationships and dynamics. Method: ethnography lasting five months in the city of Matola, Mozambique; A narrative discussion and analysis will be presented in this article. Discussion: Mozambican children have tasks and responsibilities guided by the social division of labor. Among its activities, whether domestic, communitarian or educational, there is time to play. The fun and laughter permeate the imagination and children’s worlds, producing ways of being, living and acting in the world that they share and belong. The play appears in this narrative as critical to the development and the construction of knowledge and expertise, along with cultural and social values, in addition to the accountabilities and relationships that children establish between peers and adults. Considerations: deconstruct the ways childhoods are imposed and break its universalization are the challenges encountered.

The present study analyzes of the use of media and interactive resources for the empowerment of individuals in vulnerable situations to expand their possibilities of communication and social participation, starting from the report of the experience of a university extension program, which proposed the development and use of a blog among other media resources, in workshops activities, Dynamics and Projects that integrate an intervention of social occupational therapy with the poor youth. This experience allowed the expansion of the repertoire of activities of the youth, promoting awareness of concepts, techniques and equipment, previously little available, accessible and used. The records of the contents of the blog were done in a participatory manner, generating reflection on roles and identities. Being and doing in virtual space allowed actions and real productions of adolescents and youths to be empowered when “virtualized”, providing a dimension that is not always possible to achieve in the “real” context. The blog posts resulted in a self-valorization of the population, creating places of belonging for particular social subjects, with the right to culture, communication and technology. Consequently, there was the empowerment of subjects, from the increasing social participation and achievement of the new media, which expanded their sociocultural boundaries. Moreover, it offered an expansion of the scope of resources for action on social occupational therapy, opening spaces, real and virtual, for collective experiences, for sociability and the understanding and transformation of meanings about life and about the reality in which we live.

The METUIA team from the Occupational Therapy Department of the Federal University of Sao Carlos – UFSCar has been elaborating procedures and resources, which have produced contributions to the action of occupational therapy based on a local and communal dimension, aiming at a locally rooted technical contribution and directed to face the challenges of the social field. The territory notion adopted presupposes historical, economic, social and cultural dimensions that contextualize a given geographical area where the therapeutic and occupational action is developed. We have been dealing with questions related to the poor urban youth and working in the production of social technologies (understood as products, techniques or replicable methodologies developed in interaction with the community, and that represent alternatives for social transformation), which have been able to foster new possibilities of action, integrating and articulating actions of macro and micro social scope. This article presents discussions on Workshops of Dynamics, Activities and Projects; Individual and Territorial Follow-up; Articulation of Resources in the Social Field; and Dynamization of the Social Care Network. We support a continuous and critical reflection on the labor process, assuming the technical, ethical and political dimensions that comprise the professional qualification of occupational therapists. We also advocate that the practical and conceptual existence of these technologies promotes actions associated with the social question of the lives of these young individuals, seeking the expansion of equality, recognition of differences, and their space in the public sphere, so that more participation can be produced with more freedom, autonomy and solidarity.

This paper addresses the education of young Muslims in Burkina Faso through relevant literature analysis and the authors’ observations, highlighting the pathways of study in Arabic-speaking countries and the social dynamics around them. The central theme is associated with the more general debate about education and diversity, because it discusses, on the one hand, the educational hegemony of secular orientation carried out in French adopted by part of the society and made official by the nation-state; on the other hand, it stresses the movement of another part of society that continues to enroll their children in Muslim schools where teaching is conducted in Arabic or bilingual (French and Arabic). The study describes the sociopolitical contexts that constitute the institutions of Islamic education, emphasizing the importance of Franco-Arabic schools and new Muslim private universities from the non-public higher education network. Following this discussion, there is a debate about the contribution of these young graduated men and women (inside and outside the country) to hold and maintain the educational system. This paper also highlights the political action of these groups that claims for citizenship through religious practices. We conclude by stressing the existence of the fundamental contribution of Islam, which remains a powerful space for the construction of social and interpersonal meanings even in post-colonial dynamics. This is the scenario in which the reconstruction of networks may be converted into an overall challenge for social occupational therapy to mediate conflicts emerging from the confrontation of values and social practices.

The word youth encompasses numerous concepts, definitions and indefinitions that raise the debate about the concept itself and, especially, the subjects included in this category. When the issue of drug use is included in the discussion of youth, particularly focusing on poor youths, the field for stigmatizations, ambiguities, misunderstandings and simplifications is widened, prejudicially associating drugs and poverty, without searching for an appropriate understanding of the subjects that are part of this situation. Data from two academic masters’ researches are herein presented, affiliated theoretically and methodologically to Social Occupational Therapy and supported by the contributions of ethnography and thnomethodology. Both researches were carried out with poor youths who live in a medium-sized city in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil; they aimed at a greater approximation and apprehension of the universe of those youths and the relationships established with and through drugs in their daily lives. The data showed that the inclusion of drugs in their lives occurs differently from that assumed by common sense, that is, it appears only as one of many factors of vulnerability that they are exposed in a context of social inequality. Thus, in order to propose professional actions in occupational therapy that are actually effective in facing drug issues, poor youth, and their interrelationships, we consider that is necessary to approximate and understand the universe of youths from their perspectives. It is always necessary to consider the faces and interfaces of these themes in a society ruled by socioeconomic inequality.

In the scenario of the Brazilian social reality urban centers are characterized by high socioeconomic inequality, this fact makes social/health professionals of many areas, including occupational therapists, take part in social vulnerability contexts. Thus, the objective of this study was to approach and identify interventions in social occupational therapy and primary health care in order to verify the proximities and distinctions between the actions, when performed in social vulnerability contexts. This research was carried out in São Carlos, state of São Paulo, based on semi-structured interviews with all occupational therapists working in the selected areas: six therapists working in the social field and five from the primary health care area. We have also observed in situ the activities of occupational therapists in the social and primary health care areas. Based on the observation of the occupational therapists’ practices and on the thematic analysis of their speech, we found a significant difference between the objectives and resources used, even when performed in the same territory of social vulnerability. It was possible to conclude that there are clear specificities in each field, and that it is necessary to identify the differences and objectives of each intervention. The understanding of the practices performed allows us to approach the identity of the professionals and their major viable contributions to different sectors.