“I’ve Come to This Approach Through a Lot of Learning and Unlearning”: Resocialization as Preparation for Occupational Activism

Abstract

Scholarship on occupational activism suggests that workers can promote social change through the creative or subversive performance of their occupational roles. While scholars have investigated occupational activism in various contexts, less is known about how workers become occupational activists, particularly in cases where their occupational activism contradicts the ideas, attitudes, and praxes they internalize through their professional socialization, thus requiring questioning, rethinking, and perhaps even “unlearning” the basic precepts of their profession. To address this, I analyze 85 in-depth interviews with weight-inclusive healthcare practitioners who subversively decenter weight in their delivery of healthcare to advance health, equity, and social justice. Drawing on social movement micromobilization theories and applying Deterding and Waters's flexible coding approach, I demonstrate that weight-inclusive healthcare practitioners are inspired to engage in occupational activism as a result of resocialization processes that occur largely through interpersonal interaction with weight-inclusive practitioners in their occupational network, independent engagement with weight-inclusive healthcare content, and participation in training programs and workshops designed to educate about weight-inclusivity. This research advances the work and occupations literature by demonstrating how one's enactment of their occupational role can change through resocialization processes that transform their understandings of the basic precepts of their field and facilitate identification with alternative practices. This study represents the largest analysis of weight-inclusive healthcare in the U.S. and holds practical implications for the adoption of weight-inclusive healthcare delivery.