Dr. Staffan Josephsson - 2020
He completed his PhD in 1994 at Karolinska Institutet, writing his thesis on everyday activities as meeting places for people with dementia. As a part of his PhD studies, he spent time at the University of Illinois at Chicago studying narrative, family interventions and conceptual foundations with Cheryl Mattingly, Mary Lawlor and the late Gary Kielhofner. His work there was influenced by a shared interest in the philosophy of Paul Ricouer, who was known for combining phenomenology and hermeneutics to explain how everyday human activity shapes understanding through narrative.Professor Josephsson began his teaching and research at Karolinska Institute in 1998 and he was promoted to full professor in 2011. In 2010 he affiliated with Sør-Trøndelag University College and later the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in Trondheim, Norway. At NTNU, he has collaborated with Professor Sissel Alsaker to develop a “narrative-in-action” approach to explore how everyday activities help people make sense of the world by integrating interpretating and communicating individual, social, structural, ideological and existential material.Dr. Josephsson’s work has also been influenced by his connections with occupational scientists in Chile and Japan, as well as in his personal life, where his community interactions as a storyteller and his involvement in the local art community continuously inform his perspectives. |
Staffan Josephsson is Professor and a Research Director in the Division of Occupational Therapy, Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. He earned his degree in occupational therapy at Stockholm College of Health Sciences in 1985. Between 1985 and 1989 he worked as an occupational therapist in geriatric care, in addition to studying pedagogics and theatre studies at Stockholm University.