Occupational Therapy Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2021
Journal
South African Journal of Occupational Therapy
Volume
3
Issue
51
First Page
22
Last Page
31
URL with Digital Object Identifier
http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2310-3833/2021/vol51n4a4
Abstract
Occupation-based scholars are striving to mobilize socially responsive scholarship to address occupational injustices from local to global scales. Moving forward involves expanding beyond Western, Anglophonic, female, able-bodied, adult perspectives on occupation, with critically informed participatory methodologies providing one key means to incorporate diverse perspectives on occupation and occupational justice. Drawing upon a participatory action research project with children with disabilities from rural South India, this paper puts forward an understanding of participatory action research as an occupational process (i.e., embodying a variety of occupations) and an occupation-based process (i.e., informed by an occupational lens). We forefront how ‘occupation’ was centered and mobilized within the process of this participatory action research. In addition, drawing on select study findings, we illustrate and discuss how participatory action research provided a forum to partner with the child co-researchers and collaboratively identify and critically analyse occupational injustices. Through this illustration and discussion of participatory action research as an occupation-based process and occupational process, we demonstrate its potential to be used to enact contextually responsive scholarship and praxis.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Citation of this paper:
Benjamin-Thomas, T., Laliberte Rudman, D., & Thomas, D. (2021) Enacting contextually responsive scholarship: Centering occupation in participatory action research with children in India. South African Journal of Occupational Therapy, 51(3), 22-31.
