Occupational Therapy Commons^™

Enacting Contextually Responsive Scholarship: Centring Occupation In Participatory Action Research With Children In India, Tanya Elizabeth Benjamin-Thomas, Debbie Laliberte Rudman, David Mark Thomas

Occupational Therapy Publications

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 …