Enacting Contextually Responsive Scholarship: Centring Occupation in Participatory Action Research with Children in India

Abstract

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. Keywords: occupation-based participatory action research, occupational justice, occupation-based transformation, participatory filmmaking