Advocacy or Transformative Action Overview

UBC’s Family Practice Program supports Advocacy or Transformative Action as an important domain of scholarship, given that we define scholarship as an activity with the character, qualities, activity, or attainments of a scholar, and synonymous with learning. According to the author Bilorusky, J. A. (2021). Of the text Principles and Methods of Transformative Action Research: A Half Century of Living and Doing Collaborative Inquiry, transformative action research is about “research,” “inquiry,” and “action”. The intent of transformative action research is to bring about some changes that “matter” and are valuable and useful for an individual, a group, an organization, a community, and/or the larger society. Transformative Action Research requires that a scholar to continually ask questions about what we think “matters” the most—about what’s valuable, and what’s useful or practical, in ways that matter to us. Undertaking Advocacy or Transformative Action scholarship does not absolve you from asking a scholarship question, putting that question in context, explaining how and why you will be undertaking an action, and then summarizing the outcomes of the transformative action. You must do all of this, even if you are organizing a community sit in, a protest march, or an intervention of some kind.