Reclaiming the Potential of Transformative Scholarship to Enable Social Justice

Abstract

Scholars within critical qualitative inquiry and health sciences are becoming increasingly interested in transformative scholarship as a means to pursue greater justice in society. However, transformative scholarship has been taken up within frameworks that given a lack of consistent alignment with the critical paradigm seem to fall short in this intention. This article aims to reclaim transformative scholarship as an epistemological and methodological space that transforms and challenges the social order, situating social justice at the forefront of inquiry. The article begins by addressing the call for work toward social justice within critical qualitative inquiry. Subsequently, Creswell and Mertens’ frameworks are analyzed as examples of transformative scholarship that has distanced itself from its critical roots. Based on this analysis, we raise three problematics to illustrate the dangers of this distancing. We conclude by proposing to reframe transformative scholarship within the critical paradigm to (re)connect it to political stances and values.