ANNOUNCEMENT:Extended Workshop Registration

    Conference Registration     QI 2008 Final Program Available Now!

The Fourth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI2008)

  Ethics, Evidence and Social Justice

Theme

The Fourth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from May 14-17, 2008. The theme of the Congress, building on previous Congresses, is “Ethics, Evidence and Social Justice.” The Fourth Congress will offer the international community of qualitative research scholars the opportunity to engage in debate on ethical, epistemological, methodological and social justice issues. In these changing times, there are attempts to impose uniform bio-medical ethical standards on qualitative research. There are also increasing efforts to judge qualitative research in terms of experimental, or so-called scientifically based criteria. The politics of evidence and ethics carries important implications for how qualitative research is used in the pursuit of social justice issues. Participants will explore the relationship between these three terms and what these relationships mean for qualitative inquiry in this new century. If we as qualitative researchers do not take control of these terms for ourselves, someone else will.

The 2008 Congress has several new and returning co-sponsors, including Women and Gender in Global Perspectives (UIUC), the Program in Global Studies (UIUC), Sage Publications, LeftCoast Press, The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and the Manchester Discourse Power Group (DPR).

Keynote speakers

Gloria Ladson-Billings, University of Wisconsin, Madison:
"The Moral Activist Role of Critical Race Theory Scholarship"

Gloria Ladson-Billings is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Senior Fellow in Urban Education of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. She is the former president of the American Educational Research Association, and has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Education, which advances high quality education research and its use in policy formulation and practice. Her primary research interests are in the relationships between culture and school and critical race theory. She is the author of The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children and is editor of the Teaching, Learning, and Human Development section of the American Education Research Journal.

Ian Stronach, Manchester Metropolitan University
"Ethics, evidence and the demand for ‘docile bodies’"

This paper will address the conference theme ‘Ethics, Evidence and Social Justice’ by looking at the theory and practice of social ‘docility’, as it has developed since the writings of Foucault almost 40 years ago. It will examine the case for claiming that a creeping authoritarianism has invested policy in professional domains, sometimes in the guise of micro-management, sometimes under the rubrics of the audit culture, and sometimes through the systemisation of improvement and progress discourses. Has there been a move from civility to docility, and, if so, what does that tell us about the nature of citizenship and identity in contemporary societies?

The role of moral panics and policy hysteria in these processes will also be considered, particularly in relation to the maintenance of regimes and economies of concern and control. Such themes are a matter of theoretical interest, and the paper will draw on some of the later works of Jean-Luc Nancy, amongst others. At the same time, some of the targets of these repressions will be examined in relation to, for example, the ‘pregnant teenager’, the policing of client ‘touch’ in professional arenas, and the government inspection of progressive schools – in particular, the ongoing saga of inspection of A.S Neill’s Summerhill ‘free school’ from 1999 to the present. (Yes, it stil exists!). These cases have all been empirically explored by the author, through funded research. Each has something to tell us about how scapegoats are engendered and punished, as well as about the more mundane policing of professional behaviour through procedures and practices of regulation, and – increasingly – self-regulation. If one of our final questions is: would Foucault recognise the contemporary world in the light of the genealogies he developed in the 1960s and 1970s, then a possible answer would seem to be that not only would he recognise this world of ours, he would probably wonder whether some people hadn’t mistaken his critique of ‘carceral society’ for a blueprint.

Ian Stronach is Research Professor in Education at the Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He has been an Editor to the British Educational Research Journal since 1996, and is on the Boards of Cultural Studies< - >Critical Methodologies, British Journal of Education and Work, Managing Global Transitions, an International Journal. Publications include Educational Research Undone (with Maggie MacLure 1996), and Difference and Diversity (co-edited with Heather Piper 2004). He is currently working with Heather Piper on a book about ‘touch’ in professional contexts. He is currently working on a sole-authored book, Globalising the Educational Project, and on a jointly authored book on Early Professional Learning. He has published extensively in journals in the UK, as well as in Qualitative Inquiry (2006) and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2006). Stronach’s research interests are in postmodernist theorizing, evaluation, and qualitative methodologies in general. His main current research is into professionalism, looking at ‘touch’ in such contexts, as well as a longitudinal study of the early professional learning of teachers in Scotland, England, and Slovenia. He directs the doctoral programme for the National Leadership School of Slovenia (1996- present), is a research consultant there to the University of Primorska, as well as being a member of the Discourse, Power, Resistance initiative, which runs a sister-conference to ICQI in the UK every March.

Partial List of Session and Paper Topics

The topics for the 4th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry include, but are not confined to: Autoethnography & Performance Studies, Decolonizing Truth, Democratic Methodologies, Evidence and Social Policy, Human Rights, Indigenous Law, Justice as Healing, Standards for Qualitative Inquiry, Forms and Varieties of Justice, Participatory Action Research, Politics of Evidence, Research as Resistance, Restorative Justice, Social Justice, Community Ethics, visual sociology, hypertext explorations, visual ethnography.

Half-day (morning and afternoon) pre-conference, professional workshops will be held on May 15. The Congress will also consist of keynote, plenary, spotlight, featured, regular and poster sessions. There will be an opening reception and barbeque, and a closing old-fashioned Midwest cook-out.

We invite your submission of paper, poster and session proposals. Submissions will be accepted online only from October 1 until December 1 2007. Conference and workshop registration will begin December 1, 2007. To learn more about the Fourth International Congress and how to participate, please email info@icqi.org.

Pre-Conference Events: Language, Technology, and Nursing!

On May 14 there will be at least three pre-conference language events: for Spanish, Japanese, Turkish-speaking scholars, a pre-conference event for Technology in Qualitative Research, and a pre-conference event for Nursing in Qualitative Research. Delegates need to check our website for developments with these special events.

Couch-Stone Meeting

The 2008 Couch-Stone Symposium of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction will be held in conjunction with the 4th International Congress. The SSSI will be co-sponsors of the Congress, and will share their program and keynote speaker with Congress participants. This joint conference is a wonderful opportunity for IAQI members to learn more about symbolic interactionism. It also presents an opportunity for symbolic interactionists to learn more about the IAQI community. To help make this joint meeting a success, delegates are invited to consult the call for papers in the Fall 2007 issue of SSSI Notes.

DPR Session

Our Manchester colleagues believe it is useful to conceptualize research as subversive activity, as work that unsettles, challenges and contests existing social and educational formations. Subversive research resists work that is at ease with the methodological preconceptions of federal and private funding bodies. Subversive scholars seek discourses of resistance that contest current notions of truth, justice, healing, health, schooling, identity, learning and teaching.

IAQI has a reciprocal relationship with the DPR group. They will have several high profile sessions on the themes of the Congress. In turn, IAQI will have a publicity stand and a videoconference presence at the March, 2008 DPR Conference at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Pre-conference (May 15, 2008) Workshop Organizers

Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award
The International Center for Qualitative Inquiry is pleased to announce the annual Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award, for excellence in qualitative research in a doctoral dissertation. Eligible dissertations will use and advance qualitative methods to investigate any topic. Applications for the award will be judged by the following criteria: clarity of writing; willingness to experiment with new and traditional writing forms; advocacy, promotion, development, and use of qualitative research methodologies and practices in new fields of study, and in policy arenas involving issues of social justice.

There are two award categories, traditional (Category A), and experimental (Category B). Submissions in both categories address social justice issues. Submissions in Category A use traditional qualitative research and writing forms, while Category B submissions experiment with traditional writing and representational forms. An award of $250 will be given to each winner. All doctoral candidates are eligible, provided they have successfully defended their proposals prior to January 1, 2008, and will defend their final dissertation by April 1, 2008. Receiving or being considered for other awards does not preclude a student from applying for this award . Applications are due Febuary 1, 2008. The 2008 award, co-sponsored with Sage Publications, will be made at the closing townhall meeting of the Congress. For more information, please visit the website: http://www.c4qi.org/award.html