QUALITATIVE INQUIRY FOR A GLOBAL COMMUNITY IN CRISIS

The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from May 26-29, 2010. The theme of the 2010 Congress is "Qualitative Inquiry for a Global Community in Crisis." It is clear that in these troubling political times qualitative researchers are called upon to become human rights advocates, to honor the sanctity of life, and the core values of privacy, human dignity, peace, justice, freedom from fear and violence.

The 2010 Congress will offer scholars the opportunity to form coalitions, to engage in debate, and dialogue on how qualitative research can be used to can advance the causes of social justice, while addressing racial, ethnic, gender and environmental disparities in education, welfare and healthcare. Delegates will show how critical inquiry can be used to bridge gaps in cultural and linguistic understandings.

Sessions will take up such topics as: the politics of evidence; alternatives to evidence-based models; mixed-methods; public policy discourse; social justice; human subject research; indigenous research ethics; decolonizing inquiry; standpoint epistemologies. Contributors are invited to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new presentational formats (drama, performance, poetry, autoethnography, fiction). Such work will offer guidelines and exemplars showing how qualitative research can be used in the human rights and policy-making arenas.

On May 26 there will be pre-conference language events and on May 27, morning and afternoon professional workshops. The Congress will consist of keynote, plenary, featured, regular, and poster sessions. There will be an opening reception and barbeque as well as 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 2009. Conference and workshop registration will begin December 1, 2009. To learn more about the Sixth International Congress and how to participate, please visit our website <www.QI2010.org>.

Keynote speakers

Cynthia Dillard (Nana Mansa II), Ohio State University

"Learning to Remember the Things We've Learned to Forget: Endarkened Feminisms and the Sacred Nature of Research."

Abstract

Colonial and racialized histories have created fragmentation, dislocation, and dismemberment for many, including African and other people color. These entanglements and geneologies of diaspora and location strongly influence the consciousness of African ascendant women throughout the world, even as we negotiate the countless influences that shape and impact both our individual and collective consciousness and particularities as African women. These are always and in all ways contested spaces and locations that are deeply spiritual, situated, and embodied. Collectively, we are not born "Black women": We become Black women, a cross-cultural diversity of nationalities, socio economic classes, sexual identities, spiritual beliefs and generational distinctions. And, as Audre Lorde suggested years ago, a critical part of any becoming is also about learning each other's (her)stories and resisting the temptation to compare or create hierarchies of oppression between and among the collective. This includes a deeper recognition of the ways in which we all have been collectively seduced into forgetting who we are as women (or have chosen to do so), given the weight and power of memory and the truly radical act that re-membering may represent in our present lives and work as researchers. Whether through the ravages of colonization or slavery and their inequitable outcomes, we have learned to be both complicit and vigilant in this process of figuring out who we are, who we are becoming. But in order to heal, to put the pieces back together again, we must learn to re-member the things that we've learned to forget, including engagements and dialogues in cross-cultural community that theorize our differing migrations, experiences and definitions. In this way, remembering becomes a response to our individual and collective fragmentation at the spiritual and material levels, a response to the divisions created between mind, body and spirit, and a response to our on-going experience and understanding of "what difference difference makes" (Wright, 2003).

Feminist research has both held and contested experience as a category of epistemological importance, but primarily as a secular one. Absent any attention to spirit, experience is also constructed as absent the sacred. However, the sacred is fundamental to a Black feminist epistemology and research, given the historical and cultural experiences of African ascendant women worldwide. How can re-membering bear witness to our individual and collective consciousness and generate new theories and conduct of feminist research? Through examples from her work in Ghana, West Africa, Dillard explores how locatedness, rootedness, experience and memory engage and create an endarkened feminist subjectivity and spirituality that both re-members and opens possibilities for research as sacred praxis.

Isamu Ito University of Fukui, Japan

"Globalizing The Rural: Reflections of a Qualitastive Japanese Rural Sociologist."

Partial List of Session and Paper Topics

The topics for the 6th 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 2009. Conference and workshop registration will begin December 1, 2009. To learn more about the Fourth International Congress and how to participate, please email info@icqi.org.

Pre-Conference Events:

On May 27 there will be at least three pre-conference language events: for Spanish, Japanese, Turkish-speaking scholars, pre-conference evens for Qualitative Health policy issues and for Nursing in Qualitative Research. Delegates need to check our website for developments with these special events.

The Qualitative Inquiry Special Interest Group of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction will hold their sessions in conjunction with the 6th International Congress on May 28 and 29. The SSSI QualSiG 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 2009 issue of SSSI Notes.

DPR Session
Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI),
Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), UK

Our Manchester colleagues believe it is important to conceptualize research as both an applied and subversive activity, as work that unsettles, challenges and contests existing social and educational formations, including the binary categories of 'pure' and 'applied' research themselves. They are strongly committed to maintaining and developing the quality, vitality and social usefulness of educational and social research while resisting simplistic definitions of utility. They seek to put 'theory' to the test of 'practice', while also developing theory and methodology through research practice. Subversive research resists work that is at ease with the methodological preconceptions of federal and private funding bodies. Subversive scholars seek to reconceptualise discourses of resistance and
contest taken-for-granted categories and relationships such as childhood, health and well-being, learning and teaching, research and policy.

IIQI has a reciprocal relationship with the Manchester group. They run a parallel conference in Manchester each year - Discourse, Power, Resistance (DPR) - and an associated journal 'Power and Education'. They will have several high profile sessions on the themes of the Congress.

To learn more about the Sixth International Congress and how to participate, please email info@icqi.org.