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."

Abstract

In this address I would like to talk about my reflections on the use of qualitative research for the rural studies in contemporary Japan. The main focus is on the complex and reflexive relationship between research projects, social representations of the rural, and the rural world under globalization.

In the mid 1980s, when I started the fieldwork in rural sociology, Japan was at the height of its economic prosperity, while Japan’s agriculture was subject to severe criticism for its economic inefficiencies and some neo-liberals declared that there was no need for Japan to keep agriculture. My chief concern at that time was the activity of farmers for agricultural production in spite of hard conditions, and I attempted to explore it through the case study research using the semi-structured interview and biographical method. Joint research for 10 years convinced me of some toughness or persistence of farmers, their families and rural communities. However, since the mid 1990s, we have witnessed the marked decline of agriculture and rural communities resulting from the liberalization of agricultural trade, and the persistence that we once affirmed became questionable. Then I had lost my way in rural studies, though I continued the visit to the villages with my students. It was not until recently that I have realized that besides the decline there were several reasons for my going astray: my theoretical fidelity to the tradition of Japanese rural sociology, “productivist” concerns, and a fundamental change in the constitution of the rural world itself in 1990s, and so on. The recent discussions among some rural sociologists and folklorists brought me to this realization, and then a new research project occurred to me.

It’s evident that Japan’s agriculture and rural communities are on the edge of collapse, although many aged farmers still work hard to provide us food and some few of younger generation are returning to farming. Meanwhile, new social representations of the rural have appeared and they came to play an important role in the construction and evaluation of rural problems and rural life through various media. These representations are promoted by an agricultural and cultural policy responding to the international negotiation in WTO, while these are also connected with urban people’s nostalgia and desire for healing. Indeed the movements along with these representations have an effect in reaffirming the values of agriculture and rural life, but they are so policy- centered or urban consumer-centered that they diverge from the actual contexts of rural communities and farmers’ living, and they may romanticize the rural rather than empower rural people. In these situations it seems to be necessary to evaluate critically these representations and movements, at the same time to explore the vocabularies and logics that are rooted in the existing rural world and can be utilized for the joint construction of the “glocal” values of agriculture and rural life. To carry out this task we can make good use of several kinds of qualitative research. I will introduce my ongoing research project in some detail at the congress.

Plenary Title: Getting qualitative research published in refereed journals - some political considerations.
Chair: Julianne Cheek

Plenary Abstract: Increasingly there is strong pressure on all of us to publish as much and as often as possible. But not only is it a matter of publishing - where, what and how we publish is fast becoming a political decision in new ways connected to audit culture, career planning and how we want qualitative inquiry to be written about/or how it must be written about in the research related literature. This plenary explores these and other political considerations with respect to publishing qualitative inquiry. The panel, which is drawn from a wide range of disciplines and research foci, will reflect on aspects of this topic drawing on their own experience.

Participants: Janice M Morse
Roy Ruckdeschel
Yvonna Lincoln
Julianne Cheek

Paper One: Getting qualitative research published in a refereed Journal: Perspective of an editor
Janice M. Morse

The vast increase in qualitative submissions (QHR is headed towards receiving more than 650 new submissions this calendar year), and the increase in qualitative journals, have resulted in a changed landscape for qualitative researchers. Qualitative researchers are no longer rejected because they are misunderstood and unappreciated, but rather they are likely to be rejected because of scientific concerns. In this presentation, I will first review the most common methodological reasons for receiving a rejection notice, and design flaws that drastically weaken a study. Second, I will review the characteristics of studies that are strong, and move easily through the review process, to become influential and frequently cited articles.

PAPER Two: Title: A Critical Perspective on the Politics of Publication
Roy Ruckdeschel

A critical perspective suggests that editing and publishing a qualitative journal is both a political and moral enterprise. The establishment of a new journal represents a stance on the dialogues taking place within academic/professional disciplines and the qualitative community. The impact of gender, race, nationalistic and philosophical perspectives on editorial and manuscript review policies, and the setting of journal direction will be explored. Particular focus will be on the challenges of functioning as an international journal and the dilemmas associated with the inclusion of indigenous and oppressed voice.

Paper Three: The Political Economy of Publication: Marketing, Commodification and Scholarly Work
Yvonna Lincoln

Earlier, I argued (Lincoln, 1995) that academic research was in the process of being commodified, largely due to pressures on research universities to “transfer” technology from the laboratory to commercial outlets and applications. We are now much farther down that road, with research being directed by two separate but intertwined forces: funding agency-driven research agendas, which leave little room for researcher-directed nominations of important research arenas, and the massive “rankings” system being fueled by U.S. News & Report, the Princeton Review, and other mass-media systems. Frequently, the latter have connected to them refereed publication lists, which alert competitors to the highest-rated publications in which the highest-rated institutions are publishing, thereby setting what is termed the “benchmark” for institutions wishing to compete with the top contenders. When combined with the federal press for “scientifically-based research”—a code for quantitative and randomized, field-based experimenta—the agendas have commodified academic and scholarly research both to exclude and discourage certain journals from being appropriate outlets, and simultaneously, to exclude and discourage all forms of qualitative research. Thus, the political economy of publication has been transferred from technology transfer to popular rankings of institutions by program area, subsequently narrowing the range of potential insights into social conditions and silencing a panoply of voices who might usefully contribute to the discourse around social change and social justice.

Paper Four: An alternative reading of the act called publishing
Julianne Cheek.

Publishing a qualitative study is as much a political exercise as it is a research one. Refereed journal articles are now a type of currency - able to be used to 'buy' careers, degrees and status for institutions and departments. This presentation explores some of the effects of the commodification of the journal article. For example, what does it mean that now we have to think about where we publish in terms of impact factor and level of journal as much if not more than we do about who will read our article? Who is really choosing where and what we publish? What about when we review articles? Do we expect the impossible and work against ourselves in terms of difficulty in having our work published? And what of the emerging trend of some editors publishing instructions/guides as to what they think good qualitative research is - does this create conformity in qualitative publishing that is not desirable. What if editors disagree? Or what if they want you to do things to your article that you may not feel good about but if you do not do then your article may not get published? Publishing is anything but neutral and value free...

Plenary Title: On Rigor in Arts-Based Research

Participants

Chair: Richard Siegesmund, University of Georgia
Panelists:
Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, University of Georgia (poetry)
Petuala Ho Sik Ying, Hong Kong University, (film)
Liora Bresler, University of Illinois, (music)
Charles Garoian, the Pennsylvania State University (visual art)
Discussant: Fred Erickson, University of Califonia, Los Angeles

Abstract

There is growing interest in incorporating the arts into the empirical process of qualitative research. These interests range from the creative production and collection of data to the aesthetic means by which analysis is conducted and how techniques from the literary, visual and/or performing arts are used in the representation of findings. These new mergers between the social sciences and the arts raise questions about standards, quality, and rigor. How do we understand and assess the value of a piece of arts-based research? Upon what criteria can a piece of arts-based research be judged and how are these discussions taking place in international organizations making selections for conference panels, publications, prizes, grants, and other high stakes levels of decision-making in the academy. How do these discussions compare to similar dialogue about quality in the art world? Panelists representing arts-based research in a variety of genres will discuss their engagement with questions of rigor.

Arthur Bochner
Kathy Charmaz
César Cisneros
Ma. Chapela-Mendoza
John Creswell
Greg Dimitriadis
Carolyn Ellis
Charles Garolan

H. L. Goodall, Jr.
Jane F. Gllgun
Sharlene Hesse-Biber
Ken Howe
George Damberells
Michal Krumer-Nevo
Patti Lather

Yvonna Linclon
Joseph Maxwell
Donna Mertens
Janice Morse
Ronald Pellas
Johnny Saldaña
Tami Spry
Karen Staller
Ian Stronach

Harry Torrance
Handel Wright