ICQI 2021: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry
ICQI…..you know….only the largest ……. and most respected qualitative research conference IN THE WORLD! … and with all the biggest names!
My PhD supervisor said I should consider submitting an abstract for this conference.
Doing so is a VERY BIG DEAL – this congress is the pinnacle in my field. I’ve never presented at this conference.
For the first time ever, the ICQI 2021 will be held online. This is a super attractive feature for me as it will mean if I get an abstract accepted to present, I wouldn’t have to spend the extra money to travel to the USA as was required for all previous (and probably subsequent) ICQIs. If I ever wanted to give ICQI a solid shot – this is it!
So I did – and my abstract got accepted! Woohoo!
My ICQI 2021 Abstract
Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research.
This paper traces some experimental and experiential wonderings of researching gendered journeys on bicycles in West Africa. This session shares what is unfolding for one rider-researcher as she works to excavate the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of becoming(s)-with post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices and peoples with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. My research puts to work feminist New Materialisms to explore how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education. This undertaking is bold, complex and unsettling. It requires (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging habitual preoccupations about bicycles, embodiment, movement, identity, ecology, sp/pl/p/ace and methodology. There is much about gendered bodies navigating trails that commands attention, yet defies explanation (McLure, 2013). Drawing on key encounters experienced in Brisbane (Australia) and Lunsar (Sierra Leone), I trace the skills, wills, spills and thrills from which a velo-onto-epistemology is emerging.
Below are some ICQI 2021 details to get a sense of what’s on offer.
The 2021 Congress theme is: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry.
The rapidly changing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dynamics brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are inescapable as we endeavor to move forward. The pandemic has also amplified hard truths about everyday life: the ongoing historical devaluation of teachers, nurses, and service workers, and the precarity of the working classes, the unyielding privileging of business and the free market as the answer to all social and health ills, the differential experience of the virus relative to race, class, and gender dynamics, including as related to co-morbidity and mortality rates, access to care, and visibility, the rise of right-wing populism and its deleterious impact on positive governmental responses to pandemic conditions, the prominence of conspiracy theories in mainstream and social media discourse (e.g., masks don’t help, virus is man-made, etc.).
At the same time, we cannot overlook the broader context in which the 2021 Congress will take place: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo creeping authoritarianism, environmental crises, economic shocks to higher education and continuing public health crises.
Collectively and collaboratively, this moment calls for a critical, performative, social justice inquiry directed at the multiple crises of our historical present.
We need a rethinking of where we have been, and, critically, where we are going.
We cannot go at it alone.
We need to imagine new ways to collaborate, to engage in research and activism. New ways of representing and intervening into the historical present. New ways to conduct research, and a rethinking of in whose interest our research benefits.
Sessions in the 2021 Congress will take up these topics, as well as those related to and/or utilizing:
- feminist inquiry
- Critical Race Theory
- intersectionality
- queer theory
- critical disability research
- phenomenology
- Indigenous methodologies
- postcolonial and decolonized knowing
- poststructural engagements
- diffraction and intra-action
- digital methodologies
- autoethnography
- visual methodologies
- thematic analysis
- performance
- art as research
- critical participatory action research
- multivocality
- collaborative inquiry
- ………..and the politics of evidence.
Sessions will also discuss:
- threats to shared governance
- attacks on freedom of speech
- public policy discourse
- and research as resistance
Scholars come to the Congress to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new technologies of representation.
Together we seek to develop guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns. We share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference.
As critical scholars, our task is to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage realistic utopian pedagogies of hope.
ICQI provides leadership to demonstrate the promise of qualitative inquiry as a form of democratic practice, to show how qualitative inquiry can be used to directly engage pressing social issues at the level of local, state, national and global communities.
The Congress sponsors the journal International Review of Qualitative Research (IRQR), three book series, and occasional publications based upon the more than 1,000 papers given at the conference each year. It the largest annual gathering of qualitative scholars in the world.