Conference Agenda

This panel explores how posthuman and postphilosophical orientations can reconfigure early childhood literacies in challenging times. The four papers trace how uncertainty, movement, and mundanity fray the edges of Humanist notions of literacy; how young children’s embodied (post-)digital practices entangle media, culture, and affect; how deficit framings of silence and developmental diagnoses can be re-read through material-discursive apparatuses; and how fragile refrains shape children’s sense-making in museums. Together, the contributions foreground literacies as relational, affective, and more-than-human, offering new ways of conceptualising children’s engagements with language, place, and difference in uncertain worlds.

As arts-based educators we repeatedly experience resistance by the participants in a variety of educational and organizational contexts. Through the arts, we work with emergence and serendipity: things show up. Do we take anything for granted? How can we possibly host arts-based processes with care for the participants, the material process and ourselves? The unfamiliar is a potentially dark source of insecurity and fear for both participants and facilitators. It feels almost like dying. As death (Chemi & Firing), the feeling/fear of failure is a taboo.

In this panel, we wish to address the dark side of our engagement with arts-based methodologies by tapping into our biographical narratives as arts-based educators. We wish to reframe darkness as vitalistic (Braidotti) through a journey into our personal connection with arts-based research and education. This journey starts at the roots of our ‘why’ (why am I a researcher/educator? Why arts-based methodologies? Why a personal journey?) and touches upon our own resistance. Necessarily, we address the boundaries of what counts as science (St Pierre), what is recognized as valid by the research community. We relate compassionately to the resistance of our participants, who often hold junior academic positions, or our students, who seek legitimization for thinking differently. Our aim is to open possibilities of a science that is different, polyphonic, diverse and rebellious (Burnard et al.), where doubt is part of the research process. Darkness is always there: how do we allow for the dark side to be there (Haraway)? Arts-based scholarship (Mreiwed et al. 2023) addresses how knowledge is always necessarily plural and describes how knowledges based on the senses, bodies and artistic practices are both generated by and generators of critical and creative ways of thinking. No matter what, arts-based learning will always meet resistance in practices ‘on the floor’.

We present a qualitative educational study situated within environmental education. The study, which involved Greek senior high school students, explored oral history both as a research approach and a pedagogical method in the context of a place-based school program. The aim was to empower students as citizens and young researchers of their environments in the direction of a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2013).

The study was organized along three relational axes: (a) the researcher/educator and the learning process, (b) the students and their research, and (c) the researcher/educator and the students' research. Our focus was on the spiral development of the students' sense of place as a key dimension of environmental action competence (Jensen & Schnack, 1997).

This study contributes to qualitative research theory and practice by combining environmental education with oral history while reflecting on the integration of historical and personal/collective memory perspectives into environmental education research. It also advances research on environmental oral history by developing qualitative approaches that explore the dynamic relationships between humans and their environments.

What happens when ecomuseums meet postqualitative inquiry? This paper explores that encounter as both methodological and ethical disruption. Given museum’s deeply colonial history and its grounding in Western epistemologies of control, permanence, and expertise, a postqualitative approach offers ways to reimagine heritage practices as relational, situated, and plural. Emerging organically from early fieldwork experiences in Brazil and Scotland, this inquiry rejects predetermined methods and comparative frameworks, responding instead to Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (2019) provocation: “Why do we think we should know what to do before we begin to inquire?”

Through engagement with ecomuseums as spaces of community practice, the study treats heritage not as a stable category but as an unfolding assemblage of relations—an active process of negotiation with change. Heritage practices here are understood not as the act of preserving objects, but as an ongoing practice of care, reciprocity, and becoming, entangled with material vitality, and local desires. Postqualitative inquiry fits into this context as “Not a repetition of what is known, but rupture and provocation - a thinking at the limit” (Mazzei, 2021).

By bringing heritage practices into conversation with postqualitative thought, this research challenges the binaries of subject/object, expert/community, and nature/culture. It embraces uncertainty and emergence as generative forces in both research and ecomuseums. Agency is conceived as distributed across humans and nonhumans, places and materials, rather than centralized within institutions. When heritage encounters postqualitative inquiry, it becomes a living, plural, and unfinished field - an ethics of relation and transformation that opens possibilities for more sustainable practices of care. This inquiry offers an opportunity for both myself and the communities entangled within it to “not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world, [but to be] part of the world in its differential becoming” (Barad, 2007).

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork at a Finnish composting facility and interviews with people who compost biowaste at home, this paper examines the dynamics of care and scale in composting practices. As many studies in the field of social scientific waste studies have illustrated, composting biowaste requires a lot of care – monitoring the temperature and moisture of the compost soil, and taking care of microbes, worms, soil and even the whole planet. However, like all care practices, composting involves situational exclusions of certain problematic entities and relations. Composting practices often entail awkward waste that needs to be excluded, such as avocado seeds or bones that do not break down in home composts, or plastics and other contaminants at composting facilities. Here, understanding the possibilities of care from the viewpoint of scale becomes crucial: waste is always taken care of in situated practices, and the scale of waste affects our ability to care for it. Simply put, the practices of composting kitchen waste at home differ significantly from those involved in treating retail food waste packaged in plastic at industrial-scale composting facilities. Thus, the exclusions inherent in these care practices are always connected to the scales of waste. I examine how these exclusions are enabled through what I term technologies of un/forgetting – practices and technologies that enable the management of awkward, problematic waste. These technologies include, for example, placing poorly decomposable biowaste in mixed waste bins, incinerating plastic waste received at composting facilities, or sampling the level of contaminants in compost soil. I argue that the exclusions enabled by technologies of un/forgetting are always temporary and situational. Even if we care for waste, awkward waste, such as microplastics or incineration ash, continues to haunt us if the problems related to the scales of waste remain unaddressed.

This presentation focuses on our own thinking and co-affective encounters with the Great African Seaforest in Cape Town, South Africa. Our presentation is a contribution to the emerging field of Critical Forest Studies which is "dedicated to critical, creative, and relationally embedded practices with forests”. While Critical Forest Studies has paid attention to land forests, less is known about the seaforest, and the entanglement between territorial and marine forests. We believe that we have a great deal to learn from the Great African Seaforest, in particular, as it has been under-researched from marine biology, oceanography, environmental and blue humanities perspectives. In keeping with the interconnected hydrological cycle of which we are all a part, we consider the Great African Seaforest, as a Global South “sentient interspecies learning community” for broader global politico-ethico-onto-epistemological practices and relations. In our presentation, we explore how our collaborative practice of reading-writing-photographing-swimming with the Great African Seaforest brings to the fore insights regarding kelp forest sentience, kelp forest imaginaries, kelp forest regeneration and kelp forest pedagogies. For the purposes of this presentation, we scheduled four swims throughout the month of August 2025. During these encounters we documented our swims with photos and videos, followed by freewriting sessions in nearby coffee shops. Interspersed with the swims we read marine biology and social science texts about kelp forests and the vegetal turn. In sharing excerpts of writings and visual images we give expression to how hopes and possibilities can grow in the light of our interconnectedness and shared vulnerability, as well as our interdependency with human and more-than-human worlds.

Critical examination of human-centered ways of thinking has become topical as complex crises challenge sustainable development. In education research, attention has begun to be paid to relationships and living with multispecies companions. This presentation examines the relationships between plants and children in the context of Finnish early childhood education. The research framework includes theoretical, historical, and material aspects related to plant-child relations. In the research, I utilize Haraway's (2004) storytelling strategy in studying landscape assemblages (Tsing, 2017) in which children share their lives with plants.

The presentation is based on ongoing doctoral research. The first phase of the research examined growth, children and plants in the contexts of early childhood education, learning gardens and garden pedagogy. In this presentation, I will mainly focus on the next empirical phase of the research, in which plant-child relations are mapped using multispecies ethnography.

I will highlight perspectives on how history, culture, and materiality are present in plant-child encounters and how they bring plants and children together in the diverse landscapes of cities. What happens when the priority in encounters is not the child but the plant and how to consider plants in diverse encounters? What questions does conducting multispecies ethnography with plants raise? I will present preliminary observations from ethnographic material produced by walking-with (Springgay & Truman, 2018) a kindergarten group on excursions to the surrounding semi-urban areas, reflecting the experiences on selected theoretical frameworks.

The presentation challenges to think about environmental education from a multispecies relational perspective, and it offers insights of how to conduct multispecies inquiry with plants.

This paper explores how digital ethnography can be mobilized to build equitable research infrastructures that center relationality, care, and peer learning. Drawing from my work on a Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) pilot project, I examine how first-generation women academics engage in digital knowledge co-production through a feminist, peer-based Discord server model. The project emerged in response to gaps in conventional academic systems that privilege hierarchy, institutional access, and expertise, often marginalizing early-career and first-generation researchers.

Using qualitative content analysis of asynchronous online forums and peer mentoring channels, this paper theorizes peer mobilization as a feminist digital methodology that both documents and transforms the social processes of research collaboration. The paper contributes to ongoing conversations about feminist research praxis, digital ethnography, and the future of qualitative inquiry in the digital world.

In qualitative research, the researcher inhabits a complex relational space that extends beyond immediate encounters. This is particularly evident when interviews are conducted by research assistants or graduate students, and the researcher engages only with transcripts or recordings. In such cases, the researcher’s relationship to participants is mediated through texts, voices, and narratives—yet it may still acquire an intensity of familiarity. Through attentive reading, listening, and interpretation, the researcher develops a form of vicarious presence—entering the experiential worlds of others without direct encounter.
In the study of loss and bereavement, this dynamic assumes distinctive contours. Narratives not only recount the grief of the living but also summon the absent dead, rendering them present within the research encounter. The relational field thus extends beyond the participant–researcher dyad to include those who are no longer alive yet remain insistently invoked. In this sense, qualitative research may unfold within what might be described as virtual relationships—connections sustained through memory, language, and affect rather than corporeal presence.
In this presentation, I share my experience of vicarious presence with both the bereaved and the deceased. Such relationships carry both epistemological and ethical implications. Epistemologically, they demonstrate that knowledge production in such research is never solely descriptive but constituted through acts of witnessing, memorialization, and relational imagination. Ethically, they position the researcher as a custodian—entrusted to hold, preserve, and at times withhold narratives carrying profound affective weight. This generates what might be termed a narrative burden: the responsibility to carry stories of others—stories of people who do not know the researcher—which nonetheless become integrated into the researcher’s interpretive horizon.
From this perspective, the text becomes more than data: a site of relational presence, a medium through which absence is rendered tangible and ethical witnessing is enacted.

The study examines promissory digital health as a question of how healthcare professionals give meaning to future work from the vantage point of present practices. Focusing on home-based remote monitoring of older patients, we draw on qualitative in-depth interviews with nurses and doctors and an inductive analysis of key tensions between present and future. We identify five tensions that link the experienced burden of current remote monitoring practices with professionals’ optimistic anticipations of future change. Nurses’ accounts emphasize relational guidance and practical troubleshooting, while doctors’ foreground diagnostic decision-making and organizational planning, presenting both shared and profession-specific concerns. By showing how present experiences and imagined futures are co-constituted through work-related tensions, our study advances debates on promissory digital health and professionals’ work. It highlights the micro-level of this work as the arena where meanings of current and anticipated practices are navigated and where the future of promissory digital health is made actionable.

This research examines comments museumgoers share on online review platforms, specifically Google Maps, which I approach narratively. I employ a narrative analytic framework, sometimes theoretically and sometimes as an analytic mode, to better conceptualize the kind of impressions museumgoers share after visiting dark history museums (museums which narrate genocide and mass violence). I approach these public reviews as “small stories” or bits and fractures of larger narratives, asking how the messages that these mediational institutions deliver (museums) are remediated and reinterpreted. Crucially, how are they renarrated and renarrativized by museum audiences.

To complicate things, museumgoers who share reviews online, juxtapose two different socio-technical and socio-material environments, hence also two types of entanglements: the first concerns the actual/physical museum visit (arrival at a geographical, touristic destination, walking about, seeing the display and other visitors, etc.), with – in the case of dark history museums – its challenging affective and ethical display; with what it reveals about the past and the present, and also with what it conceals. The second concerns the digital user or visitor, as she interacts with the platform and engages it (design, narrative affordances).

I take this opportunity to creatively think through these different environments and entanglements; to highlight the types of challenges they pose for experimental and innovative qualitative processes, conceptualizations and theorizing. Specifically narrative analysis. More than an answer, I wish to raise questions, and to methodologically find non-positivist approaches to the study of visitors’ online short stories that remediate collective tragic narratives. How can analyses address performative, embodied and otherwise hidden types of narrative knowledge(s), that are banked within these brief digital reviews, and within the environments and entanglements through which they are shaped and shared?

The planned project ‘Surviving the man-pocalypse?’ (2026-2030), explores intersections between survival gaming and survivalism through ‘connective ethnography’ (Hine, 2007); that is, ethnographic fieldwork that moves between multiple online and offline fields of practice and highlights the connections between them. We explore how players make sense of survival and survival games in our current geopolitical, cultural, and climatological moment, and how their engagement with survival games might affect their perception of survivalist movements and vice versa.

On one hand, we are anticipating resistance from potential participants, as in previous studies, survivalists have been skeptical of research (Mitchell, 2002). On the other hand, we see that the time to conduct this research is now: rhetorics of war are ramping up, civil defense is in the public focus in the Nordic countries (the Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian governments updated their national crisis preparation guides late 2024) as in the rest of Europe. Protectionist, accelerationist, and culturally and socially apocalyptic ideologies are growing in gaming and survivalism communities, e.g. Wells et al (2024) noted that gaming communities have become spaces for the normalization of ‘anti-democratic, right-wing extremist views’. Empirical research on the intersection between survivalism and survival games is one way to better understand the underlying sociocultural processes.

We discuss the complexities of conducting sustainable and responsible research on challenging topics during challenging times. Further, while not all communities are tied to radical politics, the perceived ‘apocalyptic turn’ (Kelly, 2020) threatening (white) masculinity is present in both game and survivalist communities. We might thereby be positioned as Other due to our (gendered, cultural, social, national) identities. However, as research team members engage in practices related to survival games and prepping, survivalism training, and civil defense measures, we could also be perceived as insiders. Therefore, we also address the contextual tensions between belonging and otherness.

This project explores the transformative possibilities of queer kinship, radical love, and collective healing through a feminist, decolonial lens, attending to relational and societal interdependencies in challenging times. Using autohistoria-teoría, I explore fragments of grief, desire, and queer becoming through dreams, memories, relationships, and reflections on therapeutic practice, attending to how connection, care, and meaning unfold in relational and collective contexts. Inspired by the metaphor of lighthouses, figures and practices that illuminate paths,I trace how grief, desire, and healing emerge across personal, relational, and communal spaces, offering alternative ways of being, relating, and caring.

Engaging with feminist and queer scholars such as Anzaldúa, Lorde, hooks, Ahmed, and Muñoz, I examine the relational, collective, and embodied dimensions of knowledge and transformation, highlighting queer kinship as a site of resistance that reimagines intimacy, eroticism, community, and public life. Dreams, memories, and family histories blur the boundaries between the real and imagined, generating insights into emotional labor, longing, and resilience within collective processes. By weaving together fragments of experience, reflection, and relational practice, this work challenges normative narratives of knowledge production and embodies possibilities for transformative, collaborative, and community-centered inquiry.

Positioned at the intersection of personal, social, and more-than-human worlds, this research contributes to polyphonic dialogue, relational understanding, and collaborative practices in qualitative inquiry. It attends to the potentials of collective resilience, relational creativity, and radical care in addressing the pressing social, cultural, and political challenges of our times, offering a “lighthouse” for those navigating paths of healing, resistance, and queer becoming.

The LGBTQ+ community is often treated as a unified group, yet -upon closer inspection- the conflicts and discrepancies within begin to show. This paper aims to examine the LGBTQ+ community, not as a cohesive total, but as a diverse group of people struggling to fit under the same umbrella despite their ever-growing amount of differences. The question that this paper attempts to answer is whether LGBTQ+ individuals in Greece feel included within the community and, if not, figure out possible reasons behind their detachment. 20 members of the LGBTQ+ community participated in semi-structured interviews, which were subsequently analyzed via Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), resulting in seven fundamental themes that influence the current state of the community; contested identity, the importance of physical appearance, political correctness, elitism, toxicity, labelling and the stance towards the heterosexual population. Despite those issues, however, a deeper emotional connection to the community -or the idea of one- seems to persevere.

LGBTQ+ inclusive Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) is possibly the most controversial and politicised aspect of the primary school curriculum in England; policies are highly contested and draw much attention from different publics. RSE is essential for supporting the health and safety of children and young people (UNESCO, 2018). In 2020, compulsory Relationships Education required primary schools to teach LGBTQ+ content (DfE, 2019). However, guidance is deliberately non-prescriptive which gives schools significant power to decide which topics will be covered, how it will be taught and at what age. Further guidance is set to come into effect September 2026 which further erases LGBTQ+ identities through its contradictions creating multiple loopholes not to teach this content. Current policy direction does not prioritise what matters to children and young people but instead is focused on adults’ rights to police access to knowledge and participation (Neary, 2023; Atkinson et al., 2023). Inspired by feminist new materialist and other postfoundational theories in educational research, this presentation follows what happens when a group of LGBTQ+ young people re-imagine LGBTQ+ inclusive RSE in English primary schools through a series of co-constructed art-based workshops. Harnessing the AGENDA (www. agendaonline.co.uk) online resource, what matters within LGBTQ+ inclusive RSE is written in jars, hung up on green and red paper plates, illuminated on a runway for change, and flown on rights kites. We explore how creative pARTicipatory methodologies open up space for difficult, complex and sensitive experiences to be expressed through creative modalities and how these help us to come to sense and know differently. By the time of this conference, I will have undertaken these art-based workshops as part of my PhD project. I will outline my methodology and give reflections.

Immigrant, refugee, ethnocultural, and racialized (IRER) as well as LGBTQIA+ communities experience compounded barriers in accessing mainstream support services, particularly suicide prevention and crisis lines. This presentation compares two Canadian pilot studies that explore equity-focused crisis intervention for marginalized populations: LGBTQIA+ individuals and IRER communities. Both studies employed qualitative phenomenological approaches, conducting semi-structured interviews with crisis responders to examine current practices, challenges, and recommendations for gender and sexual as well as culturally affirming care. Five stakeholders who work with IRER individuals and five crisis responders supporting LGBTQIA+ individuals were interviewed.

Responders’ working with LGBTQIA+ individuals varied in level of confidence in supporting sexual and gender minority (SGM) callers, revealing gaps in training, discomfort with identity disclosure, and systemic limitations in affirming care. Responders emphasized the need for LGBTQIA+ specific services, intersectional training, and organizational support to improve therapeutic outcomes.

The IRER study identifies challenges such as language limitations, institutional mistrust, and fear of police involvement. Responders and stakeholders noted the inadequacy of Western crisis models in addressing diverse ways IRER individuals may view mental health and distress. This study emphasizes the importance of culturally responsive tools, racialized staff, and community partnerships.

Together, these studies highlight the urgent need for crisis systems to move beyond Westernized, generalized models of care. Findings suggest that intersectional, equity-based training, culturally attuned safety planning, and systemic changes are required to better meet the needs of equity-deserving populations. This comparative analysis shares actionable insights to enhance inclusivity and responsiveness in crisis intervention services.

Background: The sexual and gender minority (SGM) community has a longstanding disproportionate rate of suicidality and mental health crises. Despite some crisis response agencies incorporation of LGBTQIA+ allyship training into practice, the persistent high rates of suicidality and mental health crises among the SGM community suggests a disconnect between crisis service provision and LGBTQIA+ community needs.

Aim: The objective of this presentation is to identify the gaps and create tangible recommendations to increase crisis service effectiveness for the LGBTQIA+ community. This presentation aligns with the ECQI 2026 theme by sharing findings from collaborative inquiry to transform crisis response.

Methodology: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 18 crisis responders and 16 LGBTQIA+ community members. SGM community members had the opportunity to complete a mixed methods questionnaire. Data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis informed by Gender Theory, Queer Theory, and Intersectionality.

Results: Expected themes include the need to increase LGBTQ+ affirming service provision, recommended changes in training for responders and agency systems, and suggestions in ways to decrease access barriers.

Significance: A comparison between crisis responders' reflections on the provision of care to SGM communities and LGBTQIA+ communities experiences receiving crisis services offers a rich and nuanced understanding of the disconnect between service provision and community needs. Synthesizing recommendations from crisis service providers and LGBTQIA+ community members presents a unique opportunity to formulate tangible and actionable recommendations that are community-centered and respond to the communities' intersectional needs. Highlighting the disconnect and recommendations creates the opportunity to develop innovative and dynamic training which can be implemented and concretely enhance crisis service provision for LGBTQIA+ community members. This study contributes to the field by demonstrating how qualitative inquiry can highlight systemic gaps, enhance marginalized voices, and inform crisis response through community engagement.

This Dream Team has been collaboratively developed by members of the Walking as Research Praxis group. We invite you to join us in co-creating an experimental walking praxis of speculative wanderings, temporal rhythms, space-place potentialities and affective intensities for sensing past-present-future bodies, relationalities and sensorialities.

Recently there has been significant interest in walking as a critical qualitative method (Pink, 2008; Evans & Jones, 2011; Lasczik et al., 2021). Scholars have theorized and actualized walking as a mode of accountable and response-able walking-with (Springgay & Truman, 2018); as place-space methodology (Fairchild, 2021, 2026); as relational and processual posthuman methodology (Taylor et al., 2023); as an ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015); and as inspiration for art-ful academic writing otherwise (Taylor & Fairchild, 2025). Much of this research re-imagines walking as an inventive, experimental, less elitist, more inclusive qualitative methodology; and an attunement to the infrathin - the potentiation of a relational field that includes what can be felt but cannot quite be articulated (Manning, 2017, p. 99).

Conceptualizing walking as a more capacious human/non-human/more-than-human bodily mattering, and located in a feminist materialist posthuman theory/method/praxis that connects bodies/landscapes/time/temporality, our Dream Team resonates with the conference themes of relations between human, non-humans, history, philosophy, culture, mobility, visibility, creativity, more-than-landscapes, and…and…and.

We begin with a brief introduction to walking research. Next we move out of the room into the surrounding environs to engage in a series of Speakers Corners Walkings where we stop at a Corner, a member of the WARP collective gives a brief account of their walking research, and then gives a theory-praxis provocation for us to walk with to the next Speakers Corner. We then return to the conference room for a discussion of the matterings that arose from this research-creation activity, attending to the question: how does walking as research praxis shift qualitative research methodologies?

Speakers Corners Walkings provocations include:

Ways to challenge whiteness, which Ahmed (2007) conceptualizes as “an ongoing, unfinished history” (p. 149) and “institutional habit” that coheres, redirects, and (im)mobilizes what bodies can do. How does whiteness shape the “what” that is “around” (p. 151) and privilege habits that contour spaces that [our] bodies leave behind.

Ancient Chinese culture treats spacetime as a multilayered-crisscrossed flowing river where words, meaning, and mattering (un)entangle in a perpetual movement. How might we consider walking as a mindbodyheart movement, materializing possible entanglements among mindbodyheart calligraphy/words/painting/sculpture/trees, and other nonhuman beings across/with/into a past-present-future flow of meaning/being?

How can we contest walking’s normativities, its assumption that walking is done by an upright, bipedal, boundaried body? We invite you to do/enact walking as errancy, as unwillingness to obey rules–to walk a wavering line–a line that loops, knots, curls, furls and unfurls, that knits other lines into it–so as not to re-produce a straight White line but, instead, produce multiple lines, lineages, and connectivities. Feminist in/discipline (Taylor, 2020) reimagines walking as a path to sensing-feeling-knowing otherwise; as a feminist materialist ethico-onto-epistemological political praxis.

The Angel with One Wing is a nexus point for thinking about walking-with young children’s entanglement with British colonialism, slavery, and plantation ownership. English country estates are indelibly linked to brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism (Vergès, 2019, n.p.). These histories become sanitised to justify colonialism, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism; the pristine house a monument to Western progress narratives…but scratching the surface reveals the blood and bones on which these legacies have been built.

The new mobilities paradigm (Urry, 1999; Sheller, 2017) explores walking as participatory, future-oriented, sensory, experiential, and place-based encounters for reimagining ‘sustainability’ from a social justice perspective. Including more diverse voices enables the emergence of more socially just mobility systems and practices that consider varied experiences (Sheller, 2018). How can we depart from one-size-fits all “expert” planning for sustainable urban mobility and instead work with an innovative speculative co-design methodology embedded in everyday places to produce alternative knowledges?

How might walking-with Athens help us attend to the marks of centuries, of industrialism, capitalism, progress, modernity? How are these marks felt and rendered visible? How do they tremble? What do they generate? Glissant’s (2021) philosophy invites us to experiment with the potential of trembling as a way of being-with, as a way of unfixing certainty. Tremblings are whirlwinds of transhistorical encounterings that immerse us inextricably in the world and its peoples in the everywhens and everywheres, in and beyond Athens.

This Dream Team deploys walking in methodologically playfully ways to disrupt habitual un/noticing, to invite you to wander/wonder (MacLure, 2013); and to collectively co-create new research insights.

This session will use an autoethnographic narrative to showcase how white women willfully colonize academic spaces such as classes, institutional resources, research and service opportunities in higher education. The idea of white women as Ms. Ann in the notorious Jim Crow era in the United States has not ended, but just shifted to identical roles in similar spaces. From the “White Woman’s Burden” to purposeful roles as a class traitor with a white fragility complex, this session will explore an embellished version of events witnessed in academia, where the never ending tide of neocolonization of higher education by white women unrelentingly dominates the role, identity, and place of women of color . Over the period of ten years, autoethnographic data such as conversations, events, emails, class periods, publications, and presentations have been collected and systematically evaluated to determine the roles of power between the white women and the women of color. Qualitative research methodology was used to analyze the data to create a narrative of thick description capturing the patterns of behavior of the army of Ms. Ann’s found within academic settings. The session will be presented as a combination of prose and storytelling and will include time for questions and feedback from the audience, as well as provide a community environment for solidarity and suggestions for coping, action and nonaction.

Social constructionist epistemological approaches call for a critical appraisal of academic knowledge and for a critical investigation of academic practices. However, often, beliefs circulating in academic discourse as academic knowledge remain unchallenged and are being considered as given truths. Social epistemology has argued that it is via community practices, like publication processes, that such beliefs acquire the status of true beliefs and calls for an investigation of such processes. In this presentation we use the case of a widespread belief about critical literacy origins as an example to illustrate how a social epistemological discourse analysis (SEDA), a kind of qualitative inquiry, can facilitate the challenging of academic knowledge and the disruption of certainties in academic discourse. SEDA is an approach we are currently developing, which brings together social epistemology and discourse analysis. For example, we suggest that the discourse analytic notion of intertextuality, that is the exploration of how texts relate to each other, can facilitate the examination of how academic knowledge gets constructed within the system of academic publications. Critical literacy (CL) is a very popular approach in fields like critical pedagogy, emphasizing the interconnectedness of power, ideologies and literacy practices. A wide-spread idea is that CL originates in Paulo Freire’s work. In this presentation, we challenge such an idea by reporting our intertextual analysis of published, conceptualizing texts about critical literacy, that is analysis of their interrelations. Our analysis suggests a fluid conceptualization and beginning of CL not necessarily associated with Freire. We conclude by advocating for subjecting widely entrenched academic beliefs and academic discourse to scrutiny as a prerequisite for a critically informed praxis.

In recent years, higher education institutions in the UK have widely espoused the language of disability inclusion. However, the fundamental logic of the university remains founded on elitist and exclusionary principles. In this paper, we mobilise the figure of the parasite (Serres, 2007) to explore the complex micro-politics of being a worker with investments in anti-ableism, situated within, against and beyond (Bell & Pahl, 2018; Lather, 1991) the contemporary neoliberal-ableist university (Goodley, 2018; 2024). In Serres’s account, the parasite takes up a somewhat ambivalent relationship with its host; sometimes benefitting from its power, sometimes syphoning resources out, and sometimes more directly disrupting and opposing hegemonic power from within. We will theorise different possible parasitical relations to the university, before drawing on our experiences of the two year, university-wide Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC) project, to illustrate how these may unfold in practice. Whilst both academic leadership and professional services work is often – albeit in different ways – assumed to involve complicity in neoliberal practices of academic governance and control, we surface examples of resistance which often involve bending, avoiding or disrupting ableist organisational logics. In this paper, semi-fictionalised creative writing allows us to explore the relational politics of anti-ableist working practices, without revealing sensitive details. Through critical reflection and analysis, we will highlight the tensions and creativity involved in attempted academic anti-ableism, whether they change these logics on a grand and enduring scale, or whether they are small and fleeting.

This autoethnographic study examines the complex negotiation of professional and personal identity through the lens of a U.S.-based academic navigating a transnational research collaboration, against the back drop of rising political uncertainty. Centered on the lived experience of a mother and scholar participating in an academic collaboration in Ireland, the work explores the emotional, ethical, and embodied labor of working and parenting during a time of rising political instability in the United States.

Drawing from personal vignettes and narrative reflections composed over a six-month period (January–July 2025), the research engages with themes of transnational belonging, fear, identity, and the moral tensions of professional mobility in turbulent times. The methodological approach used draws on autoethnographic traditions that center memory, relationality, and embodied experience as core sites of knowledge production. Vignettes were crafted from field notes, journal entries, memory and personal recordings, and analyzed thematically through iterative cycles of reflection, synthesis, and relational meaning-making. The analytic process foregrounds affective resonance, social context, and narrative clarity, inviting readers into an exploration of identity that is both deeply personal and socially situated.

Emerging from this work are interrelated themes of relationality, moral anxiety and identity rupture and reconstruction. Findings point to the embodied tensions between care labor and academic labor and presence and absence, in a globalized higher education environment. Experiences of parenting while abroad are placed in direct conversation with political realities at home, including safety concerns and growing authoritarianism. These tensions reveal both the emotional demands and ethical strain of cross-border work in politically volatile times.

By weaving personal narrative with scholarly inquiry, this autoethnography offers insight into how international collaboration, professional identity, and parenting intersect in complex, sometimes contradictory ways. It calls for a more human-centered and ethically attuned understanding of working, parenting, and living through political upheaval.

This autoethnographic article explores my journey as an adult educator navigating the often-stressful landscape of traditional positivistic scholarship within academia. Through a series of arts-based research (ABR) engagements, including poetic inquiry, I examine how these creative practices provided a cathartic space for personal and professional growth, challenging the dominant epistemic norms that often constrain academic identity. I delve into the emotional labor involved in reconciling my pedagogical philosophy with institutional pressures, revealing how ABR fostered a deeper understanding of my role as a researcher and teacher. Findings illuminate the transformative power of ABR in cultivating resilience, fostering critical reflexivity, and offering a more holistic approach to scholarly inquiry that prioritizes well-being and authentic expression. This work argues for the integration of ABR as a vital methodology for adult educators seeking to reclaim agency and cultivate sustainable scholarly practices beyond the confines of conventional academic expectations.

This panel presentation recounts the conceptualization, mission, development and works of the Arts-Based Research (ABR) Global Consortium founded in 2019 at the ECQI in Edinburgh as part of a Game Changer session. Since 2019, its core team and expanding membership have worked to fulfill its mission by conducting an arts-based research study, publishing on ABR philosophy and practices, providing global classrooms and seminars, presenting at conferences, and developing arts-based research best practices. In this presentation, we review our history, publications, seminars and best practices while aspiring towards future goals. We invite the ECQI community to join us.

The Gateway Access Plus (GAP) service, developed by North Tyneside Council in northern England, aims to address the health inequalities experienced by people with multiple, complex health and social needs – particularly those disengaged from healthcare services due to substance use, mental ill-health and homelessness. Delivered through a partnership model and funded via the NHS, the GAP service offers individualised support, holistic health planning and hardship funds to mitigate access barriers. This paper presents findings and reflections from an evaluation designed not only to understand the implementation and impact of the service, but to model participatory and trauma-informed research practices in contexts where traditional methods may reproduce harm or exclusion.

The evaluation design primarily involved semi-structured interviews with GAP clients, staff members and representatives of partner organisations, informed by insights from a series of lived experience workshops. Central to the methodology was a commitment to relational ethics, built through collaboration with people in recovery and frontline practitioners. The participatory workshops shaped ethical and practical decisions about how and when to engage individuals who may be in active addiction. Trauma-informed adaptations – such as practitioner-mediated recruitment, flexible consent and scaled-down sample sizes – were introduced to prioritise participant and researcher safety over data volume. These choices reflect a deliberate shift from extractive to caring research practice.

Findings highlight how the GAP service provides not only practical support but meaningful relational connection for people often isolated from both services and social networks. Gendered patterns in need illustrate the importance of intersectional, contextualised understanding of vulnerability. This paper argues for the centrality of ethical, participatory methods when working with structurally marginalised populations. Where people experience multiple disadvantage and associated stigma, co-produced and care-focused research approaches are vital for creating knowledge that is both impactful and just.

Background: Service providers offer trauma-informed care, and clergy provide informal and formal support to Christian women survivors of intimate partner violence (Nason-Clark et al., 2018). However, there is scarce research on how social workers, psychotherapists, managers of women's aid agencies (service providers), and Cameroonian and Nigerian clergy (clergy) collaborate to support African Christian women survivors of intimate partner violence in England.

Aim: One objective of this study was to explore how service providers and clergy collaborate to support these women, providing insights for practice, policy development, and research.

Method: The researcher employed interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 2009) and conducted remote, semi-structured interviews with purposefully selected service providers (N = 9) and clergy (N = 9) in England. The data was collected between June 2020 and March 2021. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analysed.

Findings and discussion: Service providers and clergy reported a lack of collaboration and expressed a desire to collaborate to support these women. A collaboration guide was created to facilitate their collaboration.

Conclusion and implications: Service providers and clergy play a vital role in supporting African Christian women survivors of intimate partner violence. They need to collaborate to deliver comprehensive care to these women and the broader African Christian community. The study recommends that service providers and policymakers adopt an intersectional approach when addressing intimate partner violence within this community. Furthermore, future research should investigate how clergy and service providers can establish and sustain collaborative relationships.

References

Nason-Clark, N., Fisher-Townsend, B., Holtman, C., McMullin, S. (2018). Religion and Intimate Partner Violence: Understanding The Challenges and Proposing Solutions. New York, Oxford University Press.

Smith, J.A., Flowers, P., & Larkin, M. (2009). Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method and Research. London, Sage Publications Ltd.

Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) offers a powerful methodological framework for engaging with lived experience in its full complexity, especially when testimony extends beyond human voices to the symbolic meanings carried by objects.

This presentation discusses a study that employs IPA to explore the meanings of restored personal belongings of survivors of the October 7^th attack on Israel. Initially perceived as silent, everyday items such as chairs, photographs or musical instruments were transformed through a rehabilitative process of destruction and restoration into more than material remnants. Participants interpreted the rehabilitated objects as symbolic witnesses, telling stories of lost homes, fractured communities and enduring resilience. Research led by an IPA approach captures these layered meanings and illuminates how individuals make sense of trauma through their relationships with objects.

By treating objects as carriers of memory and meaning, the analysis demonstrates how objects become active participants in human experience, embodying personal, familial, community and cultural narratives. Metaphors, such as cracks, silence and resilience, provide participants with a language to express what resists direct articulation. Telling one's story through the stories of objects enabled participants to personify the abstract, render trauma tangible and project everyday life worlds into experiences of loss and trauma. For qualitative research, this highlights the importance of listening not only to what is said but also to the metaphors and silences through which meaning is constructed in relation to material objects.

Methodologically, the study foregrounds the double hermeneutic of IPA: participants interpret lived experience through the language of objects, while the researcher interprets that interpretation into a broader phenomenological account. This dual movement from idiographic attention to collective insight demonstrates how symbolic analysis of objects foregrounds how participants' narratives imbue the inanimate with voice and meaning and broaden epistemologies that prioritize human testimony alone.

This study explored the lived experiences of 3 women subjected to technology-facilitated sexual violence (TFSV), employing in-depth qualitative interviews and reflective thematic analysis. The themes that emerged included the forms of online abuse encountered, the impact on women’s psychological and social well-being, the coping strategies employed, and variables related to each abusive incident, such as the characteristics of the platform or the perpetrator’s relationship with the victim/survivor. Participants reported traumatic responses to the incidents, enduring emotional distress, hypervigilance, social isolation, emotions of fear and shame, and a profound erosion of trust in both digital environments and institutional support systems. Participant recruitment proved exceptionally challenging, reflecting the ethical, emotional, and contextual barriers that frequently refrain trauma survivors from participating in research. This presentation will critically reflect on these challenges emphasising the need for participant-led, flexible, and emotionally safe recruitment and interviewing practices. Establishing trust required prolonged engagement, transparency, and survivor control over disclosure depth and timing. On this basis, the empirical findings of the study will be discussed in relation to these methodological considerations, highlighting how participants' willingness to disclose sensitive experiences was shaped by their perceived control over the process and the researcher’s capacity to create a safe, empathetic space. The findings underscore the need for ethical, trauma-informed, and survivor-centered methodologies in qualitative research on TFSV. The presentation will conclude with methodological recommendations for future qualitative studies on TFSV. By integrating reflection on methodological issues with empirical insights, this study contributes to both the substantive and procedural understanding of researching TFSV.

Interpersonal violence in sport (including psychological, physical, sexual abuse, and neglect) has increasingly been recognized as a multifaceted social phenomenon with serious implications for athletes’ well-being. Although the concept of safe sport has gained international attention as an ethical and institutional imperative promoting respect, equity, and protection from violence, its implementation and related research continue to face significant challenges and remain inconsistent across cultural contexts.

This study situates the Greek experience within broader international efforts to advance transformative and culturally informed qualitative research. The presentation has two main aims: (1) to present findings from a qualitative study exploring the attitudes and perceptions of Greek sport administrators and coach educators regarding interpersonal violence and the promotion of safe sport, and (2) to discuss key methodological and ethical challenges arising from this work. Conducted within the larger multinational Erasmus+ project Culturally Informed Safe Sport Coach Education e-Toolbox (CICEE-T, 2022–2025), the study draws on ten semi-structured interviews analyzed thematically through a social constructionist lens.

Findings revealed diverse and often contradictory understandings of safe sport, accompanied by a frequent minimization of the phenomenon’s severity, conceptual ambiguity about what constitutes interpersonal violence, and limited awareness of safe sport principles. Participants often described incidents of violence as isolated or exceptional, disconnecting them from the systemic and cultural dynamics of sport. Narratives tended to individualize perpetrators and normalize unequal power relations, reflecting broader patriarchal and hierarchical structures. Organizational responsibility was frequently displaced onto external factors reinforcing a logic of responsibility avoidance.

In concluding this presentation, we discuss some of the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting qualitative research on interpersonal violence in sport. We also offer suggestions for future research that centers athletes’ voices and agency, emphasizing the importance of co-constructing knowledge that allow us to re-imagine sport organized in different, safer and more inclusive ways.

What if young people had a state? One run by-and-for young people, with the support of adults and organisations working with-and-for them. This proposition builds on innovative anarchist, activist and academic practice for re-imagining the state in diverse and plural state-like forms (Cooper, 2018). This initiative develops as an alternative to forms of youth research and participation that tends towards tokenism, where young people are present but not powerful; or, indeed, not adequate to enable young people to become virtuoso organisers, designers, artists and citizens able to collectively engage with the challenges of living meaningful lives in a world in excess of its ecological boundaries. This presentation seeks to share emerging practice as the youth state is founded in Manchester. This is a collaboration between Unit X – an interdisciplinary creative, art and design platform at Manchester School of Art and Design – and the Greater Manchester Youth Combined Authority – the apex regional youth democratic assembly representing 650,000 young people and 28 youth charities and local assemblies. From January to April 2026, 350 students working across 7 thematic projects will meet with the GMYCA representatives to co-design new agendas. The Unit X students will collaboratively develop a series of state-like interventions into young people’s lived experience, which will be mobilised through the GMYCA and aligned networks and processes. The youth state is a speculative and prefigurative practice orientated towards understanding the function of collective infrastructures of peer, mutual and state-like care and support as it can be created and nurtured, reversing the decades of neoliberal assault on collective bases of solidarity and power in communities (Fisher, 2018). As such we are collectively investigating, what is the youth state approach to research, data, ownership and the boundaries or possibilities of youth-led research beyond neoliberalising institutions.

Theories of the ‘built environment’ formulated in the fields of architecture, software studies, and game design, come with assumptions about human sensory aesthetics in both real and virtual environments. Aesthetic dimensions play a large role in shaping our spatial habits, which entail corporeal “relational techniques of lived abstraction” (Massumi, 2014). The software rendering of space – in architectural models and game design - underscores this aspect of lived abstraction, relying on abstract forms such as vectors, shapes, and volumes, all of which are visual aesthetic elements that figure prominently in shaping our sense of belonging and alienation (de Freitas et al, 2019). In this presentation, we report on research investigating complex urban contexts where young people navigate policed environments and attempt to reclaim buildings built precisely for surveillance and control. This research is framed by theories of investigative aesthetics using various software methods to expose contested territories that are not properly reported or represented by regular data methods, often because the truth is inconvenient and buried. We use software to extract and visualize data pertaining to spatial justice, with an emphasis on the role of speculation when synthesizing data. Our project pursues “hyper-aesthetics” to expose the hidden spatial experience, where “to hyper-aestheticise is to heighten, elicit or exacerbate the capacity of bodies, technologies or states of matter to sense and increase perceptual experience” (Fuller & Weizman, 2021, p.58). We discuss sensory ethnographic data collected in New York City, and data from design experiments using game software, where the aesthetic of fantasy, hidden forces, and eerie abstraction shed light on young people’s experiences. Workshops with participants exposed the labyrinthine geometry of a/symmetric flows of bodies, and a warren-like space of crisscrossing paths, forming sites of intensive affect and a “right to opacity” in the midst of police-security watch towers.

In some interviews I conducted with pregnant adolescents as part of my PhD project on Equity Access to Inclusive Education for Pregnant Adolescents in Thailand, I observed some silences, pauses, and many short answers that, from my observations, were filled with various stories and emotions. In these situations, if the researcher does not pay adequate attention during analysis, some essential aspects of the data may be easily overlooked. The question is how to interpret these pauses, silences, and a simple response like ‘I don’t know’, and how we can uncover what remains unsaid between the lines. The method I use to echo the stories of pregnant students is Situational Analysis (SA), as developed by Adele Clarke, which highlights the interrelated foundational methodologies in pragmatist philosophy and interactionist sociology. SA includes various theoretical concept methods such as social world/arenas, situation of unit analysis, researcher reflexivity, and analysing complexities, including positionalities and differences. It also requires rich and diverse data that would be empirically constructed through four kinds of maps, followed by analytic works and memos that would allow us to understand the situation as a whole. According to this, the project aims to demonstrate how the Situational Analysis is employed to help researchers analyse and understand the complex situation of pregnant students in Thailand and make their voices heard.

During the period of emerging adulthood, individuals with a history of parental addiction are at significantly higher risk of disrupted identity formation, maladaptive coping strategies, attachment insecurity and mental health difficulties. Despite these findings, little is known about how young adults make sense of these experiences with their parents and may mobilize resilience processes in this crucial developmental transition. This qualitative study aimed to explore the lived experiences, psychosocial needs and protective factors among young adults who were raised by parents with addiction problems (i.e., alcohol, drugs, or gambling). Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with emerging adults (aged 18-25) whose parents had a history of substance or gambling addiction. The interview guide explored childhood experiences, perceived family dynamics, emotional and relational needs, as well as pathways of personal growth. Data were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis framework. Five overarching themes emerged including “living in emotional uncertainty” (i.e., chronic instability, fear, and shame that dominated family life), “becoming an adult too soon” since parentification and undertaking responsibility prematurely replaced childhood safety, “the invisible child” as silenced emotions and secrecy shaped young people’s identity and self-worth, “breaking or repeating the cycle” reflecting the experiences of some participants who reproduced addictive or self-destructive behavioural patterns, while others engaged in therapy, education, and caregiving roles that fostered awareness and resilience, and finally “redefining belonging” which echoed the participants’ attempts to build connection through substitute relationships with other “families” or the community and develop new meaning making of their experiences. The findings highlight the risk of intergenerational transmission of addiction and the enduring impact of parental addiction on emerging adults’ emotional regulation, relationship patterns and self-concept. Implications are discussed for prevention, early intervention for this age group and inclusive psychosocial policies addressing young adults with addicted parents.

Research on teachers' well-being and resilience exists extensively in international studies, yet Greek research studies remain limited. This paper investigates Greek secondary school teachers' well-being by studying individual, social and environmental influences and mediating variables on their mental health and resilience and mental health.

The presence study employed an international research protocol based on the work of Nastasi & Borja, (2016). Three focus groups discussions were the basis of empirical data collected during the school year 2024-25. The sample included 21 secondary school teachers from public schools in Heraklion and Rethymno, Crete, Greece. The study also integrated ecomaps (Matsopoulos, 2017) as an additional data collection method, which builds upon information gathered from focus groups. The final results were based on a synthesis of these two data collection methods.

Data collected were coded with a qualitative approach (Ponce et. al., 2022) and involved both deductive and inductive reasoning in which an initial coding scheme applied, using a broad set of codes, which was then generated, refined or redefined (based on the

dataset) as an interpretive step. These codes were generalized for both ecomaps and focus groups. The initial coding scheme was based on the Teacher Well-Being Project Qualitative Codebook (TWB, 2023), an internal working document which was developed from the work of Nastasi et al. (1998) and further refined by the Promoting Psychological Well-Being Globally Project (Nastasi & Borja, 2016)..

The main findings of the study showed that a supportive and healthy school environment fosters emotional stability, while teachers also reported stress and anxiety linked to interactions among family, community and educational systems. One of the most prominent findings of teachers’ stressors that emerged was the newly introduced to the Greek educational system, of individual and school unit evaluation. This new policy of evaluation is obligatory in all Greek schools.

Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy (TA), introduced by the psychiatrist Eric Berne in the late 1950s, is a robust psychological theory and psychotherapeutic approach. Even though TA is clinically applied across a wide range of client groups who either have mental health conditions or experience difficult life events, there is currently limited empirical research in this field.

This presentation outlines the research design of my PhD study, guided by a constructivist-interpretivist paradigm, which aims to increase understanding of the TA bereavement clinical work through the eyes of both TA practitioners and bereaved clients. My study focuses on the participants’ lived experiences through their stories and subjective perspectives; hence, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), as well as focus groups and individual interviews, were selected as the methodology and methods, respectively. Specifically, ten TA therapists participated in two focus groups, while I conducted individual interviews with five TA therapists and five bereaved clients.

During my presentation, I will give an overview of the IPA underpinnings through which I, as a researcher, attempted to give voice to participants’ experiences. In addition, great attention is paid to the IPA coding process and the way participants’ perspectives and experiences, as expressed in their statements, were identified. In addition, following data analysis, five superordinate themes and 18 sub-themes were identified, revealing several facilitators and barriers to offering TA therapy for bereavement, the significance of the therapeutic relationship, and how TA therapists can utilise TA and bereavement theories. Moreover, the majority of the participants highlighted the scarcity of both TA training and research on bereavement.

This innovative study highlights the potential benefits of TA in supporting individuals dealing with bereavement. Nevertheless, additional research is needed to build on these findings.

This critical ethnographic qualitative study explored Black body-based healing practices and coping strategies used to resist and titrate the impact of racism and oppression. It also examined how Black individuals use their bodies to regulate their nervous systems to heal and cultivate liberatory practices. Grounded in theoretical frameworks such as Black Psychology, African Indigenous Healing Systems, Liberation Psychology, and Critical Race Theory, this research investigated the intersections of Black Aesthetics, Psychology, and the body through the lens of the Africanist Aesthetic. The study employed interaction analysis and reflexive thematic analysis to analyze non-verbal and verbal data collected from two focus groups. Findings revealed the profound significance of community, cultural expression, and embodied practices in fostering empowerment and cultivating liberatory practices within the Black community. Participants highlight the role of movement, sensory experiences, and nature-based practices in grounding their identities and facilitating emotional and spiritual healing. The Africanist elements, including improvisation, marathoning, high effect juxtaposition, cultural fusion, and the aesthetic of the cool, are integral to understanding the complex dynamics of psychotherapeutic movement observation. This study addresses the gap in resources and prioritization of white assumptions in psychotherapeutic movement observation and somatic-based healing practices, offering a population-specific framework for community wellness and clinical intervention. By centering Black strengths-based approaches and culturally resonant practices, this research contributes to the advancement of liberatory practices within the Black African Diaspora.

In a world marked by ecological, socio-political, and mental health crises, the need for embodied, dialogic, and person-centered practices has never been more urgent. This qualitative study investigates Viniyoga therapy, a personalized approach to yoga that adapts breath, movement, and meditation to the unique needs of the individual, as a form of collaborative and transformative care. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fourteen experienced Viniyoga therapists, the research explores how therapeutic goals are conceptualized and achieved within one-to-one settings.

Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the study identifies three interwoven therapeutic aims: bringing balance, cultivating self-regulation, and guiding transformation. These aims resonate with current calls for care practices that acknowledge vulnerability, foster resilience, and support human flourishing in the face of global uncertainty. Two illustrative case studies show how therapists co-create individualized practices with clients, highlighting how embodied listening and adaptive movement become forms of dialogue and healing.

This inquiry situates Viniyoga therapy as a globally relevant, culturally adaptive, and dialogic modality, one that flows across disciplinary and healthcare boundaries. Far from being a static tradition, Viniyoga emerges as a dynamic, relational practice deeply rooted in the ethics of presence, care, and responsiveness to the “more-than-human” dimensions of healing (breath, energy, environment).

In this way, Viniyoga offers not only an integrative health intervention but also a model of collaborative qualitative engagement with human and planetary well-being. This paper invites researchers, practitioners, and communities to consider how person-centered, embodied practices can contribute to transformational change through polyphonic, creative, and situated dialogues, even (and especially) in challenging times.

Research in ‘caring professions’ identifies emotional labour as a significant societal challenge, with more recent studies indicating this is a growing issue. One approach to addressing this is building emotional resilience, using emotional reappraisal. challenges to this approach have been identified, highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of how to support these processes.

While there are plenty of neuroscience and quantitative based methods for studying this, adequately robust qualitative methods are less readily available. This presentation describes ongoing work to build such a method drawing on several relevant theoretical and methodological components.

Several theoretical lenses are utilized both for constructing the approach to data collection as well as data analysis. Two foundational theories are Barrett’s theory of constructed emotions, which provides a foundation for examining how meanings are added to experiences. As well, a dialectical approach to how meaning develops provides a framework for investigating participant emotion reappraisal processes.

Data gathering and analysis is iterative. It begins with studying participants’ experiences in a hybrid program (online gatherings and platform guided attention directing and reflection scaffolding) for building emotional resilience, based on the above theories as well as micro-developmental processes. Participants’ textual responses to reflective prompts are first analyzed to understand how they make sense of micro-moments in their process. These are used to create a systemic mind map used during the interview as a form of dynamic scaffolding, enabling the co-exploration of the researcher’s initial hypotheses about the participants’ emotion resilience building journey.

The semi-structured interview utilizes a dialectical behavioral chain analysis approach to elicit granular meaning units to reveal how emotions are being constructed and potential reappraised. Analysis of interview transcripts uses a dialectical approach to how participants are developing the skill for reappraisal.

Psychotherapy is often idealized as a space of healing and connection, yet it remains deeply influenced by sociocultural systems of power. This paper explores how White-identifying dance/movement therapists experience and articulate embodied White supremacy within therapeutic relationships. The research is situated within global contexts of inequity, interdependence, and the urgent need for relational repair. While most scholarship conceptualizes Whiteness as a cognitive or sociocultural construct, this study explores how racial dominance is embodied, lived, enacted, and potentially transformed through somatic awareness and relational practice. Using an arts-informed qualitative design, participants engaged in iterative cycles of embodied reflection, movement-based exploration, creative expression, and collective dialogue. Data were collected through written reflections, photographs, and virtual collaborative sessions incorporating both verbal and nonverbal responses. Reflexive thematic analysis identified patterns across participants’ narratives and embodied experiences. Five interrelated themes emerged: (1) Embodied White Supremacy in Daily Life and Therapeutic Practice; (2) The Struggle to Articulate and Confront Embodied White Supremacy; (3) The Role of Metaphors and Movement in Understanding White Supremacy; (4) Professional Identity and White Supremacy in Therapeutic Relationships; and (5) Overcorrection, Cognitive Dissonance, and the Tension Between Intention and Instinct. Findings demonstrate how embodied, creative, and collective processes can deepen critical reflexivity and expand the methodological possibilities of qualitative inquiry. This work contributes to global methodological discourse by modeling an integrative, body-based approach to exploring systemic power and illuminating how embodiment can cultivate relational repair, humility, and transformation, fostering spaces of hope, connection, and collaborative practice in challenging times.

Writing autoethnography through cultural ways of knowing embedded in the Caribbean Diaspora, concerns writing through global histories and relational practices of belonging. I conceptualize autoethnography within the context of writing by way of centering cultural ways of knowing embedded in the Caribbean Diaspora. In doing so, I seek to find different ways to reveal the challenges, limitations and possibilities of writing autoethnography as a research method, by way of interpreting how different communities of Diaspora come to know and understand their embodied experiences. With this in mind, I broach Diaspora as a site of interest to understand how Diasporised embodied knowledge, through different political locations, social and cultural conditions come to offer countervailing ways of knowing to undo colonial histories. One of my concerns with Diaspora is this relationship with the Diasporic subject and the nation-state, and how this relationship promotes and constructs contemporary ways of knowing civic forms of belonging. How, then, and what are the ways in which the public and social spaces of Diasporic peoples come to be constituted? The challenge here for autoethnography is with interpreting these incommensurable moments of belonging immanent to Diasporic experiences, and also to interpolate these incommensurable moments into some textualized medium from which the autoethnographer can draw. What I am concerned with is, how do these embodied historic colonial conditions of belonging continue to exist and inform the everyday lived experiences of the Diaspora? How does, the Diasporised-subject, be it through cultural ways of knowing and doing, come into political interpretive strategies to engage their ensuing public sphere? How does the Diasporised-subject know and understand when a particular place, social interactions, communicative exchanges come to be nuanced through colonial meanings, and simultaneously engendering a discursive performative citizenry, that culminates into ways of knowing the self and community?

One of us cared for her mother with cancer, and two of us have lived with cancer ourselves. From the beginning, many voices offered us imposed identities linked to cultural master narratives. Päivi was described as “a self-sacrificing caregiver of her dying mother.” A doctor told Eeva: “You are a cancer patient. Rest and follow the treatment plan.” A colleague told Satu at a Christmas lunch that, according to his physician wife, “the post-surgery period would be very difficult for her.”

Our collaborative autoethnography, what we call a trio-autoethnography, begins from these moments. We respond with counter-narratives grounded in embodied practices. Päivi reframed her role as a continuation of lifelong competence: after raising children and caring for her stepfather, she produced good life for her mother. Her calendar, where professional work and daily care coexisted, became a matter of balance rather than sacrifice. Eeva started dressage riding for the first time, working her body into strength and precision in the saddle, reclaiming agency the clinic had taken away. Satu laced her ski boots and set off on a fifteen-kilometre track right after an endoscopy, narrating herself not as weak but as enduring, rhythmic, and moving.

We analyse these counter-narratives through affective infrastructures and narrative agency. The waiting room, the stable, the ski track, and the chain of care shaped how we felt and we tell our stories. In dialogue we circulated experiences, re-storied them, and co-created ways of resisting imposed identities. Our contribution is to show that caregiving and illness identities are not determined by medicine or culture. We can remake them, so that agency and good life remain possible despite illness.

Over the last five or six years, the One Health and Conservation Medicine MSc programmes have encouraged students to consider which research approaches may best suit the research questions they feel, personally, drawn to explore for their dissertations. This has been achieved through a Research Approaches course that challenges students to find and refine their own question, emphasising approaches and paradigms across disciplines. Unusually for a College of Medicine, this course has integrated creative methodologies and autoethnographic inquiry among the options available to students.

During this time a growing number of students have chosen to undertake autoethnographic research projects. This recognises the growing awareness of how entangled we are with the planetary health, welfare, food, agricultural and ecological systems we seek to sustain and optimise. It further recognises the need for reflexive interdisciplinary collaborative practice to address these challenges.

In this presentation, we review the autoethnographic research undertaken to date. We start by discussing the rationale for introducing AE as a research option and the reasons students have chosen to adopt this as a mode of inquiry. We present the research questions explored, the knowledge contributions made and the paradigm shifts these have made possible.

Projects conducted by our diverse, international student body have ranged from the connections between ADHD and food system transformation, the role of interbeing in clinical practice, the challenges of protesting against the logging of old growth forests and those associated with working as an Official Veterinarian who is interested in posthumanist approaches to food system transformation. This modest sample highlights the importance of first and fourth person research and the reflexive turn as we attempt to meet the planetary challenges we face with greater self-awareness. We propose that AE supports an engagement with process and practice that supports relational connections and collaborative practices.

In an era defined by global crises and interconnected uncertainties, this co-authored project explores how autoethnography can serve as a relational and transformative mode of qualitative inquiry. We present a dual perspective—two faculty members who first encountered autoethnography within a doctoral mentorship and who now, as colleagues, continue to navigate the shifting terrain of higher education in the United States. Our shared inquiry examines how collaboration, vulnerability, and reflexivity shape research, teaching, and professional identity in challenging times.

Our engagement with autoethnography did not arise from institutional endorsement but from necessity, curiosity, and the conviction that lived experience holds scholarly value. Situated within the complex and often precarious conditions of U.S. higher education—marked by institutional pressures, questions of belonging, and calls for equity and transformation—this study becomes both timely and urgent. What began as a pedagogical relationship has evolved into a sustained dialogue across experience, discipline, and identity, reflecting the flows and connections that traverse contemporary academic life.

Through this collaboration, we identify six interrelated navigational practices—contextual awareness, theoretical grounding, clarity of purpose, relational responsibility, engagement with foundational literature, and preparation for reception—as ways of orienting within the uncertainties of autoethnographic work. These practices reveal the creative, ethical, and affective dimensions of scholarship that emerge when researchers work with, in, and for their communities.

By foregrounding the emotional, relational, and institutional labor of co-creation, this project contributes to ongoing dialogues about collaboration, mentorship, and transformation in qualitative research. We offer autoethnography as both method and way of being—nurturing spaces of care, resistance, and hope amid the evolving realities of higher education.

This session offers a supportive space for researchers to consider the mix of capacities they bring to their work and to design one small practice they can try after the conference. The approach is whole-person and heart-centred. It names five elements in a circle, each linked to a way of knowing and acting: Earth (embodied presence and participation in practical activities), Water (emotional perception and reflective clarity), Fire (the heart – purpose and care), Air (analysis and clear language) and Space (openness and intuition). The model is descriptive rather than prescriptive; different people will find different mixes that serve them. The five-elements framing within a research context first emerged as a heuristic device in my study of ‘community’ in community-led housing, but here it is used as a tool to bring attention to the qualities and activities of the researcher.

Who the session is for

Researchers at any career stage and from any field who use qualitative approaches, including those who are curious but cautious about reflective or embodied practices. There is no ideal profile. Participants are invited to notice what already helps them, and, if they wish, to explore one new practice.

Session flow

1. Welcome and framing (10 min):

Brief introduction to the five elements and the session principles: there are many good ways to be a researcher; start with your strengths and choose your own area to stretch into.

2. Private self-mapping (10 min):

Participants mark a simple radar/circle for Fire/Water/Earth/Air/Space and note where their current mix helps their practice.

3. Menu of micro-practices (10 min):

The facilitator will outline how each element offers small, low-effort practices to try, for example:

o Earth (embodied presence and participation): one deliberate act of being there – joining a practical activity, walking the site or using the senses to notice materials, rhythms and movements; optionally, translate a recurring observation into a simple checklist.

o Water (emotional perception and reflection): a three-minute feelings/clarity memo after interviews or meetings.

o Fire (purpose and care): check alignment of your core purpose and vision at the start of a project; build in a one-sentence values check before a design or sampling decision.

o Air (analysis and clear language): identify your most effective media to work in for analytic tasks (visual, verbal, writing, etc); define one ambiguous term before coding; sketch a brief mind map.

o Space (openness and intuition): take a five-minute pause (quiet sitting or gentle walk) before major analytic decisions; allow time for daydreaming and a mix of recreational activities to bring in unexpected influences; keep a short insight log.

4. Optional pair/triad share (10 min):

Prompt: ‘One strength I appreciate; one practice I might try.’ Feedback only if requested.

5. Stations with examples (25 min):

Participants will have the chance to browse tables with simple materials they can adapt. One table will include illustrations from community-led housing (for example, prompts for mapping a shared situation, or a short ‘who/for what/with what authority/how recorded’ community guide). Another might invite attention to more-than-human aspects (tools, spaces, regulations, ecologies) and how a chosen practice might engage them. The specific examples will be confirmed closer to the time.

6. Commitment and close (15 min):

Participants will be asked to note the practice they will try, when they will try it and how they will gauge whether it helped. Those who wish can add an email to join a light-touch post-conference writing circle to share short reflections.

Accessibility and care

Materials will use clear layout and plain language. People will be welcome to move, rest or step out as needed. Quiet participation is valid and there is no requirement to speak. Where possible, examples will be offered in text and visual formats.

Expected outcomes

• A one-page Whole-Person Researcher Canvas that participants can take away and adapt.

• A personal plan for one micro-practice to test in their own setting.

• An optional writing circle to collect short reflections after the congress (for a blog post, zine or short memo).

• For those interested, access to example prompts and templates from the community-led housing study.

Facilitator

Anna Rose Hope, a researcher working with community-led housing in England. Research methods include constructivist grounded theory and situational analysis. Current interests: developing a toolkit for community in policy and practice; exploring how purpose, emotional clarity, embodied presence, analytic care and openness can be brought together in research, and how small, well-made practices can support collaboration.

This Dream Team session proposes to rethink and reimagine the life of data through qualitative and postqualitative lenses by considering data’s capacity to act, transgress, trouble, and produce. In Western research, data is often objectified as a passive, inert, and disorganized resource to which order and value are added thanks to humans’ analytic acumen (MacLure, 2013; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018). As researchers, we are taught to manage data as technicians (St. Pierre, 2024), to filter, code, and categorize it in order to make it worthy by academic standards. Data is therefore largely treated as a commodity which is insufficient in itself—some ‘thing’ that’s always in need of (higher) human intervention and transformation. In this Dream Team session, we therefore ask: what might happen if we consider data not as passive but as active, as able to shape and transform us as much (if not more) as we attempt to shape it?

Building from scholarship rooted in decolonial thought, posthumanist theory, and Indigenous epistemologies, this session invites participants to explore how data exceeds positivist categories, partakes in affective flows, and productively troubles the unfolding of research encounters. Rather than stabilizing data as fixed representation, we wonder how we can engage with data as alive, relational, and unruly. Isn’t data is, after all, a label we feel we must put - for fear of not being deemed rigorous enough - on the encounters that make our research projects?

We therefore offer to explore, during this session, collaborative and creative ways of being and becoming with data (rather than seeking to master, order or contain it), prompted by the following theoretical elements:

Drawing on Barad’s notion of intra-action (2007), we acknowledge that we are, in fact, constantly intra-acting as we merge past and present selves through working with the data. Going further, relying on our own lived experience, as posthuman autoethnographers, has the power to overturn the exploitative paradigm and means we have to forge relationships with our own voices as data;

Working with MacLure’s concept of glowing data (2013, 2023), we attune to how data-as-lived-experience can provoke, unsettle, and transform the very conditions and methods of research;

Some core principles of pluriversal praxis (Escobar, 2018; Ortega, 2025) require that we think with data in ways that refuse the fiction of one universal world or epistemology. We accept that they lead us to see and accept that data lives within relations—stories, lands, and memories that exceed capture or translation;

Some Indigenous perspectives view and honor data as gift, as Kovach (2021) suggests, rather than seeing it as a disposable kind of commodity. This view has the capacity to alter our practices, ethical commitments, onto-epistemological orientations, and methodological choices.

The aim of this Dream Team is not to develop yet another set of procedures for dealing with data but rather, to listen and reach for frictions and reciprocities as we recognize data as a co-participant in world-making, and collectively engage with ways of becoming with data differently in our research projects. We are particularly interested in what emerges when researchers acknowledge being “taken elsewhere” by data—into uncharted affective, material, and relational terrains.

Participants will therefore be invited into a collaborative exercise to map how they currently perceive their relationship with data and where some of the theoretical elements shared above might take them. Using storytelling and visual mapping tools, we will sketch where resistance, friction, boundaries, contradictions, and flows are encountered, thereby attending to the multiple ways in which vibrant data moves us, resists categorization and ownership, and troubling the assumption that one universal truth resides in data waiting to be unlocked.

Utilization of research findings is a crucial part of evidence-based mental health service development. The Association for Regional Development and Mental Health (EPAPSY), the largest NGO in the mental health field in Greece, has made it part of its mission to develop practice-relevant research as guide for service evaluation and development. In this panel we present examples of qualitative studies that have been carried out with this aim. In the attempt to standardize provision of brief psychotherapy as part of the Association’s long-standing Mental Health Day Centre, the difficulties in ending psychotherapy were found to be an obstacle; thus, the qualitative study of therapists’ perspectives on managing termination in brief psychotherapy. The recent creation of an Early Intervention in Psychosis unit necessitated reaching out to young people with first episode psychosis. This in turn made apparent our limited understanding of the factors that facilitate or hinder your people’s timely help-seeking; thus, an investigation of the duration-of-untreated-psychosis from the perspective of people’s experiences of help-seeing and treatment. The even more recent creation of a program of psychosocial intervention for the prevention of youth violence and delinquency led to a needs assessment study in the local community to identify appropriate partnerships and optimum strategies and alliances to build a sustainable community initiative to prevent youth violence. Finally, the recovery based mission of EPAPSY led to adopting the WHO QualityRights Toolkit, a collaborative tool for evaluating human rights and quality of care, for the evaluation of its services. Here we will present the current pilot use of the Toolkit in selected EPAPSY services. The specific presentations will showcase examples of practice-led and practice-relevant research, that may be conducted in the context of mental health associations to support the evaluation, planning and development of services.

On 6 February 2023, devastating earthquakes struck Turkey, resulting in 52, 000 casualties and 100.000, 000 injuries. It was referred to as the “Disaster of the Century”. Social media and news coverage inundated millions with unfiltered graphic images, stories, and videos. To date, no published studies have investigated people' s lived experiences of the disaster through media exposure. Using Reflexive Grounded Theory methodology, this qualitative doctoral study aims to explore people' s behavioural and emotional changes, processes, worldviews, and recovery through semi- structured interviews. Participants are recruited as Turkish adults who did not directly experience the earthquake, using a theoretical sample that allows for the development, refinement, and challenge of emerging themes. So far, preliminary findings from the first ten interviews indicate that media- exposed secondary mass trauma functions similarly to primary trauma, inducing significant emotional arousal. At the same time, already existing worldviews seem to be reinforced further, acting as anchors to guide resilience, behavioural, and emotional changes. Overall, changes function as a process of appraisal for survival, forcing populations to adapt to the new reality, both individually and collectively. Participants also exhibited behaviourally adaptive and maladaptive responses, indicating strategies to mitigate intense emotional arousal, alongside resilient and lasting changes. These changes emphasise safety against potential future exposure, as more than 70% of the Turkish population lives in first— and second-degree earthquake zones. The findings will have implications for news agencies and legislators, enabling them to understand the overall effects of media exposure and potentially develop strategies to inform and induce long-lasting change in people's lives. Additionally, the study will also provide a detailed model to explain people's responses to mass traumatic natural disasters, enabling counselling professionals to understand and develop effective treatment strategies, along with offering further evidence towards developing secondary media trauma literature.

I worked for the Canadian Red Cross on their Virtual, National Disaster Management team after completing my undergraduate degree. As a caseworker, I spoke directly with victims of natural disasters, completing assessments and providing financial and emotional support for their recovery. I was working on the 2017 British Columbia wildfire operation when an unusual call landed on my desk: a herd of horses had been spotted, in bad condition, near Canim Lake First Nation. The fires had ravaged through 100 Mile House and the horses had been separated from their natural range and their ancestral caretakers.

Care, under the efficient, procedural, and human-centered bureaucratics of disaster management didn’t leave much room for prioritizing animal rescue. There was space in the policy, however, for advocacy and something in the voicemail I had listened to, implicated me in an ethics of care that extended beyond formal mandates, drawing me into the more-than-human relational responsibility that the community had participated in for generations. From a province away, I had to locate food, water, safe pasture, and caretakers for the herd.

Using a reflexive autoethnographic approach, informed by phenomenology and Indigenous ways of knowing, I explore how this experience transformed my perspective, unsettling the assumption that crisis management need be efficient and transactional. The horses were more than animals caught in the crosshairs of disaster, they represented ancestral lineages of care and connection to land and history. Caring for them honoured Indigenous practices of stewardship and was a small but impactful reconciliatory act. In light of this years’ theme, “Global flows, relational connections, and collaborative practices in challenging times,” I put this small, but instructive story forward as an example of why taking time for participation, connection, attention, and advocacy is necessary, even in crises that seem to demand an acute response.

When disasters are remembered online, memory rarely appears as a seamless narrative. Testimonies freeze mid-sentence, images blur, audio collapses or videos abruptly end. These glitches, commonly seen as technical failures, become, in fact, vernacular signs of trauma. They fragment stories, echo the ruptures of catastrophe and embody the impossibility of total recollection.

This paper develops a “glitch ethnography” of disaster memory, focusing on digital traces left by survivors of floods and wildfires in Attica. So, the emphasis is mthodological: how do broken media fragments generate new modes of meaning? Drawing on online testimonies and user-generated archives, I explore how “error” itself acquires symbolic force, mirroring uncertainty, loss and the fractured temporality of survival.

Rather than dismissing glitches as noise, I argue that they open an alternative ethnographic lens. In silence, in pixelated screens, in truncated voices, memory insists, not as polished testimony but as disrupted truth. By placing Folklore Studies in dialogue with qualitative inquiry, the paper highlights how disasters challenge not only communities but also researchers, urging us to embrace rupture as a method of knowing.

This qualitative inquiry explores how individuals affected by the 2020 Beirut Port explosion navigated their recovery through the interplay of positive psychology practices and social support networks to foster resilience and enhance well-being. The study investigates how internally cultivated psychological strengths and externally anchored social ties supported the reconstruction of resilience and personal well-being in the aftermath of collective trauma. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with six Lebanese participants aged 30 to 50 years old, and their narratives were analyzed using reflective thematic analysis to uncover noticeable patterns of meaning and response.

The findings reveal that positive psychology practices, in particularl mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, and spirituality, emerged as central strategies for emotional regulation and coping. These inner resources enabled participants to cultivate a mindset oriented toward recovery, restoring a sense of hope, autonomy, and agency amid widespread disruption. At the same time, the role of social connectedness was critical. Familial ties, community bonds, and collective acts of solidarity provided emotional support, reinforcing emotional resilience, meaning-making practices and enabling relational healing rooted in cultural belonging.

The study further highlights the importance of consistent routines and recovery practices that are sensitive to Lebanon’s sociocultural realities, offering supported, custom-made, and locally consequential tools for recovery and transformation Such culturally attuned, locally situated interventions offered practical, accessible tools for psychological and social transformation. The research underscores the value of integrating both individual and community-based approaches into post-trauma support systems.

This work contributes to a growing body of qualitative knowledge at the intersection of public health, psychology, and disaster recovery. It demonstrates how resilience is not merely an individual trait but is relationally co-constructed and contextually grounded. The study ultimately affirms the transformative potential of positive psychology and social support to facilitate integrated pathways toward healing, adaptation, and future preparedness for individuals and communities alike.

In the process of co-creating a harmonious civilisation, we are learning to embrace both entropic and syntropic forces of nature and to balance them. As individuals we are mastering the skill of directing our attention with conscious awareness, through which we are discovering our own nature (which is the nature of the world and of our reality). Conflict inevitably arises, because we have been conditioned to suppress and deny parts of ourselves. Political systems are a reflection of psychological dimensions of society, the personal is political and war is a political act. In order to substitute war with less destructive mechanisms, we are working towards understanding its adaptive role in evolution of consciousness and with it the importance of assuming individual responsibility. Being able to transition from a role of a disempowered victim or bystander is essential, because warfare originates on a subtler level. We cannot transcend war (same goes for patriarchy, destructiveness of capitalism or nationalism and other unsustainable ideologies), we must first embody it. The nature of our reality is fractal, therefore we encounter polarization at the level of particles, individuals, societies. However, polarity is only a matter of perception. On the level of the mind phenomena is defined in relation to its opposite, meanwhile the embodied properties lie on a spectrum. Photons exhibit wave-particle duality, we are never only feminine or masculine, only the self or the other, only the subject or the object, only operating from the mind or from our intuition, only the victim or the aggressor. Fearing polarization is like fearing fear itself. Existence is endlessly oscillating between perceived opposites, flowing, transforming. This is the nature of man, his power lies within accepting and allowing this nature. That is how he exists as a human.

The aim of the study was to examine a) the extent to which AI models
can produce high-quality thematic analyses of interviews with students with
learning disabilities and ADHD regarding their difficulties and sources of
support throughout school and University, and b), whether the thematic
analyses produced by AI models are comparable to those produced by
humans (experts and non-experts). This was part of a larger study
investigating school and University experiences of young adults with dyslexia
and ADHD regarding their encountered difficulties, strengths and sources of
support. Participants were 14 Higher Education students studying in Athens,
Greece who had a diagnosis of learning disabilities and/or ADHD. The
students participated in individual semi-structured interviews. The data were
analysed using a thematic analysis method by faculty members and student
assistants and through AI models. Four categories of thematic analyses will
be compared: (a) analyses produced by an expert (psychology faculty
member), (b) analyses produced by a pre-trained AI model (LLaMA), (c)
analyses generated by the BART-base model, fine-tuned specifically to the
interview data, and (d) thematic analyses extracted by the psychology
assistants who conducted the interviews. The quality of the analyses will be
assessed through automatic metrics (ROUGE-1/2/L, BERTScore, etc.), which
will compare each analysis with the corresponding experts’ analysis in terms
of lexical and semantic similarity and human evaluation by two independent
experts (faculty members), who will rate each analysis based on four criteria:
faithfulness, coverage, coherence, and style, on a five-point Likert scale. The
findings are expected to provide insights into the extent to which AI models
can support qualitative data analysis and the development of assistive tools
for researchers and educators working with students with special educational
needs.

This paper explores the use of generative AI (GAI) in qualitative research through the metaphor of the Intergalactic Bummer Train, a silly but serious conceptual vehicle proposed to name the affective, ecological, material, conceptual, and colonial conditions of contemporary inquiry (More Worlds Collective, 2015). As qualitative researchers increasingly engage with GAI, we find ourselves riding “a machinery of depletion” (More Worlds Collective, 2015, p. 11) that reshapes the terrain of knowledge production.

The metaphor offers a multidisciplinary lens for understanding this shifting terrain and imagining alternative futures. Intergalactic signals the multiplicity of worlds, ways of knowing and being, and relations that GAI constrains and enables. Bummer attunes to ecological collapse and planetary emergency, naming the feeling of unknown but inevitable destruction. Train invokes setter-colonial infrastructures and enduring multispecies violences, invoking the tracks laid to progress racialized capitalistic genocide. Riding this train—whether we remember boarding or not—carries us toward an uncertain destination.

Qualitative researchers must consider the assemblage of AI-assisted research as a moving system that carries us along, that increasingly mediates our practices, and institutional engagements. Thinking with the Intergalactic Bummer Train opens space to recalibrate how we travel—to research differently, through renewed commitments of relationality and critically reflexive stances towards institutions. Rather than simply applying GAI to existing methods, we call for methodological experimentation that embraces the More Worlds Collective’s (2025) notion of terraformatics, an ethico-political methodology that seeks to humbly and specifically limit harm to the conditions of place-based existence through a range of methods.

This is not a call to disembark but to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1), to ride the bumps and turbulence as part of inquiry, to engage multispecies relationality inside and out, and to imagine “another kind of study” (More Worlds Collective, 2025, p. 13).

This paper critically reflects on the use of generative AI in qualitative analysis. It draws on an experiment in which Microsoft Copilot was used to do an initial analysis of public discourse on autism from the Trump administration - specifically, briefings by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (April 2025) and Donald Trump (September 2025). Using Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis, we prompted Copilot to examine these texts and their reception by the media and the inclusive education community. Our aim was to assess whether AI could support nuanced, context-sensitive engagement with language, power and ideology.

We found that the AI-generated analysis suffered from consistent gaps in depth and contextual sensitivity. Key theoretical framings, such as the medical model of disability, were omitted. AI also struggled to synthesise commentary, interpret ideological tensions and engage with silence and exclusion, and particularly around neurodiversity and inclusive education. These omissions were most pronounced when prompts included multiple sources or required interpretive nuance.

To address these limitations, we refined our approach by segmenting tasks and embedding theoretical cues, which improved coherence but still required substantial human intervention from a transdisciplinary research team. Our findings suggest that AI may be able to scaffold qualitative inquiry but cannot replace the interpretive labour essential to critical analysis - especially in politically charged contexts. This paper contributes to emerging debates on AI in qualitative research by foregrounding what AI routinely misses: nuance, contradiction and the ideological work of language. We argue for a reflexive, cautious integration of AI tools, and call on qualitative researchers to remain attentive to the epistemic risks of automation - particularly when analysing discourse which shapes public understanding of topics such as disability and inclusion.

This paper discusses the sociomaterial implications for students’ academic writing in higher education when considering Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Academic writing has been a means of assessing knowledge in higher education since the 19th century, through essays, exams, and other written products (Kruse, 2006). Previous research on student and GenAI co-writing is contradictory. GenAI is at best considered a digital tutor, a dialogic partner or at worst a crutch that leaves students with little knowledge or incentive to write themselves (Flenady & Sparrow, 2025; Giannakos et al., 2024). Sociomaterial theories generally agree that humans and machines comingle and shape pedagogical practices in different ways (Fawns, 2022). This presentation speculates that human-material collectives become shaped by humans, AI technologies, contexts (such as higher education pedagogy), and affects (including ethics). Shifting and unpredictable connections within human-material collectives leave higher education with several potential futures, where academic writing may become nurtured, diminished, or accentuated. The presentation opens up for joint speculations on the future of collective human and GenAI academic writing in higher education. The paper is written within the context of the CO-WRITE project (2025–2027), which explores students’ collaborative academic writing in hybrid learning spaces in higher education.

References:

Fawns, T. (2022). An entangled pedagogy: Looking beyond the pedagogy–technology dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education, 4, 711–728. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7

Flenady, G., & Sparrow, R. (2025). Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors. Teaching in Higher Education, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2025.2497263

Giannakos, M., Azevedo, R., Brusilovsky, P., Cukurova, M., Dimitriadis, Y., Hernandez-Leo, D., Järverlä, S., Mavrikis, M. & Rienties, B. (2024). The promise and challenges of generative AI in education. Behaviour & Information Technology, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2024.2394886

Kruse, O. (2006). The Origins of Writing in the Disciplines: Traditions of Seminar Writing and the Humboldtian Ideal of the Research University. Written Communication, 23(3), 331-352. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088306289259

As I discussed and argued in my previous work, the perspective of “Spaceship Earth” in US international education of the 1960s-1970s, while departing from love and care of the common world, nonetheless actualized egocentrism and technocratic control of the Other. Curiously, such a paradox is not rare to find in contemporary Chinese international schooling. This article begins with a case study of a summa cum laude graduate from an international high school in China, who was taken by his teachers and himself as a model for international-minded citizens. The discourse analysis focuses on how the campus culture and the international courses he wholeheartedly took shaped this model global citizen’s thinking and acting of “empathy” as a set of devalued, rational methods to solve problems and improve efficiency. The second part of this article historicizes how “international mindedness” (including empathy) as the educational goal of the International School Association and IB curriculum turned from a cosmopolitan value into a scientific method that works as a transnational “currency” that is also named “competency.” Thoughts of Kant, Dewey, and Piaget and their relations are explored as the epistemic conditions that historically make such a change possible. This article combines discourse analysis of a case study and a history of the present to shed light on the blurred boundary between human and machine when empathy is developed as a scientific method of problem-solving and peace-making in international education. It concludes by calling for another possible understanding and acting of empathy from Chinese ethics and aesthetics that integrates rationality into an ontology based on情 (Qing, insufficiently translated as feelings).

This paper presents intra-sectionality as re-imagining of intersectionality’s theoretical possibilities. Building on insights from a larger arts-based embodied inquiry using body-mapping, which explored how asylum practices in the UK shape the lived and embodied experiences of asylum-seeking young women aged 16 to 21 from Global South, this paper develops the concept of intra-sectionality. Rooted in Feminist New Materialism and informed by posthumanist thought, embodiment in this work emerges as a dynamic relational process, continually shaped through exposure to policy, artistic practice, environment, and affective encounters. Through iterative intra-actions between policy, theory, and body-mapped narratives; asylum-seeking bodies are understood always in state of becoming. This recognition led to articulation of intra-sectional becoming, which highlights the endurance, adaptability, and resilience of asylum-seeking young women whose lives are continually reconfigured through material and affective entanglements. Their artistic expressions, read through a Feminist New Materialist lens, reveal how marginalised bodies are not fixed within static grids of intersectional categories but move through shifting relations of power, policy, and affect. Recognising the intellectual labour of foremothers such as Frances Beal, Deborah King, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, this work honours intersectionality’s foundations while opening grounds for extending its analytical possibilities. Following Nash’s encouragement to expand intersectionality by honouring its roots while simultaneously recognising epistemological defensiveness of Black feminist thought, and engaging Puar’s insistence on assemblage to unsettle fixity around intersectionality; intra-sectionality emerges as both a continuation and expansion of intersectional thinking. It begins with relations: the ongoing entanglements of policies, bodies, affects, and histories through which categories do not pre-exist relations but continuously re-made. Body-maps, in this work emerged as intra-ventions that unsettled fixity and made uncertainty visible, materialising asylum-seeking bodies as both enduring sedimented weight of exclusion and control, and remaining in motion, adapting to shifting socio-political conditions to claim recognition and liveability.

This paper is drawn from a 9-year international qualitative research partnership between three scholars of Education at three institutions (1 in Brazil; 2 in the U.S.). By bringing Anzaldua’s notions of borderlands and Nepantla (1987) into conversation with Simpson’s theory of water (2025), we toil with our purpose as scholars and members of our local and global communities. Our goal was to explore how critical theories, philosophies of learning, and qualitative research methods viewed through an international lens might help us and our students open new possibilities for how we teach, learn and conduct research. Over time, we became frustrated by our discipline’s pragmatist, technorationalist tendencies to frame research as a means toward solutions to technical problems. We found ourselves creating a third space within the borderlands of our respective nations and cities in addition to the borders of our discipline and the methodological traditions of social science. We became “other,” increasingly aware of the dangers of being living proof of the fallacy of the material and ideological borders people construct and police. As Nepantleras we were disobedient; we let go into an epistemological freefall. We were supposed to “collect data” while engaging with the complex realities of day-to-day lives shaped by centuries of settler colonialism, racism, and oppression. We dialogued, observed, made notes, listened, photographed, and collected mementos, but we refused to refine or confine our “take withs” inside the Ivory Tower. We sought escape routes, dreaming of freedom, flowing like water, rushing through, seeping under, evaporating above and raining down upon borders that create so much pain. We moved with topographies of the current historical moment, reaching with our bodies and hearts, not only our minds, for that which we do not know. Our “research” is lifegiving, life-sustaining amidst local and global crises. This is our story.

This study presents a feminist, intersectional, and participatory methodology for co-producing knowledge with young women from marginalised communities. In intersecting global crises, such as social inequality, political instability, and gendered violence, qualitative researchers are called to engage collaboratively with those most affected by structural injustice. Grounded in feminist intersectional theory and inspired by Nancy Fraser’s notions of socioeconomic and symbolic injustice and misframing, this research situates methodological innovation as a vehicle for inquiry and transformation.

The study sought to understand how young women experience their encounters with the welfare system and social workers, and how participatory action research (PAR) can open dialogical and empowering spaces that reframe these relationships. Conducted in Israel, the project unfolded in three iterative phases: (1) in-depth interviews with 25 young women aged 18–29 from marginalized groups, exploring their lived experiences of distress and professional intervention; (2) collective analysis sessions in which participants discussed, refined, and reinterpreted the findings; and (3) participant-led initiatives that translated insights into social and professional action.

Methodologically, the research demonstrates four interrelated practices of participatory inquiry: (1) coalescing into a group, (2) fostering shared ownership of the research process and outcomes, (3) creating multiple centres of power and interpretation, and (4) cultivating interdependency as an ethical stance. These practices illustrate how PAR can bridge micro-level experiences with macro-level critique, producing actionable knowledge grounded in care, reflexivity, and solidarity.

This presentation contributes to global dialogues on feminist and participatory methodologies in challenging times. It offers an example of how action research can move beyond representation toward co-creation, reshaping the research encounter and social work practice.

Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, Freddie Gray, George Floyd. These are not just hashtags but actual people who have been sacrificed to maintain White supremacy. After every death, Black women have led the charge in fighting police brutality in the streets, often putting their lives on the line in the process. While Black women are often stereotyped as “strong,” they still have mental health needs that must be addressed (Brown & Keith, 2003). Their role as community leaders often results in feelings of isolation and exasperation as they are less likely to receive formal support (Atkins & Rollings, 1996) The confluence of race and gender presents a dynamic that must be explored in counseling (Heath, 2006). Using Womanism as an analytic lens, the authors intereviewed several Black women to understand their views on activism, mental health, and therapy. Two primary tenets of Womanism are using everyday people to solve problems and ending all forms of oppression (Lindsay-Dennis, 2015). While this may seem akin to Feminism, Womanism uses a lens that focuses on the social location of Black women, specifically. This allows for a full exploration of the issues of Black women outside of what has been deemed “Women’s issues” by White women (Taylor, 1998; Williams, 1989, pp. 181–182) Black Women activists align with those in their community to fight racial oppression as it presents itself in the system. This paper will present findings of this research and suggestions for practitioners regarding how to best work with this unique confluence of identities.

This presentation is based on ‘Breadline Utopias’, a research project exploring currents and futures of charitable food aid in Finland. Through individual interviews, workshops, and other facilitated events, the project seeks to facilitate more equal food futures for all. This visioning is done together with various stakeholders from the field: food aid recipients, higher education students, and a diversity of professionals working in the business of food waste, food surplus, or current charity economy in European (post-)welfare affluent society. Theoretically and methodologically, our study draws from utopias as a method (Levitas, 2013) rooted in everyday life (Cooper, 2013) and from utopias as a political imagination tool (Eskelinen et al., 2020). Thus, the focus here does not lie solely in the ‘utopias’, but rather in the facilitation of imagining that reaches beyond past and present. Following our theoretical-methodological roots, we see that the starting point for ‘utopianizing’ is both rooted in and shapes our everyday lives here and now. The utopian vision, then again, seeks to break through the boundaries of our experience-based ways of knowing. However, the process of reaching beyond the known and imagining a better future is often considered difficult and challenging (Salmenniemi et al., 2024). In this presentation, we explore opportunities and challenges of ‘utopianizing’ that we have faced in our empirical work with students vis-à-vis professionals. Through these explorations, we seek to develop in-depth understandings of ‘utopianizing’ as a process. Such understanding can help both researchers and practitioners to better engage and facilitate political imagination among varying groups of research participants and stakeholders.

As a community embedded researcher (CER) on REALITIES (Researching Evidence-based Alternatives in Living, Imaginative, Traumatised, Integrated, Embodied Systems), we have been exploring how to reimagine our health services and systems through Flip of the Coin CIC. We are a nature-based community arts organisation which is women and lived experience-led. We have been exploring new approaches to implementing equitable and effective public health initiatives. We have co-production at our core; our participants are community members and decision makers, and as our research highlights issues and inequalities within our community, we work together to address them.

The entanglements between creativity, greenspace and sharing lived experience have allowed this project to become something unexpectedly powerful. We started out exploring how we could reimagine our health system and have found ourselves in a place where our lived experience is proving to be a vital and integral part of what we do and how we connect to each other. The merger of lived experience, creativity, natural greenspace and deeply honest conversations between everyone involved has meant that we are having a greater impact on community health and wellbeing than foreseen. It has also meant that these elements have all become so deeply entangled in the healing process that unpicking where one starts and another ends is impossible. By allowing the project to become in its own way, without forcing it, has meant that it is constantly becoming in response to the people who intra-act with it.

Through case studies, testimonials and works of art we are documenting how community health is impacted by belonging to a community garden with a strong focus on the strength and solidarity found in creating and sharing lived experience.

This paper presentation is an overview of a Welsh health board (CTMUHB) supported research project that took place between 2020-2025. The arts based interventions that the research focuses on took place in a "field" hospital in Wales- a temporary hospital set up during the COVID-19 global pandemic- and in the local community, culminating in an event that took place on a community field during COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Situated in South Wales, UK where the author/ presenter is based it illustrates the transformative quality of storytelling and other arts based and social presecribing practices within statutory health services. All participants identified as being adversely impacted by the pandemic and the associated social restrictions. The research drew on storytelling methodology and enabled the participants involved to take part via the means that had most resonance for them; usually linked to the intervention they had "received". This included poetry, short stories, art work and dialogue with the researcher, which was transcribed. The poems, spoken words, stories and art works were treated as "vibrant matter" (Bennett, 2010) and the researcher/ paper presenter created her own art work and poetry as response; to sit together as a collective art installation. This is an example of practice and practice-based research as co-construction (Simon and Salter 2019, 2020) and situates those involved in the project as active, agential storytellers. Stories, storytellers and witnesses are all framed as active agents in a material-discursive world (Barad 2007; Simon and Salter 2019). Learning points from the research includes the importance of bearing witness to the stories we tell; and the potential for arts for health interventions (and research into those interventions) to be vehicles for personal and social transformation. Examples of these stories of transformation will be shared through the presentation as well as other key learning points.

This presentation reflects on my experience of researching community-led housing in England and, from that experience, offers suggestions for how researchers might consciously bring their whole selves to qualitative work. I describe a simple model of five elements, drawn from Tibetan wisdom traditions, that captures the different qualities I drew on through the project: Earth (embodied presence and participation in practical activities), Water (emotional perception and reflective clarity), Fire (the heart – purpose and care), Air (analysis and clear language), and Space (openness and intuition). The model is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and different researchers will find different mixes that serve them best.

This model first emerged in my analysis of ‘community’ in community-led housing, where I used the five-elements framing to describe how community is grounded, felt, enacted, articulated, and imagined, with the longer-term aim of developing a shared language and toolkit that can support community practice and policy.

Turning that lens toward the researcher makes explicit how different ways of knowing shape what we can see and understand. In particular, the approach helps to: (1) attend to the body, place, and practical activity as sources of understanding; (2) notice and work with emotions and atmospheres that influence participation and interpretation; (3) hold values and commitments in view without letting them override evidence; (4) make language and categories clearer across multiple actors; and (5) allow periods of openness so that new patterns can emerge before being tested.

I suggest that this holistic stance supports more honest reflexivity, richer collaboration across roles and clearer analytic claims. Rather than offering a prescription, the presentation invites researchers to consider their own configuration of capacities and to experiment with small practices that fit their contexts.

Between Christmas 2023 and Easter 2024, three teen girls attempted suicide within our plantation community in Liberia. Sadly, one died, one was hospitalised for nine days, and the third was hospitalised for a few days. This qualitative study explored the questions everyone was asking within the community - what was driving teen girls to suicide and how could future suicides be prevented? A modified version of the Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach was used, what I’ve come to call PAR’PEL, which stands for Participatory Action Research & Participatory Experiential Learning. PAR’PEL like any other PAR approach follows the same cycle of identification of needs, deciding the best course of action & implementation of the best course of action; all of which were done in direct consultation and collaboration with community members. The main finding from the PAR part of the PAR’PEL project was that teens lacked the psychological know-how to tackle the difficulties they faced. The Participatory Experiential Learning part of PAR’TEL relied on evidence based theory, on what works in youth suicide prevention, to craft practical life application lessons. This was then integrated into our monthly youth Bible study such that each Bible study session covers a theme on mental well-being and/or suicide prevention directly. The Bible study club is run by a well known community member and myself. To achieve success in youth suicide prevention, our suicide prevention efforts ought to go beyond the therapy/hospital room (ie. curative action after the fact) and be engaged directly with teens within our communities (ie. preventive action). Therefore in this PAR’PEL project, emphasis is placed on active learning, specifically psycho-educational learning. This presentation then showcases how my modified PAR project, PAR’PEL, is being utilised as a tool to fight against youth suicide within my local community in Liberia, West Africa.

This Dream Team session will explore poetry as a radical, affective, and indigenous method of inquiry—one that disrupts traditional academic forms and centers embodied, emotional, and political knowledge. Poetry Inquiry is not merely a stylistic choice; it is a methodological intervention that foregrounds voice, vulnerability, and resistance.

Drawing on previous work (Garcia-Meneses, Enciso Domínguez, and Chanez-Cortés, 2023), we will engage with the concept of the schizo-affective poem as a form of epistemic rupture. We want like to keep exploring how poetic expression can channel rage, exhaustion, and resistance within neoliberal academic structures. The poem’s fragmented, multilingual, and emotionally charged form challenges the sanitized, rationalist norms of academic discourse, offering instead a visceral, affective critique of institutional violence.

We will situate such poetic practices within post-qualitative and affect theory frameworks, arguing that poetry allows for the articulation of experiences that are often unspeakable in conventional research formats or conventional settings like higher education. We will also examine how poetic inquiry can serve as both data collection and analysis—capturing the nuances of feminist pedagogies, identity, and resistance in ways that are deeply relational and ethically attuned.

As a dream team, we will work on original poems as data and result, inviting participants to engage with the emotional textures of feminist praxis, specifically pedagogical/teaching practices. We will also reflect on the ethical dimensions of poetic inquiry: whose voices are amplified, how emotion is represented, and what it means to write with, rather than about, participants.

At the end, the participants could choose to be part of a research project or just continue writing poetry by themselves.

This paper introduces Wheeling Ethnography, an innovation in qualitative data collection designed to study embodied experience, affective regulation, and the illusion of agency within engineered environments of late modern capitalism. Combining two well-established methodologies - sensory ethnography and situational analysis - Wheeling Ethnography anchors sensorial observation around an anthropological node: a focal participant whose immersive engagement with human and non-human actors becomes the center of analytical rotation. From this node, three systematic rotations unfold. Nodal rotation attends to the participant’s sensory immersion and bodily attunement; social rotation traces interactions among patrons, staff, and material infrastructures; and sensorial rotation captures the ambient sounds, lights, and rhythms that scaffold emotion, perception, and behavior. Together, these rotations form a “wheel” that moves fluidly between layers as situations evolve.

Borrowed from the emic metaphor of the “Wheel of Fortune,” this framework transforms a cultural symbol into an etic methodological tool. Developed through fieldwork in two off-Strip Las Vegas casinos catering primarily to local residents, the method privileges naturalistic, real-time observation without interviews. This approach yielded rich data on micro-interactions, embodied gestures, and atmospheric cues as they unfolded, revealing how spatial design and sensory conditioning choreograph affect and agency while exposing the patterns, disruptions, and absences of everyday life.

Wheeling Ethnography offers a portable and transparent framework for qualitative researchers seeking to capture the infrastructural logic of a field, from casinos and gyms to airports and cafés, providing a new grammar for data collection on the construction of sensorial experience and emotional regulation in late modern capitalist environments.

This presentation recounts my effects to cultivate a research practice capable of capturing the more ‘invisible’ dimensions of practices encountered during fieldwork. The atmospheres seemingly vibrating with tension. The moments we experience as reverberating throughout our bodies. The pre-linguistic forms of communication which always, at times unknowingly, inform and shape our research journeys.

Inspired by Critical Disability Studies and Critical Phenomenology, this presentation draws on a two year-long fieldwork conducted as part of my ethnographic doctoral research studies (carried out between March 2023 to March 2025). The aim of this study has been to better our understanding of disabled families’ lived and embodied experiences of negotiating the meaning of disability – of their families – with professionals throughout the Danish social welfare system. Following these families to and from such encounters has been a humbling experience. I quickly came to the realisation that it required more than written descriptions to fully depict their lived realities. I needed a way to capture the palpable yet unspoken tensions that so characterised these intimate and private spaces; a way to capture the non-verbal communications of articulate, pathic bodies. To fully understand the families’ attempts to negotiate successfully with the system, the importance of considering the pre-linguistic language of the pathic body cannot be understated.

Reflecting on the concepts of ‘bodily empathy’, ‘embodied self-awareness’ and ‘embodied intersubjectivity’, I realised that the solution to capturing these important ‘invisible’ dimensions of practice was to be found in a more creative approach to methodology. Thus, phenomenological writing, poetry, sketching and knitting became my trusted research tools. This talk will delve into each of these methods, detailing the essential ways they shaped and informed my research journey from beginning to end.

In this paper, eight practicing psychologists, a dog (Oscar), white cockatoos, crimson rosellas, blue gums, plum blossoms, the words of theorists of eco-psychology and post-humanism joined together for two days with the mountains of the Darug and Gundungurra peoples of Australia, to explore questions about psychology and its capacity to respond to the climate crisis. We designed a series of psychoterratic exercises for this purpose: (1) a bio-graphical definitional ceremony, (2) a series of short lectures and readings set to the poetics of open dialogue, (3) a sympoietic vegetal-thinking exercise, (4) a bush-psychogeography and (5) a final reflection on praxis. We present our findings, written in bricolage, a compost of experiences and ideas both horizontal and vertical, written, drawn and photographic.

This institutional ethnographic study was conducted in two Social Services Departments in Israel through participant observations and individual interviews with social workers, management staff, and support personnel over several months. Observations included participation in professional meetings, supervision sessions, and daily departmental activities.

Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theory of recognition as a dimension of social justice, this study explores how social workers explicitly articulated their need for professional acknowledgment and how the ethnographic research process responded to these demands. Throughout fieldwork, practitioners consistently expressed frustration with the invisibility of their complex work and the challenging conditions under which they operate within bureaucratic systems.

The ethnographic methodology's emphasis on prolonged engagement created temporal space for recognition to develop, moving beyond superficial encounters to deep witnessing of practitioners' daily realities. The practice of "being there" communicated to social workers that their work was worthy of sustained scholarly attention, countering narratives of professional marginalization they frequently encountered.

Participant observation became a form of professional validation as researchers engaged seriously with the complexity of social work practice, learning the nuanced skills required to navigate bureaucratic systems while maintaining client-centered approaches. Through detailed fieldnotes and attentive listening during interviews, the research made visible invisible aspects of social work—the emotional labor, strategic thinking, ethical dilemmas, and advocacy efforts that typically remain unacknowledged.

This methodological recognition operated through reciprocal processes: as researchers demonstrated genuine curiosity and respect for practitioners' expertise, social workers gained confidence in articulating their professional knowledge and challenges. The ethnographic encounter functioned as a space where professional identity could be affirmed through scholarly engagement, creating what Fraser might recognize as cultural recognition that acknowledges the value and legitimacy of social work practice.

The findings reveal that ethnographic research functions beyond data collection—it becomes an active practice of recognition directly addressing practitioners' needs for professional validation.

A new primary school curriculum was launched in Ireland in September 2025. This new, four-stage, curriculum contains five curriculum areas. Curriculum specifications for each of these areas were published in September 2025. One of these curriculum areas is Arts Education. The curriculum specification for arts education advocates an integrated approach in stages one and two, and a more differentiated approach to arts subjects (drama, music and art) in stages three and four.

The presenters are teacher educators in (primary school) drama and members of the National Arts Education Curriculum Development Group. Their participation in the latter prompted them to explore the roots of drama as a subject in Ireland’s primary curriculum with reference to their own roots in drama/theatre and education. In this exploration, they use themselves as sites of inquiry, juxtaposing and making each of their voices explicit as they trace the routes that brought them, along very different trajectories, to becoming teacher educators in (primary) drama and, more recently, to curriculum development.

In their paper, the presenters draw on six hour-long conversations over the course of nine months to untangle their experiences within the dominant discourse of drama education in Ireland in which the previous drama curriculum (1999) was nested. They show how this untangling enables them to also untangle their emerging understandings of themselves as teachers/artists/researchers as they begin to work differently, as per the new curriculum specifications, with student teachers.

In their exploration, the presenters invoke the evocative power of duoethnography, and embrace the opportunity it provides to engage in meaningful self-study in the presence of each other.

In April 2024, in Jermyn Street Theatre, London, an adaptation of the book Laughing Boy (Ryan 2017) opened to a full house. Laughing Boy tells the story of Connor Sparrowhawk, a young man with learning disabilities who died in 2013. Director Steve Unwin created a breathtaking production of laughter, tears, moments of parody and overwhelming emotion. The six-week run generated a rare moment in which audience members got to know Connor and his fascination with London buses and social justice, laughed with him and felt shocked and outraged about what happened to him and so many other people with learning disabilities.

In this interactive panel we share our work exploring the conditions for transforming knowledge, understanding and political change within theatre, and the wider potential for impact using arts-based approaches. A focus group was conducted with a self-advocacy staff group who saw the play, and in-depth interviews with six out of the seven cast members. A phenomenological analysis of the latter dataset is underway. Provocations will be offered to the audience around established methodological and ethical conventions, in part to help us resolve issues puzzling us as a research team.

Our exploration involves thinking about theatre attendance and participation, the importance of accessibility and adjustments to facilitate this, and how cast members’ knowledge of learning disability changed as their awareness grew through their work. We will share a briefing report about the potential for impact using arts-based approaches including a careful exploration of the conditions for generating impact and key issues raised by cast and self-advocates. A repeated point raised by participants was how a theatre setting ensures a witnessing of what is being said, as people cannot turn away. We would like to view this panel session as a further form of witnessing, and sharing, and thinking about injustices.

PSICONECTAMOS is an initiative launched in 2022 within the Psychology Department at a Universidad. It emerged in response to a perceived sense of isolation among faculty members and aimed to foster a culture of mutual support, collaboration, and shared professional growth.

The methodological framework was based on qualitative action research and the process unfolded in four phases: Participatory diagnosis and planning, grounded in shared needs such as lack of cohesion and a sense of disorientation. Implementation of actions, through informal gatherings that combined thematic presentations, open dialogue, and group interaction dynamics. Observation and data collection, using feedback forms, participant observation, and interaction logs. Reflection and continuous adaptation, which led to the evolution of the project through gamification, the creation of digital communication channels, and the inclusion of external experts in training activities.

85% of the department joined the communication network, and the gatherings averaged 9 participants, with peaks of up to 13. Qualitative feedback revealed significant improvements in interpersonal trust, a sense of shared purpose and perceived alignment toward common goals. Moreover, the initiative catalyzed the development of an Innovative Final Degree Project framework, and promoted training activities during low-teaching periods.

100% of participants rated the gatherings as useful and meaningful for their personal and professional development. The most requested topics for future sessions include teaching innovation, collaborative research, and well-being activities among with experiential learning events.

PSICONECTAMOS is presented as a case study that validates the transformative potential of informal spaces and support networks in academic settings. Through an action research model, the initiative has strengthened team cohesion, improved workplace climate, and generated innovative dynamics that benefit both faculty and students. This experience invites reflection on the role of community and collaboration in building more human and creative university environments.

A sense of belonging is a key condition for the academic, personal, and social success of university students. The objective of this study was to explore how students within the CIVIS European University Alliance, specifically at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, University of Bucharest (Romania), and the Aix-Marseille University (France), (Greece), experience and construct belonging and inclusion within higher education settings. The research aimed to identify the institutional, social, and pedagogical factors that promote or hinder a sense of belonging among diverse student populations.

The study followed a mixed-methods design approved by the respective university ethics committees. Quantitative data were first collected through online surveys (N=752 across the three universities) exploring inclusion, accessibility, well-being, and participation. In a second phase, qualitative inquiry was conducted through focus groups and semi-structured interviews involving 35 students (Master’s and PhD levels) and 3 faculty members. Discussions were guided by a thematic interview script addressing personal experiences of inclusion, perceived barriers, and recommendations for improving student integration. Data were coded and analyzed following an inductive qualitative approach using NVivo software to ensure rigor and traceability.

Four major categories emerged from the analysis: recognition, participation, support networks, and institutional responsiveness. Belonging was perceived as a dialogical process—developed through opportunities for active participation, fair communication, and mutual respect between students and staff. Students emphasized the role of mentoring, inclusive teaching, and visibility of support services as key facilitators. Conversely, bureaucratic opacity, lack of information, and limited flexibility were cited as exclusionary factors.

Overall, the study demonstrates that belonging is not a static feeling but an evolving relationship between individuals and their academic environment. Promoting belonging through inclusive communication, collaborative governance, and continuous faculty engagement strengthens not only student well-being but also institutional cohesion across the CIVIS Alliance.

The first year of university is a turning point in students’ lives, as the rapid changes and various challenges that this transition entails can negatively affect their mental health, and a wide range of academic outcomes. However, some students face a greater number of difficulties than others, while differences in individual characteristics, personality traits, motivation, coping strategies and forms of support, can greatly influence their ability to cope with and overcome these new challenges.

The present study attempts to explore how first-year university students perceive and navigate the transition to higher education, by employing a qualitative research design, with data collected through repeated qualitative interviews held over a five-week period. Participants were 22 first-year undergraduate students enrolled in various academic departments across Greek universities. Each student participated in an initial interview regarding their expectations and perceptions about university life, followed by five consecutive weekly interviews focusing on their experiences during the first semester of their studies.

Thematic analysis of the data revealed four main patterns in students’ narratives: (i) aspirations for academic success, (ii) personal and academic adjustment challenges, (iii) social integration, and (iv) the influence of different support systems. While most participants began their studies with a positive outlook and strong aspirations, many of them faced emotional strain, academic pressure, and moments of self-doubt, especially during the first stage of their transition. Over time, many described increasing autonomy, while peer and institutional support appear to have great significance in shaping their university experiences. These findings underscore the complex interplay between first-year students’ initial expectations, their socio-emotional adjustment and their evolving perceptions of academic success during the first semester of their university studies.

Community engagement is a mutually beneficial collaboration between an educational institution and surrounding communities. Appreciative Education is a framework for building on the best of what is working in educational practice. Drawing from dissertation research on appreciative teaching practices in music therapy as well as ongoing cross-disciplinary research on appreciative community engagement, the presenter will offer findings on powerful community-based learning practices. The session will include an introduction to the appreciative education framework and a discussion of implications for educators and researchers.

This paper explores the messy relationalities that emerge in qualitative collectives working within the neoliberal academy. We propose the concept of non-friendship-friendship to name a form of academic relationality that resists neat categorization. These reflections are grounded in the work of our qualitative collective, HaSalon – The Living Room, founded in 2023 and largely inspired by ECQI. Drawing on feminist, poststructuralist, and new materialist theories of diffraction and entanglement, we analyze vignettes, diary fragments, and correspondence from our collective. These accounts trace how intimacy, hierarchy, care, and inequality intra-act in our practices, often in ways that are uncomfortable, yet generative. By situating our reflections within the specific context of an ongoing collective that has written, presented, and persisted together across continents and in turbulent times, we foreground tensions and asymmetries rather than smoothing them over. We argue that non-friendship-friendship offers a framework for understanding collective academic life beyond binaries of professional versus personal ties. In doing so, we suggest that embracing relational messiness can serve as both an ethic of resistance and a practice of survival in precarious academic times.

How do we evaluate the impact of a theatre performance when the data from the field could be sentences like “I got loving vibes” from a performer? This paper draws from my ongoing doctoral research into the perceived impact of professionally produced cultural events—especially theatre—for individuals with diverse needs. Focusing on accessibility, inclusion, and lived experience, the study engages with audiences, carers, educators, and theatre practitioners through qualitative methods such as field observations and in-depth interviews.

Rather than seeking universal metrics, I argue for a pluralistic and situated understanding of impact in the arts. Dominant evaluative frameworks tend to favour quantifiable outcomes, often demanded by policymakers and funders. Yet these approaches frequently fall short of capturing the affective, relational, and transformative dimensions of cultural participation. Drawing on the work of Eleonora Belfiore, Oliver Bennett, Matthew Reason, and others, I explore how qualitative researchers might reconceptualize 'evidence' in ways that honour embodied experience and personal testimony, without abandoning rigour or ethics.

Reflexivity and positionality are central to this inquiry. Working with structurally marginalised communities—particularly neurodivergent children and their families—requires ongoing reflection on the researcher’s own role and assumptions. I examine the tensions between research and advocacy, and the risk of projecting presumed benefits onto cultural events without critically interrogating what kind of impact truly matters, for whom, and why.

This paper contributes to methodological debates about evaluating perceived impact in contexts where conventional tools may obscure more than they reveal. It makes a case for research practices that are ethical, empathetic, and accountable, but above all, it invites continued dialogue.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine that began in February, 2022, saw millions of Ukrainians—primarily women, children, and the elderly—being forced to flee their homes. This workshop performance examines the migratory stories of four female Ukrainian musicians, now living in Ireland and Germany. We explore how these women make music as an alternative way of being and as a way to understand the self and others. Using fragments of sound and story, the workshop performance illuminates the lives of these forced migrants as they navigate new contexts. The presentation draws on narrative data and previous work with performance students to ‘theatricalise’ the research findings (Belliveau 2015). The musicians’ stories of leaving and belonging served as the source material, which was then crafted into a structured verbatim piece. Throughout the project, the team collaborated to explore ideas with the intention of avoiding the ‘objectification of the individuals’ (Denzin 2003). At the same time, we recognised that by choosing which parts to present and how, we were shaping the narrative (Blythe 2005). The deliberate inclusion of the original researcher in the performance highlights the interrelated connection between the researcher and the research, as well as the distinctive influence of a researcher’s background, knowledge and subjectivity that they bring to research. Ireland-based Ukrainian musicians were later invited to add musical layers to the piece, which they then performed live. Their contributions provided an additional ‘musical context’ that added sonic layers to the work. These combining elements transformed the experience from simply data sharing into an embodied (musical and dramatic) representation of non-linear and deeply personal experiences. Thus, this workshop performance offers new and nuanced ways to understand the lived experiences of forced migrants and de-exceptionlise displacement by placing musical identities at the centre of their stories (Western, 2020).

This paper explores how sound can serve as a rich form of qualitative data to investigate experiences of belonging, identity, and citizenship in increasingly diverse Irish primary schools. Drawing on twenty soundscape workshops conducted in two intercultural school settings, the study examines how children engage with and interpret their sonic environments. Rather than focusing on music as repertoire or representation, this inquiry positions sound as a relational and embodied medium through which children express agency and negotiate cultural identities. Using arts-based and qualitative methodologies, the research foregrounds children’s voices—both literally and metaphorically—through their participation in collaborative sound-making and reflective dialogue. The workshops generated a range of sonic outputs and narratives that illuminate how migrant children experience displacement, connection, and citizenship within the school context. Inspired by Elizabeth Ellsworth’s (2005) concept of “places of learning” as embodied and affective, the study challenges static notions of culture and instead embraces fluid, co-constructed understandings of identity through sound. This paper argues for a reimagining of intercultural music education that moves beyond tokenistic inclusion toward ethically engaged, creative pedagogies. Sound is not only a medium of artistic expression but also a powerful tool for qualitative inquiry—one that captures the nuances of lived experience, emotion, and belonging. Through analysis of workshop data and focus group interviews, the study offers insights into how sound-based practices can foster inclusive learning spaces and support children’s active participation in shaping their educational and social worlds.

A sound piece is a way of describing a sonic creation, a sonic-something that one has made. Such a sonic-something is a sound piece irrespective of audition for trees recent piece), composition (emergent or prescribed), players (trees vs mobile device vs musicians), or (more than) human animals (e.g., Masaoka, 2025; Sterne, 2025).

A sound piece is also an expression that denotes a piece as part of a larger (sonic) something. This is the case when wondering about a soundwork regardless of its classification (art, scholarship, the ocean). In this way, a sound piece can be a part of a larger piece, itself a part of a never-ending whole, or a piece of that piece. A sound piece as a soundwork or a sound piece as a part of a soundwork.

A sound piece can also be a descriptor. This can be in the sense of a positive value judgement, a sound idea, or as a written work about sound, a sound piece. From this definition, a sound piece could be a performative utterance: a good piece of writing about sound.

Because sounds are central to all forms of qualitative research, such questions are significant irrespective of a researcher’s attention to the sonic. As expressions of event, ecologies, and relations, what “sound piece” means/expresses/is/does strongly informs how sounds are conceptualized and considered.

This proposed performative presentation takes seriously McKittrick and Wynter’s (e.g., McKittrick, 2015, 2021) calls for critical forms of praxis and the use of the arts as modes for interrupting the disciplining of knowledge. In so doing, it also attends to McKittrick’s Wynterian approach of narrative-creation through critical arts. To these ends, this an essay about sound pieces will read and recorded with live instrumental accompaniment, performatively turning an essay about sound pieces into a sonic expression (sound piece).

This paper examines The MacKenzie Method as a qualitative framework for analyzing visual
data within arts-based qualitative research. Originally developed by gallery educators, this
dialogical and multisensory approach has guided art engagement for more than three decades, yet
remains underexplored in methodological literature. The method’s five cyclical stages, which are
First Impressions, Analysis, Interpretation, Context, and Synthesis, invite gallery visitors to
move among perception, inquiry, and reflection in ways that democratize meaning-making and
foreground relational and embodied epistemologies.
Grounded in pragmatist feminist and participatory pedagogies, the method draws from Paulo
Freire’s (1970) conception of dialogue as liberation and bell hooks’ (1994) anti-oppressive
education. It attends to sensory and aesthetic experience through Maxine Greene’s (1977) notion
of wide-awakeness and John Dewey’s (1934) Art as Experience. Authors of this paper uncover,
as pragmatist feminists often do (Dea, 2022), the previously invisible work of the women
educators who co-authored the method in the early 1990s. The MacKenzie Method thereby
reflects the often-forgotten contributions of feminist educators who refused hierarchical and
didactic gallery practices, seeking rather to position art interpretation as collaborative and
community-oriented.
Applied to qualitative inquiry, the method offers a structured yet flexible process for engaging
with visual data. Each stage of the process invites researchers and participants to co-analyze
visual material through sensory noticing, affective response, and contextual interpretation. This
approach supports relational ethics, shared authorship, and attentiveness to the political and
aesthetic dimensions of visual meaning-making. Responding to the growing use of arts-based
data in educational research (Freedman and Siegesmund, 2024; Flint and Toledo, 2021), the
MacKenzie Method provides a theoretically rigorous yet accessible framework for interpreting
visual material. By reframing analysis as an iterative, collective, and sensorial process, we
authors propose that this method contributes to qualitative inquiry by offering a structured, yet
open and accessible means for analyzing visual data in qualitative scholarship.

Reflecting an individualistic and neoliberal vision, qualitative research can tend to assume the individual as its’ unit of analysis, reducing everything to the individual as a site of transformation. Our contribution takes a post-anthropocentric approach to qualitative research and aims to reimagine and reconstruct the ways the subject/subjectivity has been conceived in our respective disciplines starting from the influences of poststructuralism. We explore how subjectivities can be conceived and understood beyond the individualistic reductionism of the concept of the individual, and argue for a relational and ethical approach to the concept of subjectivity that accounts for the multiplicities of bodies. Through a range of material-discursive methods we examine and enact the constitution of subjectivity within three philosophical currents – poststructuralism, posthumanism, and feminist new materialism – and outline how these debates have entered, or could enter, social sciences, humanities and psychology. Our presentation highlights how, considering the contributions and insights of posthumanism and feminist new materialism, subjectivity is not simply a social practice conducted by conscious and intentional individuals, but is an enacted bodily, discursive, and material encounter that activates and constitutes multiple iterations of hybrid subjectivities. Rather than considering subjectivity as an exclusively human, social, and intersubjective social construction, we conceive subjectivity as a discursive, material, and transpersonal production in continuous becoming. Thanks to this change in perspective, it becomes possible to rethink women, men, multispecies kin, and others in social, material and organizational action, and in wider contexts and practices. We illuminate starting points for thinking-with and about subjectivity that is ethically sensitive to discursive-material dimensions which resist an excessive focus on the individual and align with micro-political activism in qualitative research.

The way we perceive time, and particularly the future, has tangible implications for our day-to-day lives. As Facer (2019) argues, we live the present in relation to the futures we can imagine. Our relationship with the future is deeply intertwined with meaningful emotions that guide our lives (Zembylas, 2022) and can influence our sense of agency (Osberg, 2010). Amid a policrisis, the future appears grim, precarious, and at risk of extinction (Todd, 2023). In the face of AI, climate change, and the rise of totalitarian political regimes, the future is not equally accessible to everyone (Mager & Katzenbach, 2021; Tutton, 2022).

Against this backdrop, education has increasingly been framed as a tool to prepare individuals to adapt to what is to come (EU Union of Skills Strategy, 2025). However, this approach does not address the more fundamental existential questions of temporality, such as the continuation of our species and intergenerational care. Furthermore, educational spaces historically committed to collective transformation, such as adult education, are now increasingly shaped by neoliberal priorities (Finnegal & Grummell, 2020).

This paper explores how creative androgenies can offer ways of thinking with and embodying the future, cultivating empowerment, care, and agency amid the complex uncertainties of seemingly inescapable futurity. Drawing on the concept of ancestry and the practice of becoming a good ancestor in The Work That Reconnects (Macy et al., 2014), it situates ancestral care within broader questions of power, justice, and relational ethics. In doing so, the paper highlights how adult education can serve as a generative space for connection, collective agency, and transformative existential practices.

This paper presentation will offer an overview of an international research project made up of six transdisciplinary researcher-practitioners (Rolla Lewis, Peter Whitehouse, Nelly Ndirangu, Yuki Minamii, Jeff Fifield, Leah Salter) with a conjoint interest in eco-relating, trees and action research. All authors are Taos associates and Social Constuctionist practitioners amongst other professional identities and research disciplines. Working through and across these potential differences was one of the many layers of learning.

Over the two years of the project, we forged relationships with each other and each actively developed a close relationship with a tree, as part of an eco-relational “research grove”. We met regularly with each other online and with our trees in person in our own contexts; and invited our trees into the research project as co-researchers. The trees helped set the pace of our project and set the context to how we met each other as human participants. The process slowed down and was transformative on many levels. Through this presentation I will tell stories of transformation and how the project supported new understanding of how we move through the world.

As Arne Naess suggests “we are not only creatures, but creators. The world is always in the making” (2002). We are always “intra becoming” through a “worlding” process (Karen Barad, 2007). The research was an emergent beyond-human experience, where we were intra-acting from within relationships and between phenomena; creating and telling stories about what was happening for us, as we went. The project confirmed for us that we live in an entangled, diverse, moving, temporary, pluralistic, participatory, transmaterial world . I will be cross referencing "Transmaterial Worlding"- developed by Gail Simon and Leah Salter as mutually influencing and being influenced by this research (Simon and Salter, 2019).

The 2026 ECQI Call for Proposals invites theorists to harness transformative practices that interrogate the interdependency between the human and the more-than-human. Positioned within the context of education in the United States, this project reimagines the material-discursive entanglement of Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) using Feminist New Materialist thought. In thinking with Karen Barad’s concept of the material-discursive and Anna Tsing’s concept of the feral, this proposal interrogates the becomings and doings of social structures to extend Tsing’s concept of the feral into the humanities.

In this paper, I use Tsing’s definition of the feral and deploy the material-discursive to reveal ruptures in human and more-than-human entanglements. I extend Tsing’s concept of physical human infrastructure to incorporate mechanisms of social control (social norms and policies) to demonstrate how the feral can be extended and foreclosed by human and more-than-human agents. Using DQSH, this project attunes to how drag aesthetics, once relegated to nightlife, has become feral.

In the hyperpolarized political climate of the United States, I use DQSH and drag aesthetics to rethink the doings and undoings of book bans. By attuning to mechanisms of social control through drag histories, this project interrogates modern book bans as an entanglement of current and historical events. This paper provides examples of how drag aesthetics and expression have been foreclosed in history to rethink modern attempts at foreclosure. Using the archive as an apparatus, this onto-epistemological project aims to reveal how social controls intra-act with modern drag aesthetics and highlights the need for the qualitative community to harness transformative methodological practices through dialogue and collaboration in and through disciplines.

Background: This presentation incorporates community dialogues to improve crisis response in Canada. As part of a collaborative project between the University of Calgary and the Distress Centre Calgary, a World Café was held in January 2025 with community members, academics, and service providers who work with individuals experiencing crisis. Crisis was broadly defined as a state in which an individual’s coping strategies are insufficient to manage a stressor.

Methods: A World Café methodology was used to facilitate inclusive conversations at tables. Questions explored gaps and challenges in crisis response, inclusive supports, partnership development, and resource distribution. Data was collected through audio recordings at each table as well as field notes. Data was analyzed thematically.

Results: Key themes that emerged included: (1) culture and access to resources, (2) collaborative and inclusive service development, and (3) community-centred language practices. Culturally responsive communication, co-designing supports, and limitations of technology and flyers to access services were highlighted.

Discussion: The results demonstrate the emotional dimensions of crisis response and trust building. This study also underscores the importance of participatory methods to explore lived experience in order to offer inclusive crisis interventions. This research contributes to knowledge on qualitative inquiry that centres community voices and co-creation of crisis interventions.

This presentation explores innovative qualitative strategies for culturally responsive research and practice in education. It advocates a holistic philosophical and methodological reorientation that deepens understanding of diversity through interpretation, meaning-making, and contextual awareness. The approach known as intercultural qualitative inquiry is interpretive and transformative, examining how learners, teachers, and educational communities from diverse cultural backgrounds experience, construct, and negotiate meaning within educational settings. It recognizes that teaching and learning are culturally situated processes shaped by language, identity, values, and power relations. By foregrounding local voices and emphasizing the dynamic interplay between culture, context, and pedagogy, this inquiry challenges universalist assumptions in educational research. Its goal is to foster equitable, inclusive, and culturally responsive educational practices.
Within this framework, the Forum on Intercultural Dialogue and Learning at the University of Patras has grounded its work in three interrelated strategies: reflexivity, relational ethics, and dialogic engagement. These guide both research and practice, supporting deeper insight into how individuals construct meaning around diversity and human experience.
The Forum’s projects and interventions illustrate these strategies through:
a) Reflexivity—reflexive methodologies, practitioner self-inquiry, and reflective writing;
b) Relational engagement—reciprocal collaboration with students, teachers, and communities, recognizing their agency as co-constructors of knowledge;
c) Contextual immersion—action research, ethnography, and participatory observation to uncover how cultural norms shape educational experience; and
d) Dialogic and multivocal methods—narrative inquiry, storytelling, thematic analysis, collaborative interviews, and the Delphi method that promote intercultural dialogue and multiple perspectives.
By reimagining qualitative inquiry in intercultural education, this work moves beyond description toward active engagement with diversity as a source of learning, reflection, and transformation. It offers a framework for producing context-sensitive, ethically grounded insights that inform culturally responsive pedagogy and policy in an increasingly interconnected world.

In our study on how children exclude or include peers based on gender, ethnicity, social class, language and dis/abilities in early childhood education and care (ECEC) we used short-term, multi-sited ethnography. Multi-sited ethnography was used to include ECEC centers with children from different social class, ethnic and language backgrounds. To ensure diverse geographical representation the study included ECEC centers from the big cities, small towns and rural areas.

Interviews and participant observations of daily activities were conducted for about one month in each in each of the 18 centers in 2022. The researchers conducted participant observations of the centers’ daily activities for 1177 hours over 246 days, but due to the COVID-pandemic, the number of days in each center varied. The researchers interviewed 53 teachers, 11 leaders, and 10 other staff members.

Multi-sited ethnography allowed us to adjust to the needs of the centers. In some centers, staff shortages or the Covid pandemic, made it hard to find time for interviews, but with 18 centers the overall data production was secured. Having a broad geographical representation of centers and children with a variety of backgrounds made the results more trustworthy and relevant for all ECEC centers in the entire region as opposed to studying only one or two centers. Questions or issues emerging in one center would also lead to these being studied in the other centers. Thus, patterns of similarities and differences between the centers could be identified. For the researchers it was challenging to create relationships with new participants, both children and adults, every month. A thematic analysis was conducted of all interview and observational data, but the sheer amount of data was demanding. Multi-sited ethnography posed some challenges, but generated trustworthy and relevant results of how children include and exclude other children based on their backgrounds.

Content at museum exhibits, national parks, and in education curricula in the United States (U.S.) remains caught in political crosshairs; (re)igniting contentious debates around what is worth knowing, who decides, and how this knowledge is and remains legitimized in official, sanctioned capacities. While some might argue these fever-pitch debates have reached a seemingly unprecedented level, Derrida (1994) would argue that hauntings with/in the liminal spaces of the social world illustrate such specters–while not immediately and conventionally visible–represent contours always absent-yet-present and illuminate the not-yets of the past and how these potentialities enduringly haunt the present. In education, public and official knowledge related to U.S. History continues to foment polarizing discussions, especially regarding the country’s history of racism, segregation, and xenophobia. Part of a larger, ongoing qualitative project examining the (non)memorializing of people, places, and events related to the American Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement throughout Kansas and Missouri; this work examines one landmark–the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) historic site–and how such a landmark (pun intended) case in recent U.S. history–and the place commemorating it–remain haunted by specters of exclusion and racism. Particularly given the region’s fraught history with enslavement and notions of “freedom,” this work grapples with historical knowledge and education institutions within the long arc of the democratic project–one that can never quite reach itself (Derrida, 1994).

This presentation does not reject inclusive education, nor propose to fix it; after all, the educational system is not broken but functioning as designed—built on colonial logics that frame inclusion as an unquestioned good while enacting exclusions about who belongs and under what conditions (Murris, 2017; Naraian, 2021; Snaza, 2020; Spivak, 2012; Taylor, 2013). Noticing how material-discursive enactments (Barad, 2007) have produced this system makes it possible to reconfigure inclusion beyond its inherited promises and policy framings (Law, 2015). The presentation introduces the term—distributed inclusion—to reconfigure inclusion not as a fixed policy outcome or best practice but as a relational, emergent, and more-than-human doing (Braidotti, 2013; de Freitas, 2017).

In dialogue with Barad’s (2007) agential realism, Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the trouble,” and Murris’s (2017) work on educational philosophy, I diffractively read interviews with educators, camp data generated during a Literacy and Numeracy Summer Camp, policy texts, and posthumanist theory. Rather than treating these sources as discrete data sets, I read them as entangled within an apparatus, producing interference patterns that trouble what inclusion has come to mean.

Vignettes of stillness, acceleration, control, and dis/orientation trace how chairs, policies, hesitations, and refusals co-compose what inclusion does. Rather than offering solutions, the analysis lingers with contradiction and flicker—moments where inclusion moves differently.

By elaborating distributed inclusion as an apparatus that cuts-together-apart bodies, discourses, materials, possibilities, this presentation invites a shift from inclusion as a promise toward inclusion as an ongoing, unsettled practice of world-making. In keeping with the conference theme, the work foregrounds entangled human and more-than-human relations and the ethico-onto-epistemological practice of staying with the trouble of inclusion.

Participants will be asked to take part in the doing of distributed inclusion—through chairs, movements, collaborative noticing—so the presentation becomes a time-bound (but ever-moving) performative practice of inclusion otherwise.

In the context of democracy backsliding and increasing social and political polarization, schools emerge as crucial yet challenging spaces for engaging with socially divisive issues. This exploratory study examines teachers’ beliefs and experiences related to teaching sensitive social issues —defined as issues that generate disagreement and conflict within society and evoke strong emotional reactions. The aim was to explore how teachers construct their professional role in addressing such topics in their classrooms and what educational purposes they consider important. The data were collected as part of the international project T-AP 2023 „Learning Amidst Disinformation and Social Conflict: Young People and Teachers Co-Constructing Curriculum through Transnational Dialogue”, although the findings presented here derive from the Croatian dataset. The research included three upper secondary schools, selected through a maximum variation sampling strategy. Data were collected through seven semi-structured individual interviews with teachers involved in the process of co-construction of teaching and learning scenarios with researchers and students, and three focus groups with other teachers. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. A data-driven, bottom-up coding approach was employed, emphasizing semantic codes aligned with participants’ own expressions and interpretations. Findings indicate that teachers conceptualize their role as active and personally engaged, motivated by a sense of mission, responsibility, and moral obligation. Their main educational aims relate to students’ personal and interpersonal development: fostering cognitive skills such as critical thinking and argumentation, along with empathy, tolerance, and openness toward others. However, broader social and political dimensions, such as understanding power relations, systemic inequality, or fostering civic and political engagement, remain largely unrecognized or absent from their perspectives. Teachers largely approach the teaching of sensitive social issues through the lens of individual growth and respectful dialogue rather than as a means of cultivating collective agency or driving social change.

This Dream Team session invites qualitative researchers into a critical, collaborative exploration of the methodological, ethical, and epistemological tensions which arise when generative AI enters the qualitative research space. As a team working in inclusive education, we have been experimenting with Microsoft Copilot to support a Critical Discourse Analysis of autism-related briefings by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (April 2025) and Donald Trump (September 2025). These texts, situated within the Trump administration’s broader discourse on autism, offer a politically charged site for interrogating how language constructs disability, authority, and inclusion.

Our experiment was driven by methodological curiosity. Could AI meaningfully support interpretive analysis? What happens when we delegate parts of our analytical labour to a machine trained on probabilistic patterns rather than lived experience, theory or context? What emerged was a series of epistemic ruptures. Despite detailed prompts, Copilot routinely omitted key theoretical framings, such as the medical model of disability, and failed to engage with contradiction, ambiguity, and silence. It flattened nuance, misrepresented ideological tensions, and struggled to synthesise commentary meaningfully. These gaps were not incidental; they revealed the limits of AI’s capacity to “read” texts critically, especially when those texts are ideologically saturated and socially situated.

In response, we refined our approach: breaking down tasks, embedding theoretical cues, and manually editing outputs. This improved coherence but underscored a deeper concern about AI’s tendency to reproduce dominant narratives, erase marginalised voices and bypass the interpretive reflexivity which sits at the heart of qualitative inquiry. Our experience raised urgent questions about authorship, agency and the politics of automation in research.

This Dream Team session is not a demonstration of best practice, but an invitation to think together about the risks, contradictions, and possibilities of AI-assisted qualitative research. We will begin by briefly sharing our process and reflections, including examples of AI-generated outputs and the gaps we encountered. From there, we will facilitate a series of interactive exercises and discussions designed to surface collective insights, discomforts, and provocations.

Together, we will explore questions such as:

• What does AI routinely miss in qualitative analysis, and what does that reveal about our own methodological assumptions?

• How do we ensure rigour, reflexivity and ethical integrity when using generative tools?

• Can AI ever “understand” context, ideology, or lived experience, or is its role better framed as scaffolding rather than analysis?

• What kinds of qualitative work are most (or least) suited to AI assistance?

• How might we teach students to use AI critically, rather than uncritically?

• What does it mean to co-author with a machine, and how do we navigate questions of voice, power and representation?

We will also invite participants to experiment with live prompting, critique AI outputs and reflect on their own experiences (or hesitations) with AI in research, teaching and supervision. The session will be structured to allow for small-group dialogue, collective note-taking and the emergence of shared themes or provocations.

Our hope is that this Dream Team will forge a writing collective which valorises the outcome of the session through a joint publication, blog series or methodological manifesto. We are particularly interested in capturing the tensions and creative possibilities which arise when qualitative researchers engage critically with generative tools, especially in fields such as inclusive education, where language is never neutral.

This session is not about technological mastery, but about methodological vulnerability, critical reflexivity and the politics of knowledge production in an era of automation. Whether you are experimenting with AI, resisting its use or simply curious about its implications, we welcome you to join us in thinking (and dreaming) together.

Democracy has developed a bad reputation in the past decade and is often experienced as challenging, strenuous, frustrating, broken. We witness an increasing inclination towards “benevolent authorities” in the so called Western cultures, in the deluded belief a single person would make better decisions than an informed and democratically skilled collective. Faster for sure – better? Undoubtfully not. There have been a lot of insightful analyses to describe the reasons for these phenomena from psychological, politological, sociological and transdisciplinary viewpoints. But the question is: how can participation succeed? Can we contribute in democratic learning as researchers, teachers, counsellors,…?

In this Game Changer-Workshop we’ll explore how democratic experience can be actively promoted, felt, and studied through creative qualitative inquiry. Across three 90-minute sessions, participants will engage through theoretical input, experimental exercises and collective reflection, working together to generate insights into how inquiry itself can function as a democratic act. Implementing contemporary theories, we will look at emotions as relational forces that shape participation, dialogue, recognition and hence possibilities of encounter. Participants will examine how emotional dynamics influence the ways communities engage with one another, and how shared reflection can deepen collective understanding and intraconnection. By combining embodied practice with reflective discussion, the session creates a space in which inquiry becomes an act of co-creation, valuing multiplicity, vulnerability, and shared meaning-making. Depending on the size of the group we’ll engage in different kinds of playful experiments and collective decision-making, following the principle of “listening before judging” and find out, if and how this approach can help to develop and deepen democratic processes.

The topic addresses broader societal and scholarly challenges: how to foster inclusive, dialogical spaces for belonging and knowledge creation, and integrating affective, participatory and experimental approaches into qualitative research. By foregrounding relationality and shared reflection, the session invites researchers from diverse disciplines—including social sciences, arts-based research, participatory methodologies, and civic engagement—to co-develop approaches that respond to pressing societal questions.

By the end of the three sessions, participants will have experienced democratic research practices firsthand and contributed to a shared output that embodies inclusive, participatory, and affectively informed inquiry. This approach exemplifies how creative qualitative research can address urgent societal questions, supporting the development of research practices that are both responsive and generative.

Manifold is the sense of crisis, in today’s world, in research, and in the discourses about them. Collapse as a concept in the social sciences and humanities has been frequently referred to in view of an imminent environmental disaster (Pennycook 2020), infrastructural breakdown (Abuzerr et al. 2025), or an epistemic/ontological crisis in qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln 2005). In this panel, we seek to take a closer look at the notion of collapse and propose it as a fruitful lens to unravel multiply layered, ambiguous meanings emerging from the research process. Collapse encloses both the irreversible breakdown of something existing, a structure, configuration, or system, falling apart, disassembling and suffering destruction; as well as the meaning of (potential) force of regeneration emerging from a state of compression and subsequent release. While such moments of intense, often speedy densification tend to evoke associations of negativity and destruction beyond repair, papers in this panel align with research that sees collapse as part of a cyclic process of formation, collapse and regeneration (as in language evolution, Bostick 2025) in which collapse precedes and prepares transformation and change. The panel invites reflection to answer three urgent calls in qualitative inquiry: (1) how to live, understand and conceptualise our research practice in times of social and methodological challenge; (2) how to engage in meaningful research work building ‘keystone practices’ (Ryan 2025) while objects and disciplinary boundaries seemingly ‘slip together’; and (3) how to envisage and productively work towards change (Ahmed 2025) that feels more solid and satisfying than modeling a sand castle. We propose that unraveling events of collapse, the timeline(s) of their building, their stacked nature (palimpsest) and un-doing can offer such an approach, providing insight, strength and grounding that is gained from the minutiae and care of a slowing rather than speeding process.

This paper compares the process of data coding as carried out by Qualitative Content Analysis and Grounded Theory. It uses the metaphor of a city tour guide to describe how different philosophical assumptions and research objectives between and within these approaches/methods to qualitative data analysis lead to very different tours in your city of interest. In comparing these tours, this paper focuses on the relative importance of deduction and induction and the use of literature, the meaning of theoretical saturation and the process of sampling and the relative importance of reliability in coding and how ‘quality’ is understood more generally in these approaches/ methods to qualitative data analysis. While these different tour guides will offer you a different experience in terms of ‘what you see’ and ‘how you will see it’, they enrich each others’ approach to knowledge development. The paper offers specific suggestions in terms of how these approaches / methods to QDA can learn from each other and can be used in more integrated ways to offer different kinds of experiences and outcomes of knowledge production.

In this presentation, we will speak about our new book being published with Routledge, where we explore what it means to have lived experience in practice. Written by academics and activists working with and in the field of criminological lived experience, we explore the concepts and ideas that form this movement.

Sharing autoethnographic insights and experiences of both being imprisoned and working with the previously imprisoned, this is a groundbreaking book that gets to the heart of what it means to have lived experience. We offer an innovative exploration of the transformative potential of lived experience expertise in criminology and criminal justice. This book employs a series of compelling case studies and praxis examples to examine how lived experiences can challenge established paradigms and enrich education, research, practice and activism. Authored and edited collaboratively by academics and practitioners, including those with lived experiences of incarceration, this work bridges the gap between theory and practice. Our authorship and editing process was one where we ensured transparency and collaborative writing were held in the highest regard. We used a circular writing and editing process, where we each wrote a chapter and then shared and edited each other's work. With monthly meetings and an open editing process, this book speaks to the values that we wish to uphold with our lived experience advocacy. Collaboration, transparency and ensuring that everyone gets a seat at the table.

Ultimately, we hope our book inspires transformative systemic change through authentic lived voices, expertise and insights in both the fields of lived experience and collaborative writing and publishing.

What happens when data begin to outgrow the analytic frame we bring to them? This presentation traces the methodological evolution that transformed an intended thematic analysis into the development of a grounded theory.

The study began as a small-scale thematic analysis of around ten interviews exploring self- and other-blame among survivors of interpersonal trauma. Yet, as the first transcripts were analyzed, participants’ narratives resisted containment within the anticipated thematic frame. What initially appeared to be individual expressions of blame, gradually revealed an underlying grammar of moral negotiation—moments in which participants weighed emotional, relational, and social costs before assigning or accepting trauma-related blame. These recurrent patterns of moral positioning, exchange, and regulation indicated that something more complex was unfolding: not merely what or who survivors blamed for their traumas, but how and why blame was distributed across interpersonal and cultural contexts. It became increasingly evident that the data were not only describing experiences but also theorizing them.

In response, the study’s design was reconceptualized through Constructivist Grounded Theory. Data collection and analysis became iterative and comparative, guided by theoretical sampling until saturation was reached. This shift enabled the emergence of the Perpetrator–Other–Self (POS) economic model of blame, which conceptualizes blame as a moral economy shaped by psychological and socio-cultural forces. According to this model, blame attribution follows an “affordable blame heuristic,” whereby survivors evaluate the emotional and relational costs of each blame trajectory—toward the perpetrator, others, or the self—and assign blame selectively, in ways that feel both bearable and functional.

Methodologically, this project demonstrates how data can reorient the researcher’s analytic path and epistemological stance. It highlights the generative potential of flexibility, reflexivity, and theoretical sensitivity in qualitative inquiry—particularly when the data themselves demand that we expand our conceptual and methodological imagination.

Centring lived experience has gained traction in qualitative research and beyond in recent years. ‘Lived experience’, sometimes referred to as ‘expertise by experience’ or ‘lived experience expertise’ is understood here as the unique expertise held by those who have experienced first hand the socio-political issues which researchers work to understand and policymakers commit to address. In the face of global crises the value of such expertise cannot be overstated. Whilst the ethical imperative to meaningfully involve lived experience expertise is crystal clear the praxis is less so. Drawing on research with experts by experience impacted by the criminal legal system in the UK, the paper engages readers with a number of emergent tensions in these research experiences. In response, arguing for a critical reflexive inquiry approach to collaboration. Those considering or already involved in research which seeks to meaningfully position individuals with lived experience expertise in research are encouraged to deeply engage with the tensions identified to enact equity and the emancipatory potential of centring lived experience.

This presentation introduces Momentary Reflective Data Collection (MRDC), an innovative methodological approach designed to capture the intersections of precarious work, family life, and mental health. Emerging from our study of Canadian families navigating precarious employment, MRDC adapts and extends ecological momentary assessment into a qualitative and arts-based paradigm.

Drawing on over 600 responses generated during this study, MRDC was developed to capture intensive, contextual accounts of lived experience. Across a 14-day period, participants documented their realities of precarity and family life through audio clips, photographs, and written reflections in response to daily prompts. These multimodal responses provided not only descriptive content but also insight into the rhythms, textures, and temporal negotiations of everyday life under conditions of precarity.

As we engaged with this “real-time” data, patterns emerged not only in the content of responses but also in their rhythm, timing, and tone. These patterns invited a critical re-examination of what counts as “real time.” Rather than interpreting timestamped responses as neutral temporal markers, we considered how individuals actively shape their temporal experiences. Participants exercised temporal agency—delaying, reframing, or returning to prompts—when emotional readiness, relational demands, or contextual conditions aligned. Thus, what might appear as a “late” or “belated” response instead represented the right moment for meaning-making.

Reframed through the concept of Momentary Reflective Data, each response becomes less a spontaneous real-time record and more a situated, reflexive engagement—an entangled moment shaped by attention, affect, and presence. This approach not only generates intensive and contextual descriptive data but also foregrounds the relational and affective dimensions of temporality within qualitative inquiry.

Our presentation will demonstrate the methodological contributions of MRDC, illustrating how recognizing participants’ temporal agency transforms real-time qualitative data collection into a practice attuned to the “textures of time” and the lived complexities of precarious work and mental health.

Public debate on science and society involving citizens in scientific research, has led to an increasing collaboration with older adults in research projects. This shift has opened new possibilities for engaging older adults as co-researchers, meaning research conducted ‘with’ or ‘by’ older adults, rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them. Co-research provides both a methodological and experiential framework for collaboration with professional researchers. It also creates a space for older adults to reflect on their life course, experiences of aging, and roles as societal actors.

Our study explores how co-research shapes older adults’ perceptions of themselves as active agents. The research is based on an 18-month co-research project in which four older adults collaborated with professional researcher throughout all phases of the study—from planning to reporting. The data consist of a retrospective group interview, analysed using thematic analysis. The themes of the interview were informed by 15 hours of video material collected during ten workshop meetings held throughout the research process.

The findings illustrate how participation in co-research can become a turning point, prompting older adults to reinterpret events from their lived life. It activated anticipated changes in agency that were personally meaningful, not merely methodological. While previous studies have mostly emphasized the empowering aspects of co-research, our study reveals that it can paradoxically both enhance and restrict older adults’ perceptions and expectations of themselves as agentic actors. The analysis demonstrates how engaging in co-research can lead to reflections and decisions with significant impacts on everyday life, such as giving up bicycling or ending a long-term friendship. Becoming aware of one’s own life course through co-research may strengthen a sense of responsibility and safety, while simultaneously narrowing one’s social sphere and constraining future opportunities for participation.

In this paper we reflect on the depths of ableism that persist in UK social care research, theory and method. In this context, care is constructed in ways that exclude people with learning disabilities from being recognised as care-givers, positioning them almost exclusively as passive recipients of care in binarised caring relationships of carer and cared-for. We share how, as part of a larger co produced UK based project [NIHR135080 Tired of Spinning Plates] that explored the mental health experiences of family carers of adults with learning disabilities, we found our own research planning to be unwittingly reproducing ableist logics of care.

We always understood the importance of including people with learning disabilities in our research and did so in our public involvement group, however not in other phases of research. Only as the project progressed to co producing digital stories about care with family carers, did we realise the extent of our failure to include the stories of people with learning disabilities. We share our response to this failure as a process of relational learning; we revised our research protocol and ethics to include digital stories co produced with people with learning disabilities. Drawing on insights from the Wellcome Anti-ableist Research Cultures study, we reflect on this mistake as a site of critical anti-ableist academia emerging through collaborative research.

We call for an attentiveness to the ableism and resulting social injustices that persist in dominant logics about care and the consequences of reproducing injustice through social care research that fails to pay attention to unwittingly reproducing complicity in marginalisations of people in challenging times.

A substantial literature indicates that autistic children and young people are much more likely than their non-autistic peers to have difficult childhood experiences, poor educational outcomes and increased levels of mental ill health. While a great deal is known about the particular difficulties autistic children face, how they experience and make sense of these challenges has historically received less attention. Much extant research has been conducted with ostensibly non-autistic parents, teachers and allied professionals. While offering valuable insights into stakeholder perceptions, prioritising informant accounts over autistic voices has arguably contributed to their marginalisation in research, making them a largely “muted group”.

In an effort to promote more equitable knowledge production and to address epistemic injustice, the present study adopted a participatory research approach. Seven autistic young people, aged 8 to 17 years and representing a wide range of support needs, were invited to take part in a project designed to explore what they most wanted others to understand about “being me.”

Each participant began by identifying their own priorities - what they wished others to know about them - and then worked one-to-one with a researcher to design their interview. Together, we developed a bespoke topic guide for each child, after which a professional film crew recorded the interviews. Themes constructed from the participants’ accounts included feeling misunderstood, the joy and challenges of sensory experiences, and what others can do to provide effective support during times of distress.

The resulting videos are now being used within the [redacted in case of anonymous review] as a key resource for work with families, professionals, and students, helping to centre autistic voices in education, training, and practice.

In times of uncertainty, when global crises expose our shared vulnerability, creating inclusive spaces of knowledge production becomes an urgent task. This paper tells the story of a collaborative project at the Tell Qana Archaeological Laboratory that invited adults with high-support-needs autism to take part in archaeological research. The project asked a simple but profound question: what happens when people who are usually excluded from academic spaces become active partners in the making of knowledge?

The participants—six autistic adults—joined the laboratory’s daily work of restoring pottery fragments, scanning artifacts in 3D, and organizing digital records. Their work was carefully structured and supported, but their contributions were genuine and recognized. In the act of repairing broken vessels, they not only advanced the research but also brought their own ways of seeing and attending to detail.

The project became a space of dialogue: between archaeologists and autistic participants, between scientific procedures and creative adaptations, between the fragility of human experience and the resilience that emerges through collaboration. It also revealed challenges—mentor turnover, the complexity of restoration, and challenges faced by neurotypical students in the laboratory in accepting those who are different.

This case study shows how archaeology can move beyond being a discipline that studies fragments of the past, and become a practice of mending connections in the present. It demonstrates how neurodiversity enriches research, how inclusive practices generate new forms of knowledge, and how citizen science can open pathways for more just and interconnected futures.

What sort of society would there be if all humans were implanted with a microchip? What sort of humans would we become? Would we even have a choice? As investment in microtechnologies increases and medical implants become widely accepted, the question arises of whether all humans might one day be implanted with such microchips. As a form of human enhancement, such technology could provide us with new abilities such as sensing where the North is, feeling earthquakes, exchanging information with a single touch, paying or opening doors with a swipe of the hand, … But what would it mean for society? What new social expectations would arise? Would we all be equal in the face of this microchip?

In this workshop, we will arrange for an ‘encounter’ with this possible future – or, rather, these potential futures – by first identifying different scenarios about the place that this technology could take in society. Then, we will engage you as a participant in the futures wheel approach to analyze the multi-layered opportunities and risks linked to the widespread use of microchip implants to reflect on the social, economic, political, religious, environmental, legal, and other… implications of insertables, whilst at the same time remaining sensitive to the social inequalities this may introduce. As a participant, you will be invited to reflect with us on the potential of futures wheels as a method for analyzing far-edged implications of social innovation initiatives. We trust you will have acquired a skills base that allows you to practice and apply the approach to the future scenario’s that come out of your own research.

There is a prevailing feminist critique that the reductionistic and mechanistic approaches currently dominating science are the result of patriarchal tendencies to divide, abstract, hierarchise and control (e.g. Plumwood 1993). Part of this critique is that many women, owing to their positionality in patriarchal societies, are for a variety of complex reasons, more attuned with caring approaches to relationships (Gilligan 1982), and therefore better able to offer a different way of encountering and knowing the world. What is offered is a more participatory view, where the knower interacts with the world she seeks to know and is therefore responsible for/with it (Haraway 1988); or perhaps one where caring is replaced as the fundamental mode of interaction, with knowing a mere dimension of it. In either case, knowing is repositioned as inseparable from being, or from ethics (Barad 2007). In making this move, such critiques both call out and seek to repair pernicious dualisms that reinforce specific kinds of antagonistic power configurations.

We do not question the significance of feminist care ethics, or that the positioning of women within patriarchy affords certain kinds of attunement with caring and relational ways of being. What we want to challenge is another implicit dualism we have felt resides in some ways of positioning the problem. We want to claim that despite patriarchy's role in normalising reductionistic and abstractive modes of engagement, and despite the dark marriage such engagement has had with scientific methods, men can and have also brought relational approaches into their encounter with people and the world. We know such relational approaches are possible for (cis, white) men in patriarchal society because we are ourselves two males filled with love for their topics, their students and the world.

However, we are also acutely aware of the threats to such dimensions of male experience. First, there is the potential problem that many feminist critics themselves recognise: that positioning abstraction, reductionism and so on under the male archetype might inadvertently re-enforce those very characteristics in men. The second is that men bringing love into encountering the world and students can be viewed as having suspicious motivations not necessarily presumed for women attempting the same. The result is a kind of double-bind that pinches away at the possibilities for a renewed and different mode of relation.

That said, while such circumstances present challenges, we are adamant that a 'masculinist' exploration of love, in curriculum and pedagogy, but also in theory and practice, is not only possible, but necessary. We are proposing a Dream Team session to open discussions into what this might be. The aim would be to share stories of male experiences engaging with love as part of a scientific or pedagogical practice, to discuss challenges, and to find ways of forming communities of practice to support the development of love in these fields. We would take the lead by sharing some of our own stories and struggles before facilitating a discussion and writing-exploration of these core aims.

The session encourages people identifying with any sex and gender, to come to recover a masculinist love or to ally in the recovery, or both; and the session will be set up to facilitate such collaborations. To be clear, however, it is not our intention to argue for specifics about how or what patriarchy does to enable the possibility of male love despite its well-known problems, nor to argue for any essential distinctions it has owing to its arising from the 'male experience' within patriarchy. 'Masculinist' is not taken to presume a specific quality other than its being oriented on the intrinsic relational possibilities in men's experience. How men can learn from and share in feminist politics and theory is therefore also a core question. Finally, though this should be obvious by now, 'masculinist' is not an attempt to recover male power-over under some alleged zero-sum threat from feminists. It is however, an attempt to recover new kinds of power-with (Follett 1942) de-emphasised by contemporary framings.

Come explore with us.

References:

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning Duke University Press.

Follett, M. P. (1942). Dynamic administration: The collected papers of Mary Parker Follett. Harper & Brothers.

Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.

Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge.

In 2025, we, the “Reimagining Schools Collaborative” led the Game Changer “Re-Imagining Schools: A Journey of Playfulness and Hope” at ECQI Edinburgh. These sessions were a mix of semi-structured and free-flowing experiences of playful inquiry into co-dreaming new futures in education. Building from this, our 2026 Game Changer uses our emerging perspectives on education and reimagining schools to practice connections, collaboration and engage in global flows. In our 2025 ECQI session, the activities gave us reflective and creative insight into these questions and what they mean for different communities around the globe from which we have constructed a new series of questions/activities designed to push more critically into the essential questions posed by the Reimagining Schools Collaborative: what is, what if and what’s next?, exploring imagination and investigating possibilities to reshape experiences and spaces of schooling and education for a more equitable and sustainable future. Focusing on the goals of qualitative inquiry and the theme of the 2026 conference, we explore artful and critical methodologies to witness, to learn from, and to be in dialogue with practices that stretch the boundaries of education. It is an offering of paths that connect theory and practice, dreaming and doing, local wisdom and global urgencies—always asking: how can we learn differently, so that we can live differently?

In our Game Changer for 2026, we deepen our questioning to include: What does learning/education look like when it serves everyone: peoples, communities, and the planet? How can we shift from being told what our future will be to actively creating it ourselves? Re-worlding. Our sessions aim to make visible how imagination moves from "what if” to "what we do.” The solutions for the problems we face globally cannot be answered by a select few within academic contexts. We must engage with a poly-vocal approach that includes a variety of modes of expression and understanding. As such our Game Changers embody the conference purpose to, “actively and collaboratively engaged with history and with the futures we all shape” (ECQI 2026, CfP).

The Game Changer activities weave together modes of inquiry from arts, sciences, and Indigenous wisdoms, and offer experiences where education steps beyond its conventional walls to redesign how we learn, how we relate and how we care for the world, honor our shared vulnerabilities, and celebrate our interdependencies. Exploring post-human and post-qualitative paradigms in education and society, we see this historical moment as ripe for transformative change, challenging static relationships between theory, practice, research, and pedagogy.

The story we are creating in our Game Changer Sessions is not about a formula. Our Reimagining Schools Collaborative focuses on imagining prototype futures where learning is relational, regenerative and deeply grounded in the reality and dreams of each place. The Game Changer sessions emphasize the realization that young people exist as their own vast and complex systems of knowledge and that the knowledge they intuitively hold is powerful, brilliant, and wonderful. Recognizing the significance of youth perspectives, this Game Changer highlights their agency, visions and leadership as central to meaningful dialogues on the transformative power of imagination within education. One goal is to use art and imagination to impact wider global education policies by inviting young people, some of whom are already leading their own actions and propositions, to articulate, visualize or embody the issues.

Our three Game Changer sessions will include session leaders, remote organizers by Zoom, youth participants and the session attendees. The purpose of the in-person/zoom hybrid is to include youth participants from around the globe as part of the working sessions. Each of the three days can be attended as the sole session, or participants may attend all three. We consider each session as a point of perception in our world-building experiences, holding traces of how we can transform learning spaces into spaces of belonging, agency, and collective repair.

Day 1: What is (embodiment)? Co-creating the frame for existing systems of global education.

Day 2: What if (flow/collaboration)? How do we move through entanglements of colonial realities and post-colonial futures? Exploring new ways of “world-making”

Day 3: What’s next (point)? We locate generative geographies of change. Day 3 is about the living tensions and the beauty that emerges when diverse communities of educators, artists and young people come together. Structured to inspire intergenerational experimentation with raw artistic materials and to explore the challenges confronting global education

policies, this Game Changer will culminate in a report/policy brief which embodies a call to action for researchers, educators, students and communities alike.

Recent developments in qualitative research invite us to move beyond anthropocentric inquiry toward practices of listening and responding to the more-than-human world. Building on phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), dialogical philosophy (Buber), systems thinking (Capra), appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider), humble inquiry (Schein), the recognition of sensing, feeling, thinking and intuition as equally valid and complementary ways of knowing (Goethe, Harding, Jung) and deep ecology methodologies (Macy, Seed), this workshop offers an experiential approach to qualitative research with non-human agencies.

Participants will explore a sequenced process that combines immersion, embodiment and dialogue. The participants will attune to a natural element (plant, stone, insect, breeze…) and practice “imaginative inhabitation” with that element for a time. They will then engage in appreciative ecosystemic dialogues, listening to what emerges when humans give voice to the more-than-human perspectives.

The workshop culminates in co-created artworks or performances weaving together these voices, followed by a joint reflection on the ethical, epistemological and methodological implications for qualitative research.

Rather than merely discussing on the more-than-human perspective, this session enacts a form of “radical listening” and “dialogical phenomenology,” expanding the methodological repertoire of qualitative inquiry. Participants will leave with concrete practices for incorporating arts-based, phenomenological and ecological sensibilities into their research design, fieldwork and analysis.

Limited to 16 participants; outdoors (if possible with local circumstances).

References:

Buber, M. (1984). I and thou. Clark.

Capra, F. (2014). The Systems view of Life. Cambridge University Press

Grieten, S., Lambrechts, F., Bouwen, R., Huybrechts, J., Fry, R., & Cooperrider, D. (2017). Inquiring into Appreciative Inquiry: a conversation with David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(1), 101-114.

Harding, S. (2009). Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Green Books.

Jung, C. G. (1973). On the nature of the psyche. Princeton university press.

Macy, J. & Young Brown, M. (1998). Coming back to life: practices to reconnect our lives, our world. New Society Publishers

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge

Schein, E. (2013). Humble Inquiry: the Gentle Art of Asking instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Seed, J., Macy, J., Fleming, P. & Naess, A. (2007). Thinking like a mountain. Towards a council of all beings. New Society Publishers

Wahl, D. C. (2005). “Zarte Empirie”: Goethean Science as a Way of Knowing. Janus Head, 8(1), 58–76.

My presentation is inspired by the focus of this year’s ECQI Congress: Global Flows, Connections, Dialogues and Collaborative Practices in Challenging Times. Such a focus captures my own research on Greek diasporas and allows me to reflect on it as a life-long project. More specifically, I address the topic of “returning home” for a Greek diaspora community in Australia, both in groups and as individuals, over a period stretching from the early decades of the 20th century to the present, in my attempt to explore these diverse “journeys” and the different relationships with home which various members of this diaspora have manifested over the years. What constitutes “home” for diaspora individuals? In what ways do they “return home”, if they do? How have these returns been transformed in today’s globalizing conditions and challenging times? And how can we, as researchers, address these transformations, study and attempt to interpret them?

Among the various qualitative methods I have employed in conducting research on this topic, multi-sited and longitudinal fieldwork and collaborative ethnography have proved to be of paramount value. In my talk I will consider the stories of Greek migrants and their descendants who return home physically, or mentally and emotionally, according to their circumstances and worldviews. Some of these returns are linked to active involvement with the ancestral land and its society, inspired by a sense of intergenerational debt to their forebears. Other returns are purely imaginary, revolving round symbols and myths associated with the ancestral homeland. Yet other return journeys involve representations of the homeland in writing, on websites, or in other artistic creations. In all of these stories, I have employed collaborative methods during my research, to reach, I feel, a deeper understanding of “home” as the family- and community-orientated past that diaspora individuals carry and deal with over the course of their lives. In an auto-ethnographic sense, these stories also form my own attempt to ‘return home’.