Conference Agenda

This presentation explores how people in Gaza and the West Bank experience the loss,
disruption, and resilience of learning during sustained crises, introducing two conceptual
tools—scholasticide and educide—to articulate these realities through the participants’ lived
experiences. Developed collaboratively with educators, students, and families in Palestine,
this work positions their narratives as knowledge in themselves, foregrounding how
education and learning persist, adapt, and resist under conditions of erasure.
Scholasticide refers to the systematic destruction of spaces, resources, and conditions that
sustain scholarship—schools, universities, libraries, and intellectual
communities—while educide encompasses the broader dismantling of educational life,
including informal, intergenerational, and cultural learning. Together, these terms invite a
reframing of how we understand learning as both a human right and a relational practice of
being, belonging, and becoming.
Through narrative qualitative inquiry, the paper draws on dialogic interviews, reflective
storytelling, and community-led documentation to reveal the human texture of learning amid
devastation. This work adopted a methodology of co-creation in care and waiting, developed
through sustained, affective communication with collaborators living under siege. It
foregrounds relational ethics, emotional labour, and the act of waiting as integral to
knowledge-making, positioning research as a shared practice of witnessing, presence, and
survival. It situates these lived accounts within global dialogues about resilience, epistemic
justice, and collective survival, extending beyond a Western analytical lens. Rather than
theorizing about Palestine, this research listens with Palestinians—recognizing their stories
as vital contributions to our shared understanding of education as a life practice.
By centring collaborative and experiential knowing, this paper contributes to the ECIQ 2026
theme of Global Flows, Connections, Dialogues and Collaborative Practices in Challenging
Times. It calls for an expanded vocabulary and methodology in qualitative research—one
that honours lived knowledge, challenges epistemic hierarchies, and opens pathways for
global solidarity in the face of educational erasure.

Governments often defend restrictions on expression as necessary for stability, yet a growing body of political science and psychology suggests the opposite: censorship can be strategically self-defeating. Sudden or expanded restrictions frequently trigger circumvention and politicization (e.g., VPN adoption and migration to blocked networks), heighten anger and “reactance,” push dissent into harder-to-monitor spaces, and thereby raise operational risk (e.g., intelligence blind spots) and, at times, violence. This paper develops a Montesquieu-style, natural-law argument: because speech flows like water, blocking it redirects, not dissipates, social pressure. Evidence from psychology and history are given while also reconciling evidence against free speech. It is concluded that; free-speech is a public dissidence tool and pressure-release infrastructure, counter-speech instead of censorship and transparency over bans. Network shutdowns lead to underground coalitions; if intervention is necessary, confine it to narrow, due-process-bound incitement with sunset clauses and auditability. The paper consolidates experimentally grounded mechanisms such as psychological reactance, group polarization, identity fusion, and the anger–fear balance, and situates them in legal-policy questions concerning speech regulation, incitement standards, information controls, and public-safety strategy. The historical analyses serve to external-validate these mechanisms and to clarify conditions under which legal speech interventions are more or less likely to be counterproductive. The recommendations, favoring counterspeech and transparency over blunt bans, reserving narrowly tailored, due-process-bound measures for direct and imminent incitement, and avoiding visibility-reducing network shutdowns, translate psychological regularities into legally relevant design principles

Amid the emergence of new global challenges, the persistence of racial inequalities across different contexts, histories and spaces reminds us of the enduring urgency to address our increasingly polarised societies. Scholarship and interest in allyship – as a collaborative, relational concept and transformative practice to bring people together– has surged.

This presentation actively engages with history, transcending geographical and temporal (historical) reach by turning to a previous critical juncture, the historical period of the 1960s USA, to understand the complexities of urgent interracial organising and the insights it can offer us. In drawing in specifically on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or ‘Snick’), a prominent youth organisation within this movement, its initial ‘integrated’ approach, though intense and challenging, remains a valuable site for contemporary analysis. The organisation’s evolution and later focus on Black Power, meanwhile, offers room to reflect on the nature and requirements of coalitions themselves. This aims to harness the resiliencies and commitment from the past, specifically previous activists and allies, to seek hope and possibilities for practice for the contemporary landscape.

This archival analysis, drawing on materials housed in the Library of Congress, aimed to move away from archives presenting key leaders' stories and instead finds sources where ‘everyday’ activists published their own stories in fiction, through diaries, reflections, and in interviews (at the time or retrospectively). Such lessons derived from SNCC’s evolutionary history may be directly valuable to contemporary antiracist movements/institutions, or alternatively, individuals interested in further developing their allyship within their community and localised collectives. This presentation is centred on the inkling that across temporalities, the texture of what makes us human remains. Perhaps the past will hold lessons for how we may find solutions and come together in the future.

This project proposal concerns the psychological, sociocultural, and communal trajectories of the territorial conflicts experienced by the indigenous community of the Tolupán people, located in Montaña de la Flor (Honduras). Working through a decolonial lens, we plan to analyze processes and strategies of structural violence, land dispossession, state neglect, and resistance. We will work ethnographically and collaboratively with the participants’ community narratives and practices, privileging a decolonizing orientation. Central to the project’s methodology are territorial narrated walks (caminatas territoriales narradas), in which collective memory and lived experience emerge in relation to being with-in the very land that is now in danger. By walking and narrating their territory, Tolupán participants may articulate the interconnections between historical trauma, cultural resilience, and ecological belonging. The aim is to understand how “historical trauma” is seen, lived, remembered, and healed through Tolupán cultural logics, hoping to break away from Western pathologizing frameworks and advancing a community-based decolonial psychology that is grounded in territory, memory, and resistance.

In an era of intense social visibility, modern spaces like the gym function as sites of disciplinary power, creating challenging environments for relational connection. This study investigates how the "gaze" operates as a paradoxical power mechanism within the gym, a microcosm of contemporary society. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of discipline and Lacanian-inspired analysis of the gaze, this paper examines the visual strategies individuals employ to navigate constant observation.

This research utilizes a qualitative methodology combining autoethnography, semi-structured interviews with college students, and participatory observation. The study originated from the researcher’s own autoethnographic reflections on the "unsettled gaze", bridging personal experience with sociological theory. Analysis reveals that the gym’s interwoven gazes function dually as a form of hierarchical surveillance that produces "docile bodies" and, conversely, as a sought-after source of support and recognition.

To manage the social risks inherent in this contradictory visual field, individuals adopt "blurred focus"—a deliberate disengagement from eye contact by focusing on phones or equipment—as a primary self-protective strategy. This act of being physically present but visually absent is a crucial practice for survival. By examining these micro-level negotiations, this paper argues that understanding such collaborative, albeit subtle, practices of self-protection is key to fostering healthier relational connections. The findings suggest this framework can be transferred to other challenging spaces like the classroom to transform the judgmental gaze into a more supportive one.

"Mad Literature" represents a digital subculture that has emerged among educated young Chinese. It is characterized by the creation and reiteration of "nonsensible" memes and cultural artifacts that mimic mad actions. Such artifacts include illogical emojis, insider jokes, bizarre music, and short videos, all of which are widely disseminated across Chinese social media platforms like TikTok, Weibo, and Zhihu. We introduce the term “resonance to nonsense” to conceptualize the process where contemporary Chinese youth seek connections to each other and the world not through shared meaning, but rather through “non-sense.” We ask: How do young Chinese create and experience resonance through the making and circulation of “Mad Literature”? What is the nature of this resonance?

To address these questions, the research employs a combination of digital ethnography and discourse analysis, focusing on the most popular examples of “Mad Literature”. Findings indicate that young Chinese initially resonate unconsciously with certain memes, a process facilitated and amplified by algorithmic recommendation systems. Over time, this resonance evolves into a more conscious and strategic practice, as individuals collectively reiterate these memes in their everyday lives. The shared experience at the heart of this resonance is a sense of alienation, described following Hartmut Rosa as acting voluntarily against one's true desires. For instance, young people may participate in relentless academic competition while simultaneously recognizing that such competition serves to discipline them.

The study argues that the "resonance to nonsense" cultivated through “Mad Literature” operates as a form of cultural counter-conduct against the disciplinary power that alienates youth. By intuitively adopting a mad guise, which ensures that their critique remains largely invisible to governmental censorship mechanisms, young Chinese are able to satirize and subtly subvert a world they perceive as politically delirious but also depoliticize their critique to allow for survival.

It is well known that psychological inquiry largely follows naturalistic methods, while, on the opposite camp, some critical researchers argue that greater attention be given to qualitative inquiry and to the psychological humanities (art, history, STS studies, etc.). That debate has been around since the beginning of psychological science, with Wundt (and others like Harvey Carr) maintaining that Völkerpsychologie should be used to research the higher psychological functions that cannot be studied by experimentation. In this presentation, I follow this tradition and argue that the psychological humanities can act as a hermeneutical way of understanding higher psychological functions, lived experience and human behavior. This understanding (Dilthey's Verstehen) should not be taken to be a representationalist and foundationalist knowledge, a final epistemological ground that has a static knowable object. Instead, the psychological humanities facilitate a dynamic form of knowing that focuses on an intersubjective and intrasubjective understanding (as opposed to a naturalistic third-person abstraction) and views "knowledge" as a discourse among others (that of the painter, next to the philosopher, next to the historian, next to the positivist scientist). I examine the example of first-person literature and especially the works of Faulkner and Bret Easton Ellis. These works focus on human subjectivity as is expressed by the narrator's first-person narrative and give us insights that cannot be attained by a quantitative methodology or third-person abstractions. It is argued that literature (and psychological humanities in general) should not be viewed as simply an alternative to mainstream psychological inquiry, but, instead, naturalistic inquiry should be viewed as just another form of discourse next to the psychological humanities, with no claim to epistemological primacy. In short, causal naturalistic explanation should be seen as part of a larger from of understanding, understanding that can be also achieved by qualitative methods and reading great literature.

The novel Magnificat by Sonia Aggio takes place against a backdrop of a fertile land emerged from the waters, framed by the complex relationship between humans and nature. A relationship that in the historical context of the Polesine flood in 1951 contains weak flood prevention from the institutions. Ecofeminism and ecological criticism of literature, subversive rewriting and female Gothic serve for the analysis to demonstrate that the novel is a subversive rewriting of the Polesine flood that makes voices heard that have not yet been heard. In this way it helps to fill the archive of women and non-human perspectives of the catastrophe. First, the Gothic elements present in Magnificat are ecological anxiety, monstrosity in the non-human element of the “Lady of the River”, and the focus on the bodies of women. Second, by focusing on the archetypes of the missing woman and the entrapped woman, it discusses the ways in which these Gothic elements constitute a rewriting of the relationships between women, and of non-human and non-androcentric perspectives. Third, it discusses how Magnificat reflects on the ecological crisis in the way that the novel is non-anthropocentric and non-androcentric, and that is shown through ecological anxiety, monstrosity, and the bodies of women. Further, it discusses environmental risk as a contemporary version of the ancient literary theme of the apocalypse. The analysis shows the ways in which Magnificat offers an alternative to anthropocentric and androcentric narratives since it narrates the flood from the point of view of women and nature. The flood was caused by a series of linked events whose significance cannot be understood only by hydrological explanations but is also to be traced in human responsibilities and actions, since nature is not only a “natural” matter.

The present study explores the socio-psychological mechanisms through which social subjects interpret deviant behavior and construct psychological stigma, as represented in classical literature. Focusing on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the research investigates how psychologization, internal attributions, and the fundamental attribution error shape perceptions of criminality and mental illness. Using a qualitative content analysis framework, the study combines Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) with lexical correspondence analysis via the software IRaMuTeQ. The text was coded and analyzed to identify dominant thematic axes and recurring semantic patterns that reflect the psychological and social representations embedded in the novel. The analysis revealed four major thematic clusters concerning: (a) the socio-psychological reality of the characters, (b) interpersonal relationships and social environment, (c) the phenomenology of mental suffering, and (d) the symbolic and moral dimensions of guilt and isolation. The findings suggest that deviant behavior in literature is often psychologized—interpreted as stemming from inner pathology rather than contextual conditions—thus reinforcing essentialist stereotypes that stigmatize mental illness. Moreover, social exclusion and lack of psychiatric care appear as central metaphors for the deterioration of mental health and agency. The study highlights the potential of literary texts as qualitative data for examining social representations of mental illness, stigma, and moral responsibility. By integrating phenomenological interpretation with computational lexical analysis, it bridges humanistic and psychological inquiry, illustrating how classical literature mirrors, reproduces, and sometimes challenges dominant narratives of deviance and normality.

The present study investigates the evolution of qualitative research within the Social Sciences and the Arts & Humanities through a large-scale bibliometric analysis, drawing on a dataset of 79,672 documents retrieved from Scopus between the years 2015–2026. The research systematically maps the scope, methodologies, and impact of qualitative and mixed-method approaches, while contrasting them with quantitative traditions. Findings reveal that qualitative research has steadily increased over the last ten years, with a particularly notable rise in Arts & Humanities fields, where narrative inquiry, discourse analysis, and ethnography are dominant. In contrast, Social Sciences present a more balanced interplay between qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods approaches, with case studies and interview-based research being most common. Document type analysis confirms the prevalence of journal articles (over 85% of the corpus), while language distribution shows a clear dominance of English, followed by Spanish and Portuguese. Country-level patterns indicate leadership from the United States and United Kingdom, but also a strong presence from Australia, Canada, and increasingly from emerging research hubs in Latin America (Brazil, Spain) and Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia, China). The comparative dimension highlights that qualitative research in the Arts & Humanities is more deeply embedded in interpretive and constructivist paradigms, whereas in the Social Sciences, its application often complements or challenges quantitative models. Citation analysis demonstrates that qualitative and mixed-method publications attract significant scholarly attention, particularly when addressing complex educational, cultural, or policy-related issues. Overall, the study underscores the critical role of qualitative inquiry in advancing nuanced understanding of human experience and knowledge production. It further contributes by mapping disciplinary and regional landscapes, offering evidence of both convergence and divergence across Social Sciences and Humanities, and outlining future opportunities for integrative methodological frameworks.

In an era of online polarisation and ideological fragmentation, dialogue with men has become increasingly fraught. The cultural terrain around masculinity is dominated by competing narratives of grievance, shame, and defensiveness, often amplified through digital ecosystems such as the manosphere. Within these spaces, men’s longing for contact and recognition is both revealed and distorted. Qualitative inquiry, with its emphasis on lived experience, relational knowing, and reflexivity, is well placed to re-open spaces of dialogue. Yet our methods and vocabularies for listening to men remain underdeveloped or shaped by suspicion.

This Game Changer proposes a three-day interdisciplinary think tank to develop a collective framework for menempathy: the capacity to stay in feeling-with men, even when expressions of pain, anger, or confusion challenge our values or identities. Menempathy is not a plea for sympathy or agreement; it is a qualitative stance of curiosity, contact, and complexity. It asks how researchers, educators, and therapists can listen to men without collapsing into either justification or rejection, how we might hold dialogue open when cultural discourse urges closure.

Drawing from psychotherapy, education, gender studies, and the arts, this initiative invites participants to explore:

- How can qualitative research respond to the emotional and epistemological estrangement of men in contemporary culture?

- What forms of writing, storytelling, and methodology can foster genuine contact with male experience?

- How might we listen to male bodies, to sensation, vulnerability, and pleasure, beyond traditional frames of pathology, dominance, or crisis?

- What does it mean for me, as a woman, as a queer researcher, as a non-male participant — to stay in dialogue with men?

- What does it mean to write or research with men rather than about them?

Participants will examine how qualitative inquiry can engage men’s lived realities through embodied, narrative, and performative approaches. The aim is to articulate methodological tools for staying in dialogue: practices of presence, language, and relational attunement that can operate across disciplines and settings.

While the inquiry centres on dialogue with men, this Game Changer welcomes participants of all genders. Menempathy is not a call to recentre men, but to re-examine the relational field in which genders meet. For women and non-male participants, these sessions offer space to explore positions in relation to masculinity, the tensions of listening, witnessing, or holding space when histories of exclusion or harm are present. The think tank thus becomes a shared workshop in reciprocal empathy, where staying in dialogue is an act of mutual recognition rather than gendered concession.

The three sessions unfold in dialogical stages:

Day One: Listening Across Silence

We map how men’s voices appear or disappear in research and classrooms. Participants share experiences of breakdown — moments when dialogue with male participants, students, or clients faltered. Through reflective discussion and performative exercises, we identify affective dynamics (shame, defensiveness, fear) that shape these silences.

Day Two: Methodologies of Contact

We turn to methodological experimentation. How can performative writing, autoethnography, and arts-based inquiry open new stories of masculinity? How can the researcher’s body and gendered history become part of the inquiry? Small groups sketch methodological vignettes — fragments of possible research grounded in menempathy.

Day Three: Articulating Menempathy

The final session focuses on synthesis. Drawing from the insights and tensions of previous days, participants co-author a short position paper, “Principles for Staying in Dialogue with Men,” to be shared in the conference plenary. This document articulates core principles and provocations — not a policy, but a living invitation to ongoing dialogue.

The Game Changer seeks to reimagine masculinity as a field of qualitative attention, not an object of ideological dispute. It does not attempt to redeem or critique “men” as a category but to create methodological space for men’s becoming, for stories, sensations, and uncertainties that remain unspoken. Menempathy names both the challenge and the possibility of this work: to feel-with men while maintaining reflexive awareness of power, privilege, and social context. It calls for research practices that move beyond binaries of fragile versus toxic, ally versus adversary, listener versus speaker, toward a more entangled understanding of how gendered lives are co-constituted through relation.

At a time when public conversations about men oscillate between outrage and apathy, qualitative inquiry can offer something different: an attentive, dialogical, and creative space of research-as-relation. Through this Game Changer, we invite scholars and practitioners of all genders to experiment with how empathy itself might be rewritten — to see in menempathy not a defence of masculinity, but a shared, qualitative commitment to stay in conversation with what feels most difficult to hear.

This phenomenological research creatively describes the experience based insights of six practitioners around the use of self disclosure in their practice. Complimentary to those are my own reflexive accounts, specifically how I perceived the relational interviewer - interviewee dynamics. Investigated were differences in disclosure definitions, the diverse effect of the person centred and psychoanalytic modalities in the formation of biases, quantity and quality of use, changes attributed to experience, their ethical decision making process and the disclosures effect on the relationship. The results build a profile of the therapist who accepts the broadness of the term’s definition, bends the rigid boundaries of either therapeutic approach within reason, has become more comfortable with experience using self disclosure infrequently mainly to universalise a shameful experience but in the benefit of the client. These claims, although in line with literature, should be generalised with caution as the available sample was culturally homogenous and female overpowered.

This qualitative dissertation explores the lived experiences of systemic therapists working with clients who face eating disorders, focusing on how these professionals describe their therapeutic work, what systemic strategies they use, and which challenges they encounter. Seven systemic therapists in Greece participated in semi-structured interviews, and the data were analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Ίσαρη & Πουρκός, 2015).

Findings indicate that therapists describe their experience as deeply shaped by the therapeutic relationship, which they perceive as the foundation of progress. Trust, stability, and corrective relational experiences were emphasized as crucial, often taking on symbolic roles (e.g., paternal figures) for clients with histories of insecure attachment. Regarding strategies, therapists highlighted the importance of systemic interventions that involve families, address dysfunctional communication patterns, and externalize the symptom. Interventions focusing on family dynamics, triangulation, and the re-negotiation of roles were considered effective, particularly when they encouraged differentiation and healthier patterns of closeness and distance.

As for challenges, therapists reported emotional strain, fear of relapse, and difficulties in balancing empathy with professional boundaries. They also described the influence of sociocultural pressures, such as body ideals and stigma, which reinforced symptoms and required sensitive therapeutic navigation. Professionally, participants acknowledged the necessity of supervision, self-reflection, and flexibility to manage the intense emotions and complex systemic patterns that arise.

In conclusion, the study shows that the therapeutic relationship, systemic family engagement, and sociocultural context jointly shape the therapeutic process with eating disorders. The research underscores the need for culturally sensitive, systemic training and ongoing professional support to strengthen therapeutic effectiveness.

Τhis paper represents a qualitative phenomenological study that explores the dynamic process of identity formed in individuals with serious mental illness. The case of British musician Ren Erin Gill is the example we choose in order to investigate how the expression through music can serve as a vehicle for self-understanding, emotional integration and reconstruction of personal identity in the context of psychological and emotional suffering. The material we used has been published by Ren himself. Drawing upon basically phenomenological and hermeneutic frameworks, we emphasize on lived experience as a source of knowledge about creativity, embodiment and selfhood.

The first part of the study examines phenomenomenological theoretical perspectives focusing on psychosis (as a form of serious mental illness), intersubjectivity and the nature of identity formation. Phenomenology turns the light on the experiences of people with serious mental illness.Our analytic framework interpretative phenomenological analysis is also drawn on phenomenology. Identity is conceptualized not as a fixed entity but as an evolving process formed through social interaction narrative self- reflection. The second part focuses on Ren’s autobiographical music work, analyzing the ways in which he externalizes inner conflicts and facilitates the process of meaning in his lyrics and performances. Transforming pain, suffering and disappointment into lyrics, Ren constructs a coherent sense of self that transcends the traumatic experiences in the mental health system. To understand Ren’s personal experience deeper, we conducted interpretative phenomenological analysis on some of his songs.

The findings underscore the therapeutic potential of artistic creativity as a form of phenomenological self- exploration and emotional regulation. This work contributes to the phenomenological understanding of identity formation within the lived experience of mental illness and highlights the necessity for mental health professionals to integrate expressive meaning - centered approaches in supporting clients’ identity reconstruction.

The therapeutic relationship is widely regarded as a cornerstone of effective psychotherapy. This qualitative study explored how psychotherapists themselves experience the process of constructing this relationship. Six women psychotherapists from different theoretical orientations in Greece participated in semi-structured interviews, and the data were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), with a focus on participants’ lived experiences and the meanings they ascribed to them.

Three Group Experiential Themes (GETs) were identified. The first, Adapting to the client, comprised four Personal Experiential Themes (PETs): collecting information, acknowledging differences in therapeutic approaches, empathy as understanding, and interaction over time. The second, Trust, encompassed two PETs: confidentiality and professional consistency, and the absence of judgment as foundations for a safe therapeutic environment. The third, Education and experience, included two PETs: the psychotherapist as guide and travel companion, and therapeutic approaches as alternatives.

The findings highlight the multidimensional and dynamic nature of the therapeutic relationship, illustrating how psychotherapists integrate self-awareness, empathy, reflexivity, and professional flexibility into their practice. By illuminating therapists’ experiential claims, concerns, and meanings, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the therapeutic relationship and suggests implications for psychotherapy training, supervision, and the professional development of mental health.

This research was conducted as part of my undergraduate dissertation at Metropolitan College, Greece, in collaboration with the University of East London.

This presentation will attempt to illustrate how real-life events have a bearing on career choice and how clients may later revisit their original decision and re-direct their career trajectory towards career goals that may have been present but were obfuscated because of traumas, beliefs and fears. The author does this using real stories which illustrate how people may choose careers as a direct result of situations and events in their lives rather than through a cognitive choice. However, working through their personal issues may help them to tweak their choices. The author uses a narrative approach and draws on 35 years of experiences with clients to address the subject

Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, face distinct work-life challenges shaped by recent cultural, economic, and social shifts, leading to high levels of work-related syndromes. Some authors have described them as a 'burnout generation,’ while multiple opinion pieces have been written about stress and burnout in this generation in recent years. Millennials account for the largest cohort in the workforce; thus, they are a key demographic cohort to pay attention to. Our project’s main objectives are to theorise and critically examine the generational mechanisms and the psychosocial and socio-cultural processes involved in work-related syndromes among them, mainly burnout. This project aligns with a socio-cultural approach in psychology and proposes to approach generational phenomenon from the perspective of the subject adopting a developmental perspective to explore how Millennials build specific relations and representations of the socio-historical context related to work-life and explore their experiences and narrative. A scoping review was conducted in a first step to provide a comprehensive overview of occupational stress and professional burnout within the millennial generation. The next step is a qualitative study phase where we will conduct storytelling groups focusing on the collective experience of millennials and work-related syndromes with a focus on burnout and fear of failure. We will mobilise recent alternative theories proposed to study generations, largely ignored within generational research such as the lifespan and the socio-constructionist perspective. Storytelling will be deployed as narrative groups can make it possible to capture the generational perspective on a phenomenon (burnout). We will do so under a psychological perspective of collective memory, thus in relation to the person who remembers (millennials) as they move through life and society, to better understand their accounts of what happened to them.

Many professional high-level athletes perceive their involvement in their athlete role as a priority, a "hunt" for success, an attempt to accomplish their personal "dream". However, this excessive effort can lead to a dysfunctional involvement in sports and turn the "dream" into a "nightmare," leading athletes to chronically experience burnout. The present study aims to highlight similarities and differences between athletes who experienced the same initial signs of burnout but different "paths" of the syndrome, as proposed in previous research (Markati et al., 2022). Eleven burned-out athletes from a variety of individual sports were initially examined as unique case studies, revealing a variety of negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (chronologically evolved across a 3-year time). An Embedded Multiple Case Study Design, relying on theoretical propositions (Yin, 2009), was employed, revealing four “axes” of a proposed theoretical model. According to the results, a (hub) “Komvos” axis was revealed as a remarkable finding, signaling a period of changes through the athlete’s unique “burnout path” across time. “Komvos” identifies three phases in sequence, with their corresponding reactions: (a) “starting point” (difficulties from demanding situations or unforeseen/unexpected development of them), (b) “main feature” (response to the ‘starting point” through critical negative events, or the “peak” of negative feelings-thoughts-behaviors, or the dead ends from a vicious cycle of negative emotions-thoughts-behaviors) and (c) “critical reaction” (e.g. compliance, adaptation to difficulties, interruption of a negative situation, consolidation of negative situations, persistence in a desire or effort and refusal of dysfunctional conditions). “Komvos” position in understanding the progression of the syndrome is crucial, and it is the first time a critical stage has been identified for understanding burnout progression. Identifying and recognizing the "komvos" turning point for a burned-out athlete enables sport practitioners and specialists to prevent irreversible consequences of burnout and reverse this negative experience.

Currently, Chinese traditional dance is shaped by the mixed influence of contemporary Western ideals of health and traditional Chinese philosophies such as Daoism and Confucianism (Mao, 2022). In this transition from culturally specific to globalized aesthetics, it is essential to inform dance training, education, and policy by promoting healthier body standards, preventing harmful practices, and fostering resilience through peer support. This qualitative study explores how Chinese traditional dancers construct body image, how this construction informs their behaviors to reach the ideal body, and how they navigate conversations about the body among peers. Twelve professional Chinese traditional dancers aged 17 to 29 participated in semi-structured interviews. Methodological rigor was enhanced through attention to dancers’ institutional contexts, iterative coding, and peer debriefing. Through this process, intertextual and intratextual analysis (Wolcott, 1994) revealed the dual role of aesthetic standards as both a conduit for cultural transmission and a source of crisis.

Four key themes emerged in the findings. First, dancers experience tension between conflicting aesthetic standards that value both powerful movement and soft, graceful lines. Second, their simultaneous focus on functionality and appearance heightens vulnerability to body-related anxiety. Third, these tensions manifest through internal conflict and peer competition, visible in weight-control strategies and daily conversations. Finally, imported Western fitness ideals that emphasize discipline, combined with limited institutional health education and the normalization of extreme training routines, make it difficult for dancers to recognize unhealthy coping behaviors amid their efforts toward career success. The study contributes to cross-cultural embodiment theory by illuminating how globalization reshapes self-perception and traditional aesthetic norms in performative bodies. Implications for educators and practitioners include recognizing early signs of unhealthy body-related thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and responding with culturally sensitive interventions.

This paper describes the outcomes of a one-year funded project to explore the emotional impact of working in equity diversity and inclusion (EDI) in a higher education (HE) setting. Four action research groups or workshops were facilitated by the researcher and a research assistant, following the format of presenting topics and asking participants to discuss. Nineteen participants took part in these groups in total.

The topics presented were: types of stress, overwhelm, fear and despair. Participants were also asked to recommend what resources or support they would find helpful for the emotional impact of EDI work. The groups were analysed and themes identified and presented. Three themes were identified: the emotional and moral complexity of EDI work, struggling to make change in rigid systems and finding strength through connection and care. The implications of these themes will be discussed and recommendations for useful resources and responses by universities will be presented.

Mentoring has proven to be an effective strategy for helping healthcare students manage the stress of academic demands and the transition into clinical practice. However, there remains a gap in understanding how gender and cultural factors impact mentoring relationships. Specifically, the role of the mentoring relationship among racially and ethnically minoritized (REM) occupational therapy practitioners has been insufficiently studied. This qualitative, descriptive study explored how racially and ethnically minoritized occupational therapy practitioners perceived the role of the mentoring relationship during their academic training. Thirty-one participants were recruited through purposive sampling. Participants who identified as REM individuals and who completed occupational therapy (OT) or occupational therapy assistant (OTA) training within the United States were interviewed. Through semi-structured interviews, analysis of the data reflected five key categories: (1) authenticity of interpersonal relationships, (2) understanding of psychosocial needs, (3) the toil of emotional labor and identity work, (4) importance of community and authentic support, and (5) representation and diversity of shared experiences. The findings provided specific recommendations from REM practitioners regarding valued components of mentoring relationships, desired topics for discussion, and supports needed for success. These insights offer considerations for developing mentoring programs for students in occupational therapy programs. These considerations uplift the voices of REM occupational therapy and occupational therapy assistant students and provide insight into their mentoring needs as they transition from the academic setting into professional practice.

Introduction
Ethnic minority groups in the UK, particularly African and Caribbean communities, experience persistent health inequalities, including higher rates of early-onset obesity and non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These disparities contribute to reduced life expectancy and quality of life. Positive deviance offers an asset-based approach to health promotion by identifying individuals who achieve better health outcomes despite facing similar challenges.

This research explored how leaders from African and Caribbean communities conceptualise positive deviants (individuals who maintain healthy lifestyle behaviours despite facing common challenges) to inform a community-defined criteria for recruitment.

Methods
This qualitative study was conducted in Greater Manchester and Leicestershire. Fifteen community leaders from African and Caribbean backgrounds across various sectors were purposively sampled for their insight into community dynamics. To address historical mistrust and low research participation, a community-based referral approach was used alongside recruitment call on social media. Semi-structured interviews explored perceptions of diet and physical activity. Data was analysed thematically using inductive and deductive approaches.

Results

Food was found to hold deep cultural significance, serving as a means of expressing joy, care, and connection. This social relationship with food, while positive, can hinder the adoption of healthier behaviours. Two key dimensions emerged in identifying positive deviants (PDs) with respect to diet and physical activity: challenges and motivations. Despite facing barriers such as demanding work schedules, financial pressures, migration-related stress, and chronic health conditions, PDs will tend to adopt healthier lifestyles. Their motivations included managing medical diagnoses, improving physical appearance and wellbeing, achieving longevity to enjoy family life, and maintaining independence in later years. This community defined criteria will inform recruitment of PDs for this community.

Discussion
Community leader engagement uncovered key cultural factors vital for recruiting PDs. Future research will use photovoice to explore how PDs sustain healthy lifestyles.

Since the early 2000s, creative methods have seen widespread adoption in the social sciences on a global scale. This development has been driven by the need to design research strategies capable of engaging marginalized or hard-to-reach social groups – such as children, migrants, prisoners, people experiencing homelessness, members of cultural minorities, and persons with disabilities – who are often inaccessible through traditional methods. At the same time, these new approaches reflect a broader shift toward research practices that are more participatory, inclusive, and dialogue oriented. Creative methods not only expand the methodological repertoire of social research but also contribute to redefining power relations between researchers and participants, prompting a critical reflection on the processes through which scientific knowledge is produced and legitimized.

In this contribution, based on a national research project on primary school funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, we present a study conducted using creative methods aimed at exploring the attitudes of children aged 7 to 9 toward mathematics. The research activities, which involved a total of 148 pupils, explored a variety of dimensions, such as returning to school after the summer holidays, attitudes toward numbers, homework, and the use of digital devices. The activities were carried out in the school context and employed a variety of playful tools and materials: a poster to explain the rules of the game; a mascot to manage turn-taking during discussions; animated post its, laminated figures, and visual materials designed to encourage participation and dialogue.

The study’s findings articulate a nuanced and multifaceted conceptualization of children’s relationship with schooling and with mathematics, underscoring the pivotal role of socio-cultural background and the pedagogical models experienced at school.

Can connection and collaboration really co-exist together? Institutions such as academia and the Canadian voluntary sector are increasingly encouraging collaboration. Research has shown that the increase in collaboration is rooted in the larger socio-political-economic project of neoliberalism that promotes “doing more with less,” that is, cost-effective mechanisms for larger productivity and outputs. Similarly, collaboration has become a band-aid on both sides of a macro-dynamic in which institutions leverage collaboration as a cost-effective means to increase productivity while academics and/or medium-scale nonprofit organizations use collaboration to resist institutional pressures and optimize their successes. However, from a humanist perspective, can connection and collaboration really co-exist together in the neoliberal, capitalist, heteronormative context that we live in?

This game changer interrogates the paradox between connection and collaboration in qualitative research. Within academic and community-based inquiry, relationships are often celebrated as ethical and participatory; yet, connection is frequently tethered to the timeline of a collaboration, dissolving once a project ends. What does it mean to build genuine relationships that are not contingent on productivity, deliverables, or shared outputs? This gamechanger explores how relational ethics might be reimagined beyond the logics of collaboration toward a practice of connection that honors temporality, care, and autonomy.

Reimagining relational ethics invites us to explore the constitution of relational ethics. While relational ethics is often conceived as a shared moral framework grounded in reciprocity and mutual understanding, relationality is inherently contingent upon individual values, histories, and affective orientations. As such, relationality cannot be fully mutual, it is singular, partial, and lived differently by each participant. This tension exposes a fundamental paradox: ethics assumes collectivity, while relationality resists it.

Hence, can we ever achieve truly ethical relationality that is mutually understood? In theory, yes—codes of ethics, institutional/community guidelines, and laws create frameworks that assume shared moral ground. Yet, in practice, relational ethics are shaped by individual factors such as one’s relationship to shame. The more deeply shame is buried, the more it constrains one’s capacity to be relational. As a result, relationality remains asymmetrical, often reinforcing a systemic cycle in which collaboration becomes a proxy for connection, a structural bandage covering affective disconnection.

The outcome of this project takes the form of a Museum of Failed or Finished Collaborations: a research-creation installation that curates fragments of relational collapse in qualitative inquiry. This living archive gathers traces of projects, correspondences, and emotional residues that mark the afterlife of collaboration: emails never sent, ideas left unfinished, moments of silence that followed care. Each artifact stands as evidence of the paradoxes that shape our scholarly relationships: connection tethered to collaboration, ethics presuming mutuality, and the buried shame that determines our capacity to relate. By materializing what academia routinely conceals: the endings, asymmetries, and quiet failures that structure relational work, the museum invites participants and viewers to reflect on how knowledge is co-constituted through rupture as much as through reciprocity. In doing so, it reframes failure not as absence but as a methodological site of feeling, accountability, and ethical re-imagination.

Session 1: The Paradoxes of Relational Ethics

The session begins with a conceptual presentation of three paradoxes that frame the project: (1) the paradox of connection and collaboration, where relationality is sustained only through productivity; (2) the paradox of ethics and relationality, in which ethics assumes mutuality while relational experience remains asymmetrical; and (3) the paradox of shame and ethical capacity, where unacknowledged shame shapes how and whether we can be relational at all. This opening situates participants within the emotional, ethical, and methodological tensions that give rise to the museum.

Session 2: Building the Museum

Participants are invited to co-create the Museum of Failed or Finished Collaborations. Through guided prompts, they contribute fragments of unfinished projects, collapsed relationships, or unspoken endings: emails, reflections, screenshots, sketches, or anonymous notes. These contributions become “artifacts,” displayed digitally or physically, forming an emergent archive of relational rupture. This process transforms personal experience into shared inquiry, allowing participants to witness the systemic conditions that make failure a structural inevitability rather than an individual fault.

Session 3: Completing the Installation

The final session returns to reflection. Together, participants re-enter the museum to interpret what has been assembled, tracing patterns of connection, disconnection, and repair. Discussion focuses on how these paradoxes might reorient qualitative research toward a more honest ethics: one that values endings, asymmetries, and emotional residue as knowledge. The installation remains a living archive, a collective gesture toward accountability and creative closure.

RQ: How can sympathy be transformed into deep empathy within cross-cultural PhD mentor–mentee relationships?

How can sympathy be transformed into deep empathy within cross-cultural PhD mentor–mentee relationships? International doctoral students often encounter formidable hurdles, from adapting to unfamiliar academic practices and cultural expectations to managing personal pressures. Traditional supervision, although foundational for academic guidance, frequently leaves many needs unmet, resulting in a critical support gap. Mentoring emerges here as an indispensable resource that addresses these underlying challenges.

This paper tackles the issue by employing duo-ethnography, as enacted by two international postgraduate researchers a mentor from India now embedded in UK higher education, and a mentee from China progressing through her PhD. Their extended relationship, grounded in authentic support and mutual understanding, moves beyond superficial sympathy to deeper, reciprocal empathy.

Over the course of eighteen months, the mentor and mentee initiated monthly conversations, recorded their meetings, and maintained reflection journals, fostering ongoing dialogue and self-awareness. These interactions, systematically shared and analysed, embody the dual ethnographic method and reflect the dynamic interplay of their personal and academic identities (Valdez et al., 2022; Burleigh and Burm, 2022). Our findings highlight how the cultivation of empathy—not mere sympathy—contributes meaningfully to both academic achievement and emotional wellbeing in doctoral studies.

We propose a transformative model for evolving sympathy into empathy within cross-cultural mentorship, demonstrating its practical value in relieving the isolation and tension experienced by international doctoral scholars. This approach not only bridges gaps left by conventional supervision but also enhances academic environments through more holistic support. Our research offers actionable insights for institutions aiming to design more effective mentoring systems for diverse doctoral communities.

This paper presents and discusses methodological considerations on workshopping as collective thinking and doing when tracing students’ academic writing in higher education. It is contextualized in the research project CO-WRITE (2025–2027), which explores students’ collaborative academic writing in hybrid learning spaces in higher education. The subproject that this paper more particularly builds on explores what students use in their academic writing, how they use it, and why, understanding academic writing as created in relations between humans and non-humans through thinking with posthuman and sociomaterial theories (e.g., Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005). Rather than performing the data generation as a process of eliciting student responses about what they use, how they use it, and why, four workshops were enacted with the purpose that the research participation could become valuable for the students (cf. Kara, 2015). The intention was that something of value might emerge not only for the research but also for the students themselves. Altogether, 30 students in educational, political, and caring sciences participated in the workshops (2,5 h/workshop) and were tasked with mapping and discussing their academic writing processes, based on questions from the researchers. The workshops were designed not merely as a means of generating data, but also to provide the students with opportunities engage in reflective dialogues about their writing together with peers, which previous research has suggested to be valuable in developing as and becoming an academic writer (Jusslin & Widlund, 2024). Data includes audio–recorded conversations and text/maps on paper from the workshops. In this paper presentation, we discuss methodological considerations, potentials, and challenges with the workshop design, focusing particularly on the collective mapping as a material and embodied research-creation process.

Prior research has found that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) centers are central to the development and maintenance of student of color and LGBTQ+ groups at colleges and universities. DEI centers provide funding for diverse student organizations, organize DEI-centered trainings, and provide spaces for students of color and LGBTQ+ students to meet. Despite their importance, nine states have passed legislation that dismantles DEI centers and diverts funding away from DEI initiatives. How has this recent legislation impacted activism and feelings of belonging among marginalized students? This study utilizes a multi-method approach to examine how students at a regional state university are responding to the passing of a bill that led to the closing of the campus DEI center. First, archival data is examined to holistically understand the historical significance of the DEI office on this regional campus. Second, student interviews (N=10) and observational data help illuminate how marginalized students and their organizations navigate institutional challenges while centering resilience and community.

The mental health needs of university students have increased since COVID-19 and more needs to be done to promote well-being. When in distress, students turn to each other for support. There is evidence that peer mentoring can facilitate new students’ adjustment to higher education and is associated with wellbeing and student satisfaction. In Greece only two pilot peer mentoring programmes appear to have taken place. There is a lack of research on peer mentoring with university students in Greece, indicating that this study provides a significant contribution to knowledge.

Fourteen students undertook 30 hours of training in the principles and techniques of peer mentoring, in the NYC Department of Psychology in 2024-25. Afterwards, 19 students received mentoring sessions, whilst the Peer Mentors attended a weekly support group. All participants were invited to take part in a semi-structured interview to explore experiences of mentoring at the end. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using Thematic Analysis. The research was approved by the NYC Department of Psychology Research Ethics Committee.

This qualitative investigation provides valuable in-depth information about the lived experience of mentoring in higher education. In line with previous research findings, both the mentors and mentees reported enhanced professional identity, an increased sense of belonging, increased campus connectedness, and improved interpersonal skills and personal strengths. Mentees emphasized how mentoring relationship was supportive in itself, but how it also led to greater campus connectedness. Mentors emphasized the opportunity to practice their counselling skills. Peer Mentoring services can be organized in a relatively easy and effective way (complementing existing student counselling services), as a low stigma pre-counselling supportive experience that helps reduce distress and promotes help-seeking attitudes. Further research should incorporate quantitative methods and a longitudinal design.

This paper presents the findings from the framework analysis of a broader mixed-methods study exploring social connection as a protective factor to support the behavioural health of young men in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It included interviews with 30 young men aged 16-19 from working-class communities, evenly representing the region’s two predominant communities: Catholics and Protestants.

The study used a gender lens to examine how the pressures to perform particular types of masculine identity shaped the ways relationships formed and operated in young men’s lives. Although they are disproportionately vulnerable to poor mental health, injuries related to interface violence and substance use, and exploitation by paramilitary organisations, this demographic is often excluded or marginalised in research. Study recruitment was conducted through partnerships with community-based youth work and restorative justice organisations, allowing for the application of a strengths-based analysis.

I will present the experiences of these young men, highlighting the people and structures they found most impactful in the delivery of both individual-level behavioural health supports and community-level violence interruption. The most emergent theme was the role of their youth workers, who were often themselves men from the community in early adulthood. These figures acted as “masculine exemplars” and presented a powerful–and positive–counter to online influencers like Andrew Tate who was, at the time of the study, “the most googled man on the planet.”

I will further reflect on the study’s secondary outcome, the testing of the new Andrizo Integrated Conceptual Framework, which combines theoretical bodies on gender, adolescent development, and suicidology to articulate the ways that these factors interact to generate suicide risk in adolescent males. The framework is currently being explored by youth work organisations as a mechanism to enhance the development of interventions to support the health and wellbeing of young men in Belfast.

Patriarchal masculine conditioning of boys and men is a pervasive social entrainment, a peremptory circumscribing of the multitude of male bodies: corporeal, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, until the (patriarchal) mask of incommensurable humanity has fixed itself insensate over the fault lines of an authentic life. This paper applies cultural neuroscience and neuroanthropological conceptualizations of liminality to theorize the importance of inner experience and the transmutive potencies of ritual to produce neuroplastic ecologies capable of becoming, metabolizing and integrating elements of the wound body leading to new gestalts of being. An autoethnographic sharing of one man’s descent into the patriarchal wound body, into ecstatic grief ritual, dissolving into a sympoietic liminality is threaded throughout the paper. Discussion of healthy masculinities includes feminist and indigenous masculinities.

Violence against women (VAW) remains a global issue, with unique challenges in some Muslim-majority nations due to complex socio-economic, cultural, and historical factors. While much is known about the causes of VAW, less is documented about Muslim men actively engaged in preventing it. This article presents findings from the Turkey portion of our “Transforming Muslim Masculinities” study, in which we interviewed Turkish men about their life trajectories and motivations for engaging in VAW prevention. The findings highlight key influences shaping men’s views on gender justice, such as important milestones and life trajectories, involvement in academics, and Islamic perspectives on equity. Subsequently, the findings reveal barriers faced by men in their journeys, such as cultural norms, complex socio-political factors, and pushback from local communities. Moreover, these models offer culturally sensitive strategies for engaging Turkish men in gender-equity efforts and practical approaches for promoting gender justice in similar cultural contexts within Muslim-majority societies and beyond.

What happens when we ask a man about his penis — not to pathologise, objectify, or sexualise, but to listen? To listen to the stories that live in the body, the sensations that are rarely spoken, and the meanings that men have never been asked to give voice to?

This paper explores the penis as a site of lived experience and relational knowledge. Drawing from performative writing and long-term therapeutic work with men, I trace the ways in which masculinity has been disciplined into silence — the soft, sensing, relational penis eclipsed by cultural scripts of hardness, dominance, and control.

To ask about the penis is to stay in dialogue with what we often avoid: male fragility, desire, shame, and tenderness. In the current climate, where online communities like the manosphere fill the void of male conversation, this act of asking becomes radical. It reclaims curiosity, restores complexity, and invites men into genuine contact rather than ideological performance.

Framed as both qualitative inquiry and performative gesture, this presentation brings fragments of male embodiment into the room — not to resolve or defend them, but to listen with care. Through these dialogues, I suggest that the therapist, researcher, and audience alike are called to reimagine the penis not as a symbol of power, but as a site of relation, sensation, and story.

The presentation discusses a collective walking ethnography, or garbography, of a lakeside wasteland in Tampere, Finland. The area, Nekalanranta, once served as a landfill and today is unzoned and unused land, deemed unsuitable for residential housing due to contamination. We explored the site on several visits on foot, attending particularly to the entanglement of decay and flourishing in the wasteland as a damaged landscape, as well as to the multispecies world-making projects encountered there. In addition to fieldnotes and the photographs and videos that we took, our analysis draws from documents, such as city council statements and plans for the area, together with memories of walking through the wasteland and living in its vicinity. In our presentation, we focus especially on collective walks – or ‘walking-with’ – as a method of knowing waste(lands) through movement and sensory entanglement. During our walks, we were struck by the abundance of both organic and inorganic debris, some of recent origin, others long buried in the soil and now resurfacing. We also suggest that the wasteland presents a ‘heterotopia’, a counter-space to the smooth, regulated and strictly planned urban space harnessed to utility. Situated in the margins or on the periphery, between official and acknowledged places, the wasteland may not attract much attention, yet it allows informal human uses and supports the flourishing of rich plant and animal life.

This presentation reflects on practitioner research and how one moment—sparked by a child’s fascination with a pileated woodpecker—reconfigured my pedagogical orientation and deepened my capacity to listen differently: beyond human voice, into the ecologies that shape and are shaped by our common worlds (Taylor & Giugni, 2012; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016). This encounter opened me to the presence of the woodpecker, a species I had previously overlooked, and shifted how I attune to the minor gestures (Manning, 2016) in children’s play—those often fleeting, easily dismissed moments that can reveal profound relational connections with the more-than-human world.

In the context of the conference theme, this reflection situates such moments within broader global flows of environmental change and pedagogical practice, suggesting that even small, local encounters can hold significance in challenging times. Through the child’s sustained attention to the woodpecker, I came to recognize play as a collaborative practice of world-making (Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016), one that entangles humans, species, and places in shared acts of care and curiosity.

Attending seriously to these everyday encounters has reshaped how I understand and respond to children’s inquiries as invitations into collaborative, multispecies worlding. In attuning to how children become-with (Haraway, 2008) beloved species, I found a pedagogical opening for myself to become-with children’s nature worlds, to be moved by them, and to consider how these relationships might reorient what matters in education.

In reflecting on this single moment, the presentation invites a broader conversation about how qualitative, practice-based research can trace relational connections across scales—from local encounters to global ecological concerns—reminding us that new pedagogical possibilities often begin in the subtle, shared gestures of everyday life.

We present a qualitative educational study conducted with Greek elementary school children, situated within the tradition of relational assemblages of people and places (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The study was enacted through pedagogical encounters in which children, the researcher (first author), and the place formed temporary hybrid assemblages, generating experiences, relationships, and events that opened new possibilities for thinking and learning. Through a series of creative pedagogical and research experiments, the study explores what emerges within these assemblages as they unfold in space and time.

Our study adopts a post-humanist and new-materialist perspective, drawing on the philosophical toolbox of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with the concept of assemblage at its core. Applying the research-assemblage model of Fox & Alldred (2015), we conducted a qualitative cartography, positioning the assemblage—not the human—as the unit of analysis and attending to multi-level material-semantic relationships. The narration and analysis of these encounters drew on Diana Masny’s vignette model for rhizoanalysis (2013, 2014), enabling non-linear, richly textured representations of the research process.

This research contributes to qualitative research practice by combining philosophical concepts with creative pedagogical methods, emphasizing the environmental affordances of existence and learning. It proposes ways of thinking and researching that recognize the co-production of human and non-human/more-than-human actors, for the realities-yet-to-come, as Gilles Deleuze would reflect.

Traditionally, mathematics is considered a difficult subject for the majority of pupils of all ages. As a result, a lot of them underperform in it and as a consequence only a few of them appear to succeed. Surprisingly, this unequal achievement is considered normal by implicitly accepting a hegemonic ideology of ‘aptitudes’ i.e. that only selected people can be able in mathematics.

The purpose of the study presented here was to design and implement a teaching practice which ensures that all the pupils in a classroom have the opportunity to engage productively with mathematics. This was achieved by the adoption of a collaborative problem solving approach: pupils of different “abilities” formed small groups and were set the task to discuss on equal terms carefully selected mathematical tasks.

A qualitative analysis approach was adopted which focused on the development of arguments by each member of the group recognizing that such a development is the essential indicator of mathematics knowledge-building. “Mathematics learning” is conceived as a “change” from primitive arguments to more sophisticated ones. Thus, each pupil’s discourse was recorded and analysed drawing primarily on discourse analysis and sociocultural theories of learning.

Results from the analysis of the arguments generated by the three members of one typical group are presented in this paper. The results indicate that, despite their different abilities, the pupils seem to have advanced significantly their discourse during their involvement in the collaborative work. In other words, the adopted teaching approach appears to have created equal opportunities for all the group members.

In this session we want to work together to engage in multimodal analysis of digital stories created by people with learning disabilities, and family carers. The stories were told as part of a research “Tired of spinning plates": an exploration of mental health experiences of adult/older carers of adults with learning disabilities [NIHR ID 135080]. The overarching aim of the project was to generate new knowledge and understanding of the mental health experiences of carers of adults with learning disabilities (September, 2023-November, 2025). Drawing on participatory approaches, we worked with 17 parent carers, sibling carers and people with learning disabilities who created digital stories about their experiences of care and of mental health.

Thinking with disability

Digital storytelling is a multimedia approach to telling stories which is typically used to generate 3-to-5-minute short films (Oppel, 2025). These films bring together a mixture of images, video, voice recording, music, sound, and text to narrate the storytellers' experiences of their everyday lives (Gubrium et al., 2014). Multimodality is typically valued as a way of enhancing meaning, increasing clarity and enriching storytelling (Walters, 2018).

And yet, digital storytelling approaches and multimodal analysis have not always embraced the diverse ways in which people experience the world (Pink, 2011; Douglas et al., 2021; Walters 2018). The literacy theorist Gunther Kress describes ‘multimodality’ as "the normal state of human communication” and this appeal to “normal” has invited critique (Kress, 2010:1 cited in Walters, 2018). Writing from an anthropological perspective, Pink (2018) has criticised Kress’s failure to recognise the dominance of Western thinking in the development of multimodal analysis, and argues for an approach to multimodality which embraces culture, meaning and experience, and Walters (2018) has questioned both the accessibility of digital storytelling to disabled people, and a wider failure to consider diverse storytellers and audiences (Walters, 2015).

Spinning analysis

In this session, we plan to screen 3 short films created as part of the Spinning Plates project. We invite audience members to engage with us in a multimodal analysis from a critical disability studies perspective (Walters, 2018). First, this means that we want to explore the moments in which the stories disrupt dominant ableist narratives which (re)produce beliefs and practices which are based on the unquestioned assumption that the ‘able’ body-mind is the ideal type (Woolbring, 2008). Second, we want to pay attention to the moments in which stories frustrate dominant (Western) narrative forms and generate new ways of thinking about “coherence” in storytelling (Walters, 2015:5).

Session Plan

In this session we will invite the audience to engage with three digital stories created by three storytellers (a person with a learning disability; a parent carer and a sibling carer).

In the session, we will:

1. Introductions and overview of the session

2. Contextualise the stories: introduce the project and explain where the digital stories come from.

3. Invite audience members to analyse the digital stories using the multimodal analysis framework grounded in a critical disability studies perspective.

4. We will show 3 x 5 minute films and ask audience members to use the framework to analyse at least one film of their choice. .

5. Discussion: we will reflect on the responses to the films and the approach to analysis during the session.

Following the session we will:

1. Contact audience members who sign up to be co-authors on the paper to ask them to sense check our thematic analysis of the collated responses to the films using the framework analysis.

2. We will share the final author copy of the co-authored paper for comment before submission.

3. We will submit the multiple co-authored paper to Societies journal.

References

Gubrium, A. C., Hill, A. L., & Flicker, S. (2014). A situated practice of ethics for participatory visual and digital methods in public health research and practice: A focus on digital storytelling. American Journal of Public Health, 104(9), 1606–1614. https://

doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2013.301310

Kress, G. (2009). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary communication. Routledge.

Oppel, A. (2025) Digital storytelling as an act of academic courage https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/04/20/digital-storytelling-as-an-act-of-academic-courage/

Pink, S. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: Social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception. Qualitative research, 11(3), 261-276.

Walters, S. (2018). A Different Kind of Wholeness: Disability Dis-Closure and Ruptured Rhetorics of Multimodal Collaboration and Revision in" The Ride Together". In Composition Forum (Vol. 39). Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition.

Wolbring, G. (2008). The Politics of Ableism, in “Development”, 51.

In times of uncertainty and rapid global change, stories remain one of the most enduring human practices for creating meaning, fostering connection, and envisioning new possibilities. This Dream Team proposes an experiential exploration of therapeutic storytelling as a collaborative practice that bridges individual self-reflection with collective dialogue. Drawing on two decades of psychotherapeutic experience within cognitive-behavioral and third-wave approaches, I have developed a body of over one hundred short stories designed to support clients’ self-awareness, awakening, and motivation for change. These stories, accompanied by illustrated postcards, act as tangible anchors of insight within the therapeutic encounter. Although rooted in clinical practice, their resonance extends far beyond the therapy room: they offer a powerful vehicle for dialogue, mutual recognition, and collaborative creativity in diverse communities.

The concept of Storyflows positions stories not as fixed texts but as dynamic movements across personal and cultural boundaries. They flow between therapist and client, individual and group, inner world and outer reality. In this sense, therapeutic stories reflect the very theme of this congress: global flows, connections, dialogues, and collaborative practices in challenging times. Stories invite us into shared spaces of imagination, compassion, and transformation, making them uniquely suited for a Dream Team session.

This 90-minute session will unfold as an open, participatory journey in five stages. First, the session will begin with the reading of a short therapeutic story, offering a common experiential ground from which reflection can emerge (10 minutes). Second, delegates will be invited into guided reflection through carefully crafted questions, encouraging them to consider how the story resonates with their own lives, practices, and current global challenges (15 minutes). Third, participants will move into small groups for a creative exercise of story co-construction (30 minutes). Supported by thematic prompts and visual stimuli such as postcards, each group will be invited to create a brief story that captures their collective reflections. Fourth, these stories will be shared in plenary, where the process of listening, recognition, and dialogue will highlight the multiplicity of perspectives and experiences present in the group (20 minutes). Finally, the session will close with a short guided meditation and reflective writing exercise, anchoring insights and inviting delegates to connect their experience with their own professional or personal contexts (15 minutes).

The Dream Team model is particularly appropriate for this work, as it emphasizes interaction, dialogue, and co-creation. Rather than a traditional presentation, this session will be a living laboratory of collaborative practice, demonstrating how stories function as vessels of shared meaning. The process of collective story-making embodies the congress’ concern with global flows and connections: participants from different countries, professions, and cultural backgrounds will bring their voices together in the creation of new narratives. These narratives will not only reflect individual experiences but also gesture toward shared human concerns in times of disruption and transformation.

Participants will gain experiential understanding of therapeutic storytelling as a practice that fosters both individual self-awareness and collective dialogue. Third, participants will leave with practical tools - reflective prompts, experiential techniques, and creative approaches - that can be adapted to their own professional practices, whether in therapy, education, community work, or leadership.

This Game Changer will explore barriers to collaboration and opportunities to facilitate paradigmatic shifts towards more equitable co-existence and co-flourishing. It will consider how we can ensure that justice and, in particular, multispecies, social and environmental justice have a seat at the table and are taken seriously. This may involve a shift from pusillanimity to magnanimity and the necessary integration of spiritual health and growth into learning and teaching.

This Game Changer explores how bringing slow-pedagogies into Higher Education can help us rediscover our place in the universe. It recognises that a reflexive turn is needed if we are to transcend dualistic thinking and explore co-presencing and genuine meeting with the more-than-human. If the practice of ecological pilgrimage as a methodology for re-imagining our fraught relations with the world is to realise its transformative potential, however, it needs to engage with and contribute to the biomedical sciences, especially where they seek to explore inter and transdisciplinary approaches to complex planetary health challenges. One Health and the related fields of Ecohealth and Planetary Health offer opportunities for such transformative work. There are many obstacles, however to such collaborations. A particular obstacle to such transformations lies in the analytical traditions and habits of those working in STEM disciplines and their historical siloing away from the SHAPE disciplines, where process-philosophy and methodological pluralism and diversity may have already contributed to a Great Turning (Macy and Brown, 2014) into re-imagining and re-creating the world. It will challenge One Health to build on its recognition of equity as a guiding principle (OHHLEP, 2022), to address its anthropocentrism and historical animal, plant and fungi blindness.

In this Game Changer, we draw on walking practices to consider how qualitative researchers can engage with quantitative researchers whose disciplines may still be invested in and wedded to objectivism, rationalism and materialism, anthropocentrism and androcentrism. This can challenge us to make sense of our grapplings and struggles when facing into the realisation that the Cartesian model is still running our institutions and that God is an engineer or mathematician. Descartes maintained that truth is found only in clear and distinct ideas. For Thomas Aquinas, however, truth is a passion of the heart for “the objects of the heart are truth and justice” (Sheldrake and Fox, 1996, p.73). A concern for justice is therefore a game-changer, providing it is recognised as central and foundational to the inquiries we engage in and lives we lead. But what if our collaborators have not bought into this brave new world and are content working on technofixes to preserve the old order? What if our collaborators do not recognise the rights of more-than-human animals, rivers and the life-sustaining systems we depend on? These represent very real tensions and challenges within the academy.

Walking affords unique opportunities to slow down and come into relational ecological presence. The significance of this shift in mode of being has been recognised by philosophers, writers and researchers from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Gros to Solnit, Kahn and Ingold. It is perhaps best summed up by Thich Nhat Hanh’s invitation to find peace in every step. Stepping off the busyness of life to gain perspective is therefore a serious activity and one that has been recommended as a search for presence, grace and right-relation. It represents a shift from ego to eco and as such can be viewed as ecological pilgrimage: a journey on foot through which we learn to live our questions. This shift embraces the wholeness of experience and the many epistemic practices through which we become more ecological. The pedagogical potential of pilgrimage allows us to explore fourth person knowing (both at the level of the individual and the collective) and to encounter and resolve conflictual tensions in our relationships with ourselves, others and the more-than-human.

This Game Changer will be of interest to pedagogues, psychotherapists and other professionals working in reflexive interdisciplinary ways to promote health and flourishing and interested in exploring how education can guide and heal the soul. It is hoped that this will allow us to take our path making more seriously to better realise transformative learning and fourth-person knowing.

References:

Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming back to life : the updated guide to The work that reconnects. New Society Publishers.

Sheldrake, R., & Fox, M. (1997). Natural grace: Dialogues on science and spirituality. Bloomsbury.

One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP). (2022). One Health: A new definition for a sustainable and healthy future. PLoS pathogens, 18(6), e1010537. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1010537

This project explores Collaborative Audio Narrative as a radical, affective, and interdisciplinary method for feminist inquiry. Drawing from Narrative Productions Methodology, the project positions narrative not just as a storytelling tool, but as a body—a site of encounter where researcher and participant engage in body-to-body dialogue that transcends language. This method invites listeners to feel, resonate, and be moved.

The project emphasizes the relational and affective dimensions of sound, treating sound as resonance and knowledge, and noise as a productive, transformative force. The results are not traditional transcripts or case studies, but curated audio stories—podcast-like episodes blending voice, ambient sound, and abstract textures. These soundscapes provoke affective engagement, capturing tensions, contradictions, and resistances voiced by intergenerational women in academia as they reflect on their conditions, challenges, and the reproduction of academic systems.

We ask: which bodies matter in academia? From an affective perspective, a body is not limited to flesh and bone—it can be a building, a policy, or a piece of technology. In neoliberal academic systems, non-human bodies are often prioritized, while patriarchal structures devalue human bodies—especially those of women, mothers, racialized scholars, and gender-diverse individuals.

This method honors collaborative knowledge production, where participants are co-creators. The presentation includes audio excerpts and reflections on the ethical, technical, and affective dimensions of producing them. Listening becomes a political act—tuning into feminist resistance, institutional violence, and collective hope.

We argue for more studies that center collective, emotional, and embodied voices—moving beyond the frameworks of organizational and clinical psychology. In challenging times, Collaborative Audio Narrative offers a transformative lens for inquiry.

In a world marked by division, this study addresses the challenge of fostering peace by re-establishing dialogue between "reason" and "unreason," a rupture diagnosed by Michel Foucault. We argue that understanding the pain of others is a micro-practice of peace-building. This research asks: Can we move beyond textual interviews by using participant-provided images of suffering as a bridge for dialogue?

This qualitative study explores how a rigorous interpretation of visual narratives can become a form of peace education. We conducted in-depth interviews with three young adults who have experienced profound emotional suffering, treating their personal photographs as primary data. Adopting Ralf Bohnsack's "documentary method," rooted in Panofsky's iconology, our analysis prioritized the images' formal structures (composition, staging, perspective) over their narrative content. This approach "brackets" preconceived knowledge to reconstruct the shared, tacit "habitus" or "documentary meaning" behind the images.

Findings reveal that the photographs' formal compositions eloquently "document" a shared habitus of conflict and isolation. Images of a grasping hand near glass shards or a fallen tree blocking a path visually articulate a tension between agency and self-harm, and a state of being "cut off" from peers.

This method transforms the ethics of viewing pain. By focusing on how images construct meaning, the researcher is forced into a slower, more respectful engagement. This shifts empathy from a fleeting "I feel sorry for you" to a structural understanding: "I see the predicament you are in." This rigorous visual interpretation, therefore, offers a path for qualitative inquiry to foster relational connection and build peace in challenging times.

In the world as it presents itself today a lot of people like myself give in to doom and despair. Hope is sometimes seen as naive, despair as its opposite then seems to come accross as sophisticated. But in precarious times when we do not know what is going to happen - and in what order - neither stands on solid groud. Contrary to either possibly leading to inaction, I argue for a position beyond hope and despair - a position of humility, that allows for continued "trying" our best.

Whether understood more as a theory, a lens, and/or a methodology (Cho et al. 2013), intersectionality is a generative approach to research interested in critical issues of inequity. Within qualitative inquiry, intersectionality has been deployed in various ways in collaborative community-based research (CBR) projects, often with an emphasis on intersectional praxis (Fine et al. 2021).

As we have found in our three-year Intersectionality in Action Partnership project, putting intersectionality into practice across all stages of qualitative community collaboration is full of challenges. Is this a “good problem” to have? Understanding how relationships and practices in CBR unfold across time is crucial to answering this question.

Drawing on a range of methods (interviews, mini focus groups, short questionnaires, mapping exercises, and activity notes) deployed with the members of two housing research teams in Alberta, Canada, our research explores the joys and pitfalls of learning and doing intersectionality over the life cycle of community-partnered research. We are thus interested in an unfolding process over time. In this paper, we share our preliminary attempts to develop a temporal mapping approach to situational analysis (Clarke et al. 2016)—a method that “supports the analysis of multiple temporalities and processes” within the “wider configurations of elements that shape process” (Knopp 2021). In doing so, we consider the importance of temporality itself as a vector of power within intersectional research relations (cc Freeman 2022).

Through the stories of seven doctoral students and two professors who supported their dissertation journeys, this session will explore how biography and individual as well as shared context(s) shape researchers' methodological choices. Particular attention will be paid to data collection and analysis techniques that departed from or pushed the boundaries of canonical qualitative methods, such as hip-hop lyrical elicitation, artifact elicitation, walking interviews, experiential dialogues, arts-based methods (e.g., stippling, drawing) and mosaic line drawing analysis. Authors will highlight how their own ways of knowing, participants' ways of knowing, and/or the geo-political-economic context in which their work took place compelled their choices and led them to a place where they felt authentically present in their research. By examining how these scholars arrived at research methods authentic to themselves and sensitive to their participants, the authors will illuminate common themes that reveal the deeply personal and even social nature of methodological decision-making. Our analysis of these narratives reveals three distinct, yet occasionally overlapping, pathways to methodological innovation. First, some researchers harness their natural creativity, finding freedom from conventional constraints to develop novel approaches. Second, others leverage their commitment to structure, using systematic frameworks as containers that paradoxically enable innovation. Third, scholars who have experienced marginalization often develop methodological breakthroughs that unlock knowledge about previously underexplored experiences and communities. Across all three pathways, a central truth emerges: while pursuing authentic and personally meaningful research can be a demanding journey, it offers profound rewards. Such approaches not only expand the boundaries of human knowledge in meaningful ways but also support scholars' own healing and growth while building community and relationships that transcend traditional academic boundaries. Researchers who embrace authentic methodologies create spaces for vulnerability and new awareness—both for themselves and the world they study.

Qualitative interviews with marginalized participants risk flattening complexity by focusing on a single, dominant identity, which can reproduce epistemic injustice. Addressing this in the context of India's rural-to-urban youth migration, we use a single interview as an exemplar of co-constructed conversation. Our aim is to demonstrate how a researcher, practicing epistemic humility, can attend to the dynamic surfacing and receding of multiple identities throughout the interview. By applying principles from Conversation Analysis (CA) and Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). This micro-analytic approach tracks how conversational turns and shifting contextual frames enable or quiet certain topics.

The analysis organizes around three interlinked concerns grounded in the exemplar. First, securing conditions for voice: participant-defined boundaries around dress, mobility, and setting, together with learned micro-etiquettes, shape what can be said; the conversational flow shows an early chapter of caution and a later chapter of competence, both of which need to remain audible in the record. Second, negotiating knowledge and authority in everyday navigation: the participant evaluates local remedies versus exploitative claims and moves into rights-talk with institutions and markets; pairing event-with-feeling and fact-with-meaning questions, and reenacting brief scenes, helps surface practical decision rules and “power-in-action” as the talk unfolds. Third, replotting identities and futures: counter-stigma caste talk coexists with roles as student, friend, hosteller, worker, engineer-in-training, and daughter/sibling; talk about returning to serve one’s home region reorders priorities across moments, echoing recent calls to treat positionality as dynamic and situational rather than fixed. Finally, we offer strategies for making co-construction explicit and putting epistemic humility to work. By treating the interview as jointly authored and carefully attending to conversational dynamics, researchers can hold multiple identities in play. This produces a plural, thick, and accountable representation of participants' knowledge.

This presentation is a call to imagine, celebrate, work with and revalue stuckness – a feeling/idea often evoked when speaking and reflecting on qualitative research, but one that has not been sufficiently thematized and studied. We engage with stuckness and think with another concept – stickiness – to consider the affects and ideas that may hold us back and sustain the normativity of stuffy academic (writing) practices. Even within the uncertainty we experience, staying stuck can be an embodied resistance to normative expectations of productivity, of being fast and effective. In our presentation, we play with the idea of stuckness as a movement that can help detach from these sticky expectations. We aim to show some of the multiplicities of stuckness and ‘re-member’ (Barad, 2017) our own experiments with academic writing on the move. We use this as a prompt to dwell in moments of stuckness as a constraint but/and, most importantly, a possibility, pleasure, and hopefulness. Stuckness can be a prompt to take action, lure to seek new companions and to change the assemblage. It can be an invitation to inhabit incoherence and indeterminacy as a reorientation and recalibration of normative academic pace and rhythm in the movement of writing bodies. It is a generative space, a place-space to dwell in. Towards these aims, this presentation is an invitation to think about 1) How do we experience stuckness and its trouble(s)? 2) How does stuckness feel, taste, look, sound like? 3) What can stuckness become/what can become out of stuckness? Feeling stuck in academic writing and research can feel daunting; however, this sensation could be equally productive and generative. Stuckness, we propose, unsettles certainties and potentially can compel us to think, write and act otherwise.

How to properly acquire informed consent is among key questions in ethical research practice. Rather than a one-off event, existing methodological literature has helped us to understand giving an informed consent as a process of negotiation, which is imbued with complex and shifting power relations. In our own research we have found, however, that it is often difficult to grasp or articulate these complex, embodied and affective processes in research participation. In this presentation, we approach these negotiations with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) concept of periperformatives, to see whether it helps us to put our finger on some of these elusive elements of research encounters. Building on J.L. Austin’s classical work on performative utterances, with periperformatives, Sedgwick draws attention to interactional moves that cluster around and about performatives, commenting on or conditioning them. While giving an informed consent in a traditional sense may be understood as a performative speech act, periperformatives happen around and “in the neighborhood” of performatives: the potential participants’ often subtle expressions of doubts and interests, the researcher’s worries and wishes, and how these circulate and become apparent through various forms of interaction. We argue that periperformatives in research encounters are fuzzy and difficult to grasp, yet they hold affective and performative power and are important in terms of both the unfolding of participation and research ethics. By using the methodology of memory work, we tapped into our own research processes to explore how periperformatives as a conceptual tool may transform our thinking about research consent. In our presentation, we pull our reflections together and discuss how attending to periperformatives may sensitise us to recognising complexity and processuality of participation.

Background: Social influences are key drivers of youth smoking in Nigeria, yet health communication campaigns rarely visualize these dynamics from the perspcetive of young people. This study used a co-design approach to engage young people in identifying and illustrating the root causes of smoking in their community.

Methods: Eighty-nine students from two senior secondary schools in southern Nigeria participated in a series of co-design workshops. Seven mixed-department groups (sciences, social sciences, arts) used problem-tree mapping to identify smoking-related root causes. Thematic analysis was conducted on their visual and written outputs.

Results: Participants consistently identified peer influence as a major driver of smoking initiation, describing it as a gradual process beginning with casual invitations (“just try it”) and progressing to habitual smoking (addiction). Family members were also seen as both risk and protective factors. While mothers were described as strong deterrents; fathers, uncles, and older brothers were often cited as modeling smoking behaviour. Although negative influence was usually ascribed to male relatives, they were also the reason why some participants witnessed the serious health consequences of smoking and believed smoking to be dangerous, thereby serving as a deterrent.

Conclusion: Co-design empowered participants to articulate complex social influences on smoking and translate them into an engaging animation for tobacco use prevention. This participatory, visual approach may strengthen youth-focused health communication campaigns in African contexts and improve their cultural relevance. The co-designed animation will be showcased during the conference presentation.

Within large research collaborations especially in health domain, International Working Groups (IWGs) serve as platforms facilitating joint expert work on specific topic areas. Using the Network of Practice (NoP) lens, this study investigates how geographically and culturally diverse members from different background contexts and competence levels navigate participation in a loosely structured, informal group based on voluntary participation. Specifically, the study explores how members of one International Working Group in a global health research network understand their group as a mechanism for collaboration, knowledge sharing, learning and improving the shared practice, and their role and participation in it. The empirical material consists of semi-structured online interviews (n≥20) with members of one IWG focusing on one specific aspect of the shared research practice of the network. Interview data will be complemented with supporting material such as documents produced within the IWG as well as observation of the IWG meetings held online. Data will be analysed qualitatively using the Gioia methodology. The study reveals how members construct meaning around their roles, responsibilities, and contributions within the group. It also uncovers the activities (e.g., meetings, joint production of scientific articles) and tools (e.g., surveys, online platforms) that the group coordinators apply to facilitate synchronous, but also asynchronous scientific collaboration across time zones worldwide. This research advances understanding of how distributed scientists-practitioners co-create shared practice through International Working Groups dedicated to specific topic areas.

Background: Integrating the Living with Long Term Conditions (LwLTCs) scale into routine primary care is challenging, especially for under-served populations facing health inequalities. This study addresses these issues within "challenging times" in healthcare, focusing on fostering "relational connections and collaborative practices" to enhance patient care.

Aims & Objectives: Our project aims to identify enablers and barriers for introducing and operationalising the LwLTCs scale in primary care, particularly for under-served groups. Objectives include exploring patient and healthcare professional (HCP) perspectives and collaborating with implementation champions to facilitate scale adoption and integration.

Methodology: Utilising a qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 LTCs patients (purposively sampled across ethnicity, socio-economic status, remote living) and 15 LTCs-related HCPs (purposively sampled by working area/professional background). Recruitment was from two diverse primary care practices within Hampshire, England (urban/semi-rural) via professional networks and social media. Data collection is complete, and thematic analysis is underway, with Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) validation and dissemination. By the time of the conference, preliminary findings from this analysis will be available for sharing and discussion.

Contribution: This research directly informs collaborative practices by identifying practical strategies for implementing the LwLTCs scale. By highlighting diverse patient and HCP perspectives and local factors, it strengthens relational connections within healthcare. Findings will support a responsive implementation plan, address health inequalities, and foster effective primary care models relevant to global flows of complex health needs.

Research focusing on attitudes has long been at the core of social psychology. Studies have typically defined attitudes as relatively stable internal dispositions that guide behaviour. This study, however, takes a different approach to attitudes towards alcohol screening and counselling. Rather than viewing attitudes as internal dispositions, this study considers them to be argumentative and socially embedded phenomena – that is, attitudes which are constructed and can be recognised in social interaction. The study provides a qualitative analysis of how alcohol-related problems are constructed within the context of social work. A qualitative attitude approach (QAA) is employed to explore the construction of attitudes in argumentative talk. Specifically, it explores how social workers (n = 14) and their clients (n = 14) constructed alcohol-related problems as attitude objects. Both groups mainly constructed alcohol-related problems as social issues. The interviewees associated this social issue closely with social statuses, as well as with clients' fulfilment of their responsibilities and their ability to function well. The alcohol-related problem was attributed not only to the individual, but also to the people around them. While the medicalised view of alcohol-related problems, which highlights the negative impact they can have on people’s health and well-being, was present in the argumentative talk, it was less common than the social view. The interviewees saw identifying and managing alcohol-related problems as an essential part of a social worker's job. This social view may contrast with individualistic models of substance abuse treatment. The results demonstrate that a qualitative approach to attitudes is required to understand different constructions of attitude objects.

Supervised Consumption Sites (SCS) operate within the framework of harm reduction practices, providing individuals who use psychoactive substances with a safe and controlled environment to engage in such use.To date, there is a paucity of research emanating from Greece on heroin users’ experiences in the SCS context. The goal of this study is to provide a platform for the voice of users of psychoactive substances, specifically heroin and to update harm reduction policies and the relevant services, so that they are able to respond to the needs of the population in the best possible way. This thesis aims to explore the lived experience of heroin use within the SCS. Nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals who used the SCS for heroin use. The method of analysis employed is Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which allows for the study of participants' interpretations of their experiences while simultaneously acknowledging the inevitable influence of the researcher's interpretations. The findings that emerged are captured through the following sections: a) The “structure” of survival, b) On the threshold: between marginalization and acceptance, c) Building alternative relationships: support and obstacles, d) Cracks towards the light: the possibility of moral reconstruction and rehabilitation. The SCS emerged as a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional space, an important function of which seemed to be the coverage of heroin users’ basic needs. Participants seemed to give it meaning as a space between the “inside” and the “outside”, with their experience within it being largely determined by the social relations that develop in its context. The SCS emerged as a potential station between heroin use and rehabilitation, emphasizing the importance of its integration into a network of therapeutic options and services in order to be a hub of support for people who use heroin.

As the intersectional complexities of the challenges we are facing in society today proliferate across social-ecological levels, radical change is tracking along the fault lines of power and oppression accelerating inequities across all aspects of human and more-than-human life. Collective imaginaries are needed to reworld endogenous participatory ontologies capable of disentangling from hierarchal introjections, liberating the unique beauty and genius within each of us to become manifest in a new social order. Prolonged activation of the stress-response systems in our minds and bodies, however, are suppressing the imaginal capacities necessary for a salutary response from disadvantaged populations. What then are we to do? Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are proven to support development of effective coping and appraisal skills, yet their focus has largely been calibrated to decrease negative functioning. Could this sociopolitical environment produce the conditions that serve as the catalyst for the development of an innovative transformational contemplative practice?

A transdisciplinary developmental framework guided by the mindfulness to meaning theory was applied to create a new 8-week MBI: Mindfulness-Based Eudaimonic Wellbeing (MBEW). Salutogenic activities operationalizing elements of eudaimonic well-being grounded in Aristotelian philosophies of eudaimonia and the hero/ heroine archetype of comparative mythology were integrated into mindfulness meditation practices to produce liminal cognoaffectiveinteroceptive ecologies animating endogenous paradigms of personal and collective selfhood as an approach to upend systemic barriers (e.g., social, psychological, material) to self-determined flourishing.

A mixed-methods feasibility and pilot testing of MBEW was conducted in a community-based setting with disadvantaged adults. Results demonstrate significant changes in stress (decrease) and mindfulness (increase). Additionally, to my knowledge, this is the first MBI study to demonstrate significant changes in the ‘total score’ of Ryff’s scales of psychological wellbeing (eudaimonic wellbeing). Participants completed qualitative interviews articulating in their own words the positive impact MBEW has had on their lives.

Early adulthood is a period of profound transitions, where young adults establish independence, build differentiated relationships, and consolidate their professional paths.

This study explores how young adults, focused on professional development, actively construct their identities through participation in a personal development group, highlighting the interplay between social interaction and individual transformation. Group participation served as a transformative experience, enabling self-reflection and the dialectical construction of identity through interaction and mirroring among members.

Adopting a systemic–dialectical and narrative approach, this qualitative study emphasizes lived experience, relational dynamics, and co-construction of meaning. Data were collected from eight personal and professional development sessions involving eight participants, members of this group, meeting weekly for two-hour sessions over one to three years. These sessions were coordinated by three systemic psychotherapists. The data analysis focused on the transcripts of session discussions.

Identity is understood as a cyclical, social process, through which participants come to know themselves, claim their positions, and seek recognition within relational and group contexts.

Participants’ journeys revealed a dynamic process of self-discovery: clarifying values and beliefs, navigating uncertainty, confronting responsibility and fear, and negotiating personal pathways. Revisiting personal narratives with openness to vulnerability highlighted the transformative nature of the process, while reconciling with the inner critic fostered acceptance of self and significant others. Participants developed resilience amidst relational turbulence, shaped meaningful aspirations, and balanced desire and fear to pursue their goals iteratively, without nostalgia, while attending to survival and self-care.

These findings demonstrate how systemic–dialectical and narrative practices enhance qualitative research by revealing how social interaction fosters agency, reflection, and transformative development in early adulthood, offering practical insights for counseling, education, and organizational practice.

Despite self-actualisation (SA) being an influential concept, as testified by numerous academic publications, most research on the subject is quantitative. Even though there are some phenomenological qualitative research projects on SA, they all focus on very specific target populations. This qualitative study, therefore, attempted to make a contribution toward filling this gap in current literature. The aim was to examine the subjective view of SA of participants living in Greece. A maximum variation sample was employed, consisting of seven participants. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews. The epistemological standpoint was phenomenological. A data-driven, inductive analysis was implemented, following the six stages of reflexive thematic analysis designed by Braun and Clarke (2022). For many participants SA meant realising professional goals related to their natural inclinations, establishing harmonious relationships and achieving desired mental states such as equanimity, happiness, creativity and contentment. Despite a degree of homogeneity there were also important differences. Some participants valued autonomy while others sought fulfilment by being part of something bigger than themselves. Material wealth was essential for only a few of the participants. Other participants emphasised the importance of being of service to others and making a positive contribution to the world. Implications, applications, limitations and future research were also discussed.

The study of group process in psychotherapy has been the subject of extensive scientific research over the past decades, highlighting the importance of its investigation. Based on systemic–dialectical epistemology, and in particular on the theory of the dialogical self, the Synallactic Collective Image Technique (SCIT) developed by Vassiliou & Vassiiou has been applied in various psychotherapeutic and psychoeducational contexts. The core of the technique lies in the co-creation of relationships among group members through the stimulation of verbal and nonverbal modes of communication while simultaneously revealing deeper, unconscious functions. A central element of the process is the shared drawing, which emerges collectively in real time and space, functioning as an analog representation of the group’s cohesion and dynamics while also opening channels of connection among the members. This presentation describes the application of the SCIT technique with an emphasis on the role of the shared drawing, as well as its benefits for group cohesion and communication. The presentation links group functioning with the principles of systems theory, neuroplasticity, and interpersonal neurobiology, emphasizing the importance of analog communication and participatory creation for the group’s psycho-emotional development and cohesion. Finally, it underscores the profound significance of the group process as a counterbalance to the pervasive individualism and existential isolation of contemporary society, illuminating the enduring value of coexistence, mutual interdependence, and communal connectedness.

This study investigates contemporary perceptions of love among young people in Greek society through a qualitative phenomenological approach. This approach was chosen as the most suitable to gain an in-depth understanding of participants’ subjective experiences and to illuminate the complex social phenomena that shape perceptions of love. The material was collected through semi-structured interviews with five participants aged 18–25. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, which revealed four main categories: the definition of love, associated with emotions such as jealousy, romance, and happiness; the stages of love (excitement, duration, maintenance, commitment); the influence of love on social relationships (conflict, distancing, autonomy); and the impact of social and technological changes on contemporary understandings and expressions of love (social media, historical comparison, new forms of love).

The findings highlight the multidimensional nature of love. Certain aspects, such as its definition, stages, and the emotional co-dependence of partners, appear to remain stable over time, while others shift in line with broader social trends. For instance, alongside co-dependence, participants emphasized the importance of autonomy, noting greater equality in modern relationships and increased freedom in partner choice compared to the past. The rise of social media in partner-seeking was viewed as contributing to a more superficial perception of love among young people, yet they continue to struggle with the transition from love to lasting commitment. Finally, while exclusivity was regarded by most as a fundamental element, some participants expressed openness to new forms of romantic relationships within a polyamorous framework.

Posthumanist methodological theory and contemporary Black Studies literature have arrived at similar philosophical positions in the early parts of the 21st century. Significant numbers of leading scholars in both fields of study have concluded that inquiry should be something other than an effort to represent an exogenous “reality” in a final and uniquely authoritative manner. Instead scholars are exploring the possibility that social inquiry is not primarily about refining epistemic representations, nor even about deconstructing pretentions to certainty, but are more fundamentally about generating new ontological relations and new political possibilities.

The posthumanist literature being referred to here includes, but is not limited to: feminist new materialism, Barad’s agential realism, Latour’s actor network theory, Deleuze’s assemblage theory, St. Pierre’s postqualitative inquiry, affect theory, Alaimo’s transcorporeal analysis, Tuana’s viscous porosity, Kohn’s material semiotics, and more. The Black Studies literature being referred to here includes, but is not limited to: fugitivity theory, Wynterian sociogenics and counterhumanisms, Moten’s improvisatory foundations, theories and practices of refusal, Hartmans’s critical fabulations, Afro-futurism, Black speculative fiction, and more.

Posthumanist and Black studies scholars have arrived at this postfoundational conception of social inquiry by relatively different paths and have done so in pursuit of somewhat different purposes. Consequently, there are both resonances and tensions between these literatures. The posthumanist literature tends to treat an emphasis on the impossibility of closure and epistemic fluidity as a positive political achievement. It also frequently operates with an aversion to essentialism and a preference for making broad identity categories the object, rather than the subject position, for analysis. The Black studies literature, on the other hand, tends to treat an emphasis on the impossibility of closure and epistemic fluidity as a neutral political achievement which under some circumstances can serve constructive political purposes, but under others can serve reactionary purposes. It also is organized around the idea that social analysis can and should center Blackness as a subject position for the foreseeable future and does not regard essentialism as the most significant risk facing our social worlds. Despite these tensions, many scholars are increasingly working with and in both literatures in pursuit of social amelioration.

These game changer session presume that any 21st century framework for social analysis must have something to offer the contemporary struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, and systemic racism to be relevant to contemporary world historical events. It also presumes no theoretical stone should go unturned in this effort. The session’s purpose is to gather scholars and graduate students interested in bringing these theoretical frameworks together in their research and scholarship in a manner that builds upon their resonances while also respecting their differences.

Structure of the Game Changer.

This Game Changer session will focus on examining the relationship between the relevant bodies of literature. It will provide an overview of their areas of overlap, including shared features, commitments, and purposes, while also addressing points of tension, conflict, and potential incommensurability. The session will conclude with a facilitated discussion that reflects on these insights and explores ways of strengthening connections between the literatures in the near future, for example through collaborative literature reviews or special journal issues. The session will be open to all conference attendees.

As this literature is vibrantly intersectional, adjacent literatures will be engaged as well, such as: Indigenous theories on non-human agency, Chicana feminist literature, queer theory, disability studies, animal studies, etc.

Deliverables

The session will provide a QR code link to a bibliography of relevant books, book chapters, and articles sorted into thematic sections. These will include works of posthumanist methodological theory and philosophy of science by scholars such as Annmarie Mol (2021), Anna Tsing (2024), Karen Barad (2015, 2020), Isabel Stengers (2023), Deboleena Roy (2018), Stacey Alaimo (2018), Elizabet St. Pierre (2021), Lisa Mazzei (2021), and others. It will also include book chapters and articles focused primarily on contemporary Black studies and Black feminist theories of inquiry, such as Sylvia Wynter (2003, 2015), Zakiyah Iman Jackson (2022), Saidiya Hartman (2018, 2019), Alexander Weheliye (); Fred Moten (2017), Tina Campt (2017), Kara Keeling (2019), Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen & Alex A. Moulton (2023), and others. Finally it will include book chapters and articles that explicitly bringing these literatures together in the service of anti-oppressive scholarship, such as Jasbir Puar (2024), Claire Colebrook (2022), Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Alecia Jackson (2013), Fikile Nxumalo (2021), Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2022), Sarah Truman (2019), Awad Ibrahim (2023), Tiffany Lethabo King (2017), Jerry Rosiek (2019), and others.