Conference Agenda

Each of the presenters are serving in the role of department chair, programme director, dean, or associate provost. We each spent years teaching and leading in qualitative research programs. Our collective scholarship is rooted in philosophies and theories that embrace situational, political, and ethical demands of relationships. Yet, as we moved from faculty roles into leadership roles, we found ourselves thinking about how to embody and lead with philosophical concepts that for years led our research/teaching practices. We offer four papers that question current discourses on higher education leadership, demonstrating the struggles we have in embodying and enacting relational philosophical concepts. These papers are rooted in the empirical, the everyday decisions, actions, and policy implementations we make as campus leaders.

We found ourselves looking for books on being a leader in higher education. What we found were advice literature on conflict management, survival guides, and recommended best practices. These approaches are rooted in humanist logics of the individual leader that allow for binary thought of administrator vs. faculty or leaders vs. followers. However, we were deep in living, teaching, and researching with philosophies that resist binary logics and focus on the relational ways the world comes into being, moment-by-moment, in more-than-human ways. Theories and philosophical concepts are not simply for research studies but for everyday living.

Collectively, in response to the conference theme, the papers discuss the rapidly changing needs of institutions and examine how embodied, philosophical concepts offer new and expansive visions for academic leadership, especially in unprecedented times. Our examples are based in the micro-moments of leading or the leading practices of the everyday. This is significant to the field because micro-moments as leaders are what makes our institutions. Thus, exposing how philosophical concepts inform our everyday decisions is critical to the field.

In an era of escalating global crises and ideological polarization, the field of psychology faces a critical test of its social justice commitments. This panel presents a cohesive, multi-methodological inquiry into the mechanisms of epistemic violence—specifically Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian rhetoric—within U.S. clinical psychology training. Moving from intimate testimony to collective strategizing, we illuminate how settler colonial and white supremacist discursive formations are perpetuated through everyday interactions, institutional policies, and clinical pedagogies. The panel begins with an autoethnographic excavation of epistemic violence across political eras (Paper 1), revealing the continuity of derailing and gaslighting tactics that protect dominant comfort. This is followed by a composite narrative (Paper 2) that vividly portrays the pathologizing of Palestinian identity and the violent boundaries of “treatability” within a program espousing equity. The third paper (Paper 3) shifts from narrative to embodiment, using somatic practice and scholarly review to frame epistemic violence not as an abstract concept but as a visceral, bodily harm. The panel culminates (Paper 4) in a praxis-oriented dialogue, collaboratively generating actionable strategies for micro-level interventions and macro-level institutional transformation. Together, these papers challenge the field of psychology and the wider academic community to move beyond recognition toward responsible action. By weaving autoethnography, narrative, somatic inquiry, and participatory dialogue, we model an unsettling approach to research—one that disrupts settler colonial and white supremacist discursive formations, exposes the violences of dominant knowledge systems, and holds psychology, clinical practice, and academia accountable to the futures we must collectively shape.

Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry is an edited collection that provides a framing for these two panels. The book aims to move beyond a critique and deconstruction of method in order to present an engagement with various postfoundational frameworks and approaches that produce new concepts and enactments. What makes the contributions to the book unique, and the subsequent new papers generated for this conference, is the singular focus on postfoundational paradigms, borrowed from the humanities and sciences, that are enveloped in what is referred to as the ontological turn, the new empiricisms, and the new materialisms. Postfoundational inquiry in this context is conceived as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive.

In the original book, the editors invited authors to offer enactments as a way of reorienting toward what is unthought, not yet, and becoming. This “not yet” is that which happens “in the moment of sensing, thinking, reading, and writing in the production of the new” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, p. 5). These enactments are not bound to foundational assumptions in that they do not follow a predetermined method, nor do they attempt to represent traditional accounts of fieldwork. Furthermore, they do not aim to critique or deconstruct. Instead, they overturn and displace foundations not only by attuning to the contingency of what emerges, but also by decentering human agency in favor of prepersonal, affective encounters that are of the world.

In these two sessions, an orienting introduction will be provided to explain more fully the facets of postfoundational inquiry as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive. Contributors to these panels were invited to revisit their earlier writings and consider:

How is your current work aligned with postfoundational approaches?

What you learned, or how your work has shifted/extended from the chapter produced for the book?

Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry is an edited collection that provides a framing for these two panels. The book aims to move beyond a critique and deconstruction of method in order to present an engagement with various postfoundational frameworks and approaches that produce new concepts and enactments. What makes the contributions to the book unique, and the subsequent new papers generated for this conference, is the singular focus on postfoundational paradigms, borrowed from the humanities and sciences, that are enveloped in what is referred to as the ontological turn, the new empiricisms, and the new materialisms. Postfoundational inquiry in this context is conceived as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive.

In the original book, the editors invited authors to offer enactments as a way of reorienting toward what is unthought, not yet, and becoming. This “not yet” is that which happens “in the moment of sensing, thinking, reading, and writing in the production of the new” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, p. 5). These enactments are not bound to foundational assumptions in that they do not follow a predetermined method, nor do they attempt to represent traditional accounts of fieldwork. Furthermore, they do not aim to critique or deconstruct. Instead, they overturn and displace foundations not only by attuning to the contingency of what emerges, but also by decentering human agency in favor of prepersonal, affective encounters that are of the world.

In these two sessions, an orienting introduction will be provided to explain more fully the facets of postfoundational inquiry as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive. Contributors to these panels were invited to revisit their earlier writings and consider:

1. How is your current work aligned with postfoundational approaches?

2. What you learned, or how your work has shifted/extended from the chapter produced for the book?

What does a white male rock-and-roll star born in Freehold NJ have in common with a female Chicana scholar and mystic living along the Mexican American border? Everything. It sounds unlikely but there are connections to consider and reasons why considering these connections should matter to us. This proposed paper intersects the visionary shamanic and aesthetic ideas of the scholar Gloria Anzaldúa (2015; 1987) with the visionary language of Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run (1975) and how interweaving their work addresses the “... synergies, creativities, transformative practices, hopes and possibilities ... “ of our collective futures (ECQI Call for Proposals). The presenter explores sites of resistance and hope shared between a disenfranchised working class riding down the broken highways like the characters in Springsteen's album Born to Run and the communities living in the liminal shamanic borderlands of Anzaldúa’s praxis. Both Anzaldua and Springsteen highlight a need for spiritually-adjacent aesthetic experiences that bridge divides between individuals/groups and foster belonging in our shared “interconnectedness, our shared vulnerability, and our interdependency with human and other worlds“ (ECQI Call for Proposals).

How can we shift (or disrupt) the binaries that limit our individual and collective realities without losing what matters? This presentation emphasizes how liminal spaces of fiction, storytelling and metaphor as qualitative modes of inquiry are necessary elements of resistance. Anzaldua refers to this spiritual inquiry through artmaking as conocimiento (2015, p. 142). Session participants will discuss song lyrics and scholarly passages alongside each other and consider how metaphoric, artistic, and literal border-crossing ‘conjures’ communal acts of shared futures that enable us to shape-shift and reconnect with human and nonhuman worlds.

References

Anzaldúa, G. (2015). Light in the dark. Duke University Press.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderland/La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books.

Springsteen, B. (1975). Born to run [Album]. Columbia Records.

This paper presents findings from Growing Up in the Market (GUIM), a three-year qualitative longitudinal study conducted as part of a research partnership between Queen’s Communities and Place (QCAP) and the Market community in inner-city Belfast. GUIM followed 61 participants across four generational cohorts—children, young people, young adults, and parents—through three waves of interviews (2022–2025). Our aim was to explore how community context shapes health, wellbeing, education and employment over time, and to explore the impact of our academic partnership. As such, this is an interdisciplinary project drawing on sociology, community psychology, and educational research. Its multigenerational design offers a relatively rare yet highly valuable lens through which to understand the dynamics of community life and change over time.

We will present narratives collected revealing three overarching themes: tensions of belonging and exclusion, collective action in response to adversity and asserting ambition(s) despite constraints. Across generations, participants emphasised pride, attachment, and solidarity, even as they spoke of stigma, precarious living conditions, and the intergenerational legacy of conflict. Education emerged as an act of resistance through which families sought to assert ambition, dignity, and possibility despite constraints. These findings were interpreted within the life course paradigm, highlighting how individual, family, and community trajectories intersect with wider structural forces across time.

Further we reflect on the approach itself and how, rapport built over repeated interviews developed trust and, at times, blurred the boundaries between researcher and participant impacting the data collected. We also discuss what this data suggests about the powerful potential of community-led interventions—from substance-use evenings to arts-based projects. In attending to the voices of children, young people, and families, the study foregrounds how hope, endures—even in precarious worlds and how communities under pressure resist deficit narratives and cultivate futures with persistence.

In this presentation, the author will present a paper that weaves autobiographical anecdotes with translanguaging theory to illustrate what educators can do, in their classrooms and everyday practice, to counter the deficit-oriented discourses and ideologies circulating about immigrant and/or multilingual learners. The author will begin by reflecting on her own translanguaging identity and life as a translanguager in primarily monoglossic spaces. She will then discuss alternative, heteroglossic understandings of language that seek to disrupt and counteract dominant and damaging monoglossic ideologies and perspectives, acknowledging the difficulty of such a task in the current sociopolitical climate in the United States. Finally, the author will invite attendees to explore their own linguistic and cultural identities and roots and engage in dialogue about the educational practices and policies that facilitated or stifled the development of their multilingualism as well as how the present realities in which they currently operate are similar and/or differ. Together, the author and attendees will discuss how educators can go about creating expansive, heteroglossic, translanguaging spaces that cultivate and nurturing students’ translanguaging instincts by discursively pushing back on larger monoglossic ideologies while also protecting ourselves in the current sociopolitical climate.

In today’s challenging times, resistance to managerialist and marketised education systems (Ball, 2019) remains problematic. Tools to counter fixed and ossified structures are few, whilst time and space for reimagining leadership are hard to find. As global market matters (policy, language, technologies) advance human performativity (Sidebottom, 2019), liberating leadership with embodied methodologies for the unintentional may be useful to subvert dominant operations and advance possibilities elsewhere.

This presentation embraces the transformative practices of art making with education as embodied, material, post-qualitative and post-human becomings (Fairchild, Taylor, Benozzo et al, 2022) for the unintentional and novel. Ways of making methodologies as soft materialisms will showcase the generative possibilities of material intra-inter-actions of bodies-non-bodies (Barad, 2017). These bring into question how hyper feminine objects activating multi-sensory knowledges may reposition commodified management structures. Further, softly visualising hierarchies of patriarchal language are seen to produce the previously unimagined, unknown and unintentional in acts of resistance. These art methods and materials perform a gentle approach to developing critical and self-reflexive leadership and softly contributes to the expanding field of possibilities (Glăveanu, 2023), post-qualitative studies and feminist new materialist inquiry (Braidotti, Coleman and van der Tuin, 2024).

Moreover, a view on the public dissemination of exhibition that invites intentional-unintentional audiences to bring their leadership-non-leadership bodies into art spaces for reimagining education will be shared. These lead us to consider how collective, embodied material acts as assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) perform further disturbances to orient education leadership differently. In the pause until these methodologies for resistance are widely adopted, the transformational inter-intra-play of bodies-making-education matters can be understood to take leaders somewhere else in the hope of a better world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

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.

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.