Conference Agenda

In a world marked by rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity, the ability to think systematically about the future is no longer a luxury—it is a necessity. This workshop introduces scholars to the transformative power of futures thinking. Drawing on Sohail Inayatullah’s Six Pillars of Futures Studies participants will get an overview of the methodological possibilities to co-creatively map, time, deepen, create alternatives for, transform and anticipate on the future. Using Glenn's future wheel approach we will further explore the cascading consequences of design related changes made into the configuration of our living environments. Participants will learn how to map first-, second-, and third-order impacts of emerging trends, technologies and prototypes designed to tackle contemporary societal challenge of redesigning the city, enabling a deeper understanding of systemic interconnections and long-term implications of solutions proposed today. The futures wheel method encourages structured creativity and critical thinking, making it ideal for scholars seeking to enrich their own research with futures-oriented perspectives. By the end of the session, attendees will be equipped to use the Future Wheel in academic, policy, and innovation contexts related to their own research responses to emerging challenges.

Studies of educational ecologies are now so well established as to be commonplace (e.g., Author 1, 2017; Jackson, 1968; Thorne, 1993). It is certainly the case that educators note important lessons learned in their sociocultural roles as educators and it is equally common to note how students can and do educate one another. As educators and qualitative researchers, we understand the idea of being educated as an integral aspect of living and believe formal educational ecologies are a deeply significant, (more than) human right.

Yet, such studies of educational ecologies most often conceptualize young people in general, and young people of color in schooling in particular, as those in need of education. Drawing from two different longitudinal studies of young children in educational ecologies, this performative paper seeks to interrupt these studies to more directly consider the question: what does it mean for qualitative researchers to take children of color seriously as educators?

Although differing in context and purpose, our studies of sonically adaptive public play spaces and children’s use of songwriting to express academic content are parallel in their ethical commitments to young children, communities, and education with sounds. In thinking through our work individually and in conversation, it became clear that we, like many educators and those whose scholarship is with young people, understand children as educators. Yet, there are comparatively few qualitative studies of educational ecologies that center children as teachers and adults as students.

In similar fashion, in qualitative research, children are more often seen than heard. We mean this in a literal fashion: we read children’s words or watch them on videos where their actions are often secondary to their sounds. To these ends, this sonic scholarship (e.g., Bull & Cobussen, 2022) expresses important lessons from children-as-educators, providing an opportunity to truly listen and learn.

Arts education has become a focal point of interest across academic, practical, and political spheres. It is increasingly viewed as a vital context for experiencing, negotiating, and learning forms of creative coexistence, life orientation, and self-efficacy. In this light, questions surrounding resonance within and through cultural education have gained renewed urgency. In times characterized by growing uncertainty, heightened societal fears, threats to democratic cohesion under populist pressures, and the escalation of armed conflicts, there is a pressing need for spaces that promote creative expression, open dialogue, and cultural visibility.

In collaboration with a practice-based partner—an interdisciplinary production and performance venue in Leipzig—this project explores how spaces of resonance, both verbal and non-verbal, can be intentionally designed to invite participation, enable meaningful engagement, and support the exploration of diverse ways of creating and living together.

We ask: What makes spaces for experience and creativity resonate? How do such spaces influence participants, and in turn, how do they foster a sense of self-efficacy and belonging? How do they invite reflection on self-image, personal goals, and life circumstances? To explore these questions, we design and research various creative spaces, each centered on expression through language or sound. Through these low-threshold offerings, we seek to understand how personal creative narratives—both verbal and sonic—can generate spaces of resonance, thereby enabling new forms of expression, engagement, and negotiation.

To accompany the open and evolving process of spatial design, the research adopts a process-oriented, posthuman paradigm. This framework draws on participatory and (post)qualitative methodologies to examine how these creative environments emerge, transform, and invite participation beyond human-centered paradigms.

This paper presentation will explore a qualitative study of the utilization of havruta-style text study to read and analyze primary sources in a social studies/history methods course. This style of text study is rooted in a traditional Jewish style of textual learning, where men studied complex texts in the Yeshiva (Shulman, 2008). At the heart of havruta is partner text study, where dyads or triads of students closely read and examine a text. As part of this, partners corroborate, disagree, and question to delve deeply into the meaning of a text (Shargel, 2019). Our research goal was to: a) investigate preservice teachers’ understanding and interpretation of primary sources using havruta-style text study, b) examine preservice teachers’ willingness to use this method in the middle and secondary classroom, and c) consider how to apply this method to the scholarship of teaching and learning. Recently, educators have been experimenting with this style of text study in secular contexts. There have, however, been only a few studies that consider the impact of havruta in secular settings, such as English classes and first-year college seminars (Shargel, 2019; Wright, Bergom, & Brooks, 2011). To date, there are no extant studies of preservice teachers in universities preparing for public education using havruta-style text study. Our qualitative study is based on three semesters of data collection with three groups of preservice secondary social studies/history teachers, where we took fieldnotes, conducted debriefs after each havruta session, and did a final focus group interview at the end of each semester. We used thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to code the data.Our research aims to add to the repertoire of havruta instruction by creating new knowledge of using this method for preservice teachers in public education.

The paper examines how the scientific and professional foundations of education can be reimagined phenomenologically through the reversible relation between perception and world. Educational science offers both general and specific concepts that address the lived problems and possibilities of teaching. Yet these terms often acquire meanings within institutional contexts that exclude the very experiences they aim to describe. Institutional discourses, dominated by nominalization, tend to dissolve the intimacy between word and experience (Nilsen, 2021).

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s later writings on language, visibility, and the flesh, teachers’ professional language emerges as an effort to restore contact between the linguistic shell and the lived gesture, allowing speech to pervade speech in a porous renewal of expression (Kaushik, 2025).

As professional practices mimic the methods and attitudes of science, they risk falling into the same pitfalls that Merleau-Ponty cautions against, unless they remain thoughtful of their origin in lived experience. Seen in this light, professional language and communication are reconsidered not as systems of control, but as movements within a field of reversibility where expression loosens articulation and exposes the fragile juncture of body and world, thought and gesture.

From this view, ethics emerges through exposure, excess, and reversibility, modes of unsettling the professional that transform authority into responsiveness. Such modes open a space where teaching and research become practices of contact rather than mastery, grounded in the risk and ambiguity of a shared thought’s body (1968).

Kaushik, R. (2025). The problem of speech in Merleau-Ponty. Philosophies, 10(3), 50. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies10030050

Nilsen, A. C. E. (2021). Professional talk: Unpacking professional language. In P. Luken (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of institutional ethnography (pp. 359–374). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54222-0_25

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible: Followed by working notes. Northwestern University Press.

What I explore in this paper is what might unfold through playful and speculative dialogues with the haunting and absences of early childhood education (ECE). By using ideas from hauntology (Derrida 2006), I think-with possible future(s) by looking at what is making itself known as an absent-presence. For educational research, hauntology can provide tools for considering how the past might be at work as hidden silences and absences. With the figuration of data-ghost(s) I think with what lingers, troubles or is silent as hauntings. As a fluid methodological move, I create data-ghost(s) with artwork to speak of, to and with the ghostly. With such ghostly presences, I attend to what went unnoticed or was ignored. By re-turning to pedagogical documentation practices with imagery and narratives of learning events, I slow down and linger with events I had not paid attention to before to notice what has been absented but still having an influence. With data-ghost(s), I make greedy magpie-like borrowing from arts-based research practices to consider theory, speculation and research work in relation. Speculating with absences leaves space for otherwise possible future(s) to unfold with hauntological imaginaries in-between liminalities of past-present-future(s). I do this by first attending to what interrupts and re-turns in dialogue with the words of Derrida. Then I use data-ghost(s) creations by imagining digital artworks as an absent-presence. With these data-ghost(s) I imagine possible future(s) involving teacher education. But speculating with the ghostly invites attention to documentation’s own desirings and dialogues that silently go on in-between past-present-future(s). What I propose is that hauntings trouble and generate speculative openings. Such spaces bring attention to what is missing from documentation along with possible future(s) for practice and research. But what haunts is an unreliable kind of data where documentation itself might reveal its own wants and desires.

This presentation introduces childing as a post-age methodology through a choreographed video drawn from the research project Small Matters: An Educational Community Project about Multispecies Death and Dying (2023–2026), funded by the Research Council of Finland. The project brings together ‘small matters’ - young children, viruses, insects, microbes, plastics, and digital trace - as political agents in spaces where they are usually excluded from conversations about death and dying.

While the example comes from this project, childing methodologies are post-age. Like the ‘post’ in posthumanism, post-age is not about leaving childhood behind, but about troubling developmental and chronological conceptions of time. Childhood here is not a stage of becoming but a mode of being-with, a relational, intensive orientation ‘to’ the world. The referent of this performative practice is not ‘the’ child: there is no individualised, developing subject en route to maturity. Childing decentres the (adult) human and opens material-discursive possibilities for research by reconfiguring how knowledge, time, and agency are produced.

As a childing methodology, performative videography treats video not as a representational tool but as an intra-active participant in the enquiry - an apparatus that co-creates knowledge through movement, rhythm, and affect. Aligned with the conference theme, it engages the intricate interplay between human and more-than-human forces. In our example, video editing techniques such as slow motion, repetition, and reverse cuts enact the temporal complexity of children’s philosophical play about death and dying. Rather than documenting, performative videography thinks-with material, sound, and gesture - inviting the viewer to experience the entanglement of image, body, and thought beyond the boundaries of the human subject.

Music therapy is the clinical and evidence-based use of music to achieve individualized goals. Using music therapy in early childhood addresses social/emotional development, language and literacy, cognition, and perceptual motor and physical development. This convergent parallel study consisted of a series of investigations, some qualitative and some quantitative over different time periods. Results concluded that music therapy improved externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, and adaptive skills. In conclusion, an environment rooted in respect for children’s right to participate in music associated with their culture drives our clinical decision-making as we design and implement session plans to support all learners. From these results, the research team designed an online learning center for professional development training including courses on trauma-informed practices, holistic approaches to development, differentiated instruction, the use of verbal skills in working with early childhood, supporting early childhood with musical elements, and supporting early childhood with musical elements.

This paper offers a methodological reflection on conducting ethnographic research with children in superdiverse schools: sites where global flows, institutional norms, and children’s everyday practices intersect. Drawing on a prestudy using participant observation in the least-adult role, I consider the challenges and possibilities of researching children’s school experiences. I begin from a critical reading of the dominant concepts of “sense of school belonging” and “homophily,” which risk reducing belonging to subjective feeling and reify the supposed centrality of similarity, rather than attending to how children actively navigate the familiar and unfamiliar.

Foregrounding methodological experiences and claims, I discuss how moving between different modes of ethnographic engagement — from participative to more detached observation, from focal-child to event-focused strategies, and from open to structured techniques — shaped what could be seen and known. I also reflect on the tensions of occupying shifting positions between least-adult participation, observation, and interviewing. These methodological choices not only structured the data I could generate but also revealed how my presence was negotiated by children and inflected their own practices and experiences.

Through this reflexive engagement, I argue that qualitative inquiry with children in superdiverse contexts requires attentiveness both to researcher positionality and to the institutional conditions in which belonging and intergroup relations are enacted. Ethnography can illuminate how children rework categories of difference and belonging, but only if theoretical and methodological frameworks remain open to being unsettled by the field itself. By critically interrogating belonging and homophily, and reflecting on the situated dynamics of ethnographic practice, this paper contributes to broader conversations on how qualitative research can respond to interconnectedness and shared vulnerabilities while sustaining dialogical and collaborative engagements with participants.

Early Childhood Education (ECE), and indeed education more broadly, has long been dominated by a neoliberal narrative that commodifies every aspect of life. As several scholars have noted, the current polycrisis reveals how this narrative is not only reductive and narrowing, but also unable to address challenges symptomatic of its own logic (Sousa & Moss, 2024). In troubling times, however, alternatives might find terrain to be formed, but as Sousa and Moss notes, alternative ideas and narratives are not enough. Accordingly, this paper aims to problematize and experiment with educational evaluation practices in ECE — not merely as an effort to re-think or re-conceptualize such practices, but to re-make them, experimenting with alternative modes of evaluation and, in doing so, engaging with the question of valuing differently.

In this paper the notion and practice of evaluation in ECE is explored by drawing on affirmative critique, moving beyond criticism as a distant, retrospective, and negative approach (see Staunæs, 2016). Engaging with affirmative critique—grounded in a critical perspective and informed by feminist new materialism (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016)—I investigate and problematize evaluation practices from within the same practice where they are enacted, collaborating with preschool professionals from two different preschool settings. Together, we affirmatively problematize existing evaluation practices in each setting, pointing to what could be otherwise, and creatively experiment with alternative ways of doing evaluation — thus both imagining and enacting possible 'elsewheres', humbly borrowing the term from Haraway (1992, singular in original). In the presentation, I outline the genealogy of thought underpinning the paper and present some tentative results from the ongoing analysis.

This presentation draws on methodological insights that emerged from my master’s thesis in social work, which explored meanings cosntructed by Israeli parents of their gay or lesbian child’s coming-out. As a gay man, an insider to the researched phenomena, I will present the methodological challenges of interviewing parents as someone who is, in many ways, their child.

This unique positioning raised pressing questions of power and voice: Whose voice am I trying to hear, and whose voice do I ultimately amplify? How do I listen authentically when I also long to hear something very specific? At times, I longed for acceptance, while parents offered confusion or silence. This revealed not only the gap between fantasy and reality, but also the methodological complexity of being both insider and outsider in the field.

A recurring experience was what I conceptualized as parents’ movement from shattered reality to new reality. Parents described the collapse of imagined life scripts, while I too faced the shattering of my fantasy–that they would say what I longed to hear from my own parents. In this parallel process, I found myself learning to accept the parents as they were, just as I once hoped my parents would accept myself and those like me, and perhaps as I wished these parents would accept their own children.

This research highlights qualitative inquiry as a dialogical and collaborative practice. The interviews and analysis process became spaces of connection across differences, where flows of meaning moved between researcher and participants, shaped by vulnerability, expectation, and context. In times of tension, such encounters show how reflexivity and positionality generate challenges and possibilities for dialogue and transformation.

By situating the researcher explicitly within the field of collaborative meaning-making, this presentation corresponds with broader methodological conversations on qualitative research as dialogical, and ethically complex.

Authoritarianism constitutes a staple of social and political psychology research since Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality (1950). Adorno and his colleagues drew heavily on theoretical and methodological insights from psychoanalysis, Marxian thinking and the American empiricist psychology of their times. In so doing, they formulated an extensive, research-based account of authoritarianism as a construct that links specific socioeconomic and political conditions with the cultural production, through, mainly, pedagogical practices, of a type of personality that is particularly vulnerable to fascist propaganda. The notion of culture and the concern over the de(legitimation) of political authoritarianism are pivotal for our research also. However, our epistemological position diverges from the one favoured by Adorno et al. Drawing on critical discursive social psychology, we maintain that the naturalisation and reproduction of authoritarian political practices occur thoughtfully within rhetorical / ideological practices unfolding, amongst other domains, in political discourse and lay talk, often through invocations and rhetorical uses of occasioned constructions of culture. Our analytic corpora consist of (a) transcripts of Greek parliamentary debates pertaining to the so-called ‘wiretapping affair’ a surveillance scandal, which recently rocked Greece’s pollical life raising concerns as to the (alleged) governmental authoritarian turn in the country; and, of (b) twelve focus groups, collected within a wider research project on authoritarianism, with some of the groups enlisting participants employed in Greek military and police forces. Our analyses indicate that, in both political and lay discourse, a common discursive resource, mobilised, for the (de-)legitimation of authoritarian political practices pertains to evaluatively tinged conceptualisations of culture and hierarchically ordered cultural difference. As we argue, culture and cultural hierarchy, emerge as rhetorical / ideological resources and accomplishments for meaning making, accountability management and (de-)legitimation of authoritarian political practices.

This paper examines the perspectives of young people from challenging contexts in 10 European countries (Austria, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain) on the state of democracy and its development in the near future. Across European Union there are trends of growing alienation of youth from democratic institutions and declining political participation. Aforementioned makes understanding the views of young people on democracy in 21st-century Europe important. Data were collected through the Horizon Europe project "Critical ChangeLab - Democracy meets arts: Critical change labs for building democratic cultures through creative and narrative practices." A standardized research approach enabled comparative analysis across 10 different contexts. In each country, in-depth case studies were conducted, including focus groups with young, semi-structured interviews with individuals working with these youth, and a mini ethnography. The selected cases reflect the diversity of young people’s identities and life circumstances, capturing significant variation across geographic locations, from rural areas and small towns to national capitals and major European cities like Paris, Berlin, and Barcelona. The study also addressed the experiences of youth facing various hardships, such as female teenage STEM students, youth at the EU’s borders, migrants, those in substitute care, and LGBTQ youth. Focus group participants, aged 11 to 19, were selected in cooperation with organizations familiar with the youth and their challenges. Additionally, project partners identified individuals from local government, educational institutions, NGOs, and youth associations for interviews, providing further insights into young people's democratic opportunities. A total of 80 young people and 49 individuals working with youth participated in the research. The results offer valuable insights into the diverse perspectives of youth in challenging contexts and how variations in context, social structures, civic education, and the digital society shape their experiences and views on democracy today and in the near future.

Across generations, South Louisiana has existed at the intersection of environmental, economic, and social upheaval—where climate migration, recurring storms, and the deep scars of environmental racism and generational poverty converge. From hurricanes that reshape coastlines to industrial contamination that poisons land and water, the region’s history tells a story of communities repeatedly displaced, rebuilding on shifting ground, and enduring cycles of loss and renewal. Violence, both physical and structural, threads through this narrative: the violence of extraction, neglect, and systemic inequity that positions resilience not as choice but as necessity. Over time, endurance has become a hallmark of regional identity—celebrated in folklore, media, and policy alike—yet increasingly weaponized to rationalize insufficient aid, stalled recovery, and the continued exploitation of people and place.

This paper critiques how resilience is weaponized and co-opted by institutions to sustain inequitable systems. Rather than fostering genuine well-being or reform, organizational narratives valorize individuals’ capacity to endure adversity, framing perseverance as virtue while deflecting responsibility for structural change. This dynamic disproportionately affects marginalized groups, who are praised for “pushing through” exhaustion or injustice instead of being supported through meaningful transformation.

Using a community phenomenological approach, this work examines the lived experience and collective memory of South Louisiana over the past two decades of storms, poverty, and terrorism-related trauma. It interrogates how resilience has been defined by outsiders—government agencies, media, and institutions—and the ways these definitions have been weaponized to justify neglect, austerity, and cultural stereotyping. By situating personal narrative within broader sociopolitical and environmental contexts, the paper explores the enduring impacts of this weaponization on community identity, well-being, and recovery, calling for a reorientation toward collective care, structural accountability, and authentic forms of resilience grounded in place and lived experience.

This conceptual paper examines the potential long-term psychosocial and somatic ramifications of recently passed conservative education laws in US states like Florida and Texas. These laws, which severely restrict discussions of gender, sexuality, and human biology in public schools, codify ideological assumptions that (a) minors must be protected from "inappropriate" topics, and (b) sex before heterosexual marriage is wrong and dangerous.

Drawing on narrative inquiry data from eight women raised within conservative Christian communities that enacted these same ideologies, we employ Jackson and Mazzei’s (2022) "plugging in" methodology. We analyse the women’s lived experiences of bodily illiteracy, sexual shame, and chronic genital pain (dyspareunia) as a prospective lens to understand the potential consequences of these laws especially on children with vulvas and vaginas. The findings illustrate how enforced silences and disparaging discourses led to a profound alienation from their own bodies, a phenomenon conceptualised by Labuski (2015) as the accumulation of “genital baggage.”

We argue that these legislative acts function as state-sanctioned mediating institutions that perpetuate this accumulation, fostering sexual illiteracy and creating conditions where genital pain and dysfunction become normalized. The analysis demonstrates how ideological messages can become somatically embodied, with tangible health consequences. Ultimately, this study contends that such restrictive legislation does not merely limit curriculum but actively contributes to a cultural and corporeal subordination of bodily autonomy. We will conclude by considering possibilities for resistance and the urgent need for educational approaches that foster sexual literacy, genital intelligence, and pleasure-affirming futures, despite the challenging political constraints.

This paper traces the journey of a UK-based early-career academic who has been reshaped by witnessing the ongoing destruction of Gaza and by engaging in dialogue with its scholars and educators. It argues that Gaza can serve as a moral and intellectual compass for all committed to social justice—reminding us that no pursuit of justice can stand apart from the struggles of the oppressed and centering their voices. Through two collaborative projects, the paper illustrates how global events can reconfigure scholarly identity, purpose, and practice.

The first collaboration interrogates the concept of scholasticism. While widely circulated in English-language research, the term is often confined to Western theoretical vocabularies. In Palestine, however, scholasticism is a lived condition, bound to the realities of siege, occupation, and survival. Working in dialogue with Palestinian colleagues, I moved from reading about scholasticism to listening to it—hearing what the term means within their everyday lives. Their narratives unsettled dominant academic framings, revealing forms of knowledge rooted in endurance, affect, and collective resilience, an epistemology unknown to Western Academia.

The second collaboration emerged during the current genocide in Gaza, where education persists under bombardment and displacement. Extending earlier research on educational continuity, I initiated a collective book project in which Gazan educators and families document learning amid devastation—through mobile classrooms, improvised teaching in camps, and symbolic acts of carrying books while fleeing. Their stories reveal that education is not merely instruction but survival itself.

In this presentation, I will share their stories, poems, and vignettes—their experiences, their attempts at being erased, and their insistence on life through learning. These narratives offer a compass for scholars everywhere: to shape and reshape ourselves as witnesses to the eradication of all that lies between land and sky, where education endures as the only living pulse of hope.

The laboratory is not only a site for learning experimental skills and scientific production, but also a crucial space where scientific cognition and subjectivity are shaped. This study aims to explore how novice researchers in the laboratory form their scientific cognition and self-constitution through continuous interaction with frequently occurring non-positive results (experimental outcomes that are unexpected, inexplicable, or poorly reproducible).Challenging traditional views that treat the things and failures in experiments as passive objects or background, this study draws on Actor-Network Theory to re-conceptualize the lab as a dynamic assemblage woven together through the continuous associations and negotiations of human (i.e.,supervisors, peers) and non-human (i.e.,cells, instruments, non-positive results) actors.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 12 students from the School of Life Sciences in a leading Chinese university , combining with participant observation and analysis of material documents like lab records. By following the actors, we mapped the mutual trajectories of translation within this network.

The study finds that students initially experience non-positive results as a sign of personal inadequacy, leading to prolonged internal struggle.Through ongoing negotiation with a multiplicity of actors, both human and non-human, they gradually learn to reinterpret failure as a form of communication from material world that can provoke new questions. The re-shaping of cognition not only helps them develop practical strategies of trial-and-adjustment but also enables identity shift: translating from a controller who attempts to unilaterally master objects, into a coordinator who mediates between human and non-human actors. This process ultimately leads to demoralize failure and helps students redefine the boundaries of their agency by establishing a new world-relation: with the support of peers and through dialogue, to build a responsive and affective connection with a world they acknowledge as fundamentally uncontrollable. This study offers a new ontological perspective for understanding uncertainty, failure in science education.

What if empathy were fundamentally part of the world in its ongoing performativity? Understanding empathy as a complex multifaceted aesthetic phenomena, through which sense-making happens, opens it up to including non-human animals and material objects as well. Through affective flows and interfaces, not only are we capable of empathizing with non-human animals but also material objects. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) feminist posthumanism theory agential realism and multispecies ethics (Rose, 2012) this paper argues that empathy is a biologically innate, material-discursive practice through which all living creatures work toward biological order.

Empathy, foundational to all forms of life and interactions, has become a highly misconstrued, anthropocentric concept. But how, might you ask, could inanimate or non-human animals be connected to empathy? Through shared experience or energy embedded in their creation and form, empathy work in eliciting responses in helping us form meaningful relations with Others. In this case, empathy is done performatively, as something we do, not something we have.

This presentation features a series of short video artworks called antinarratives, designed to elicit more-than-human empathy through surprising encounters. These videos illustrate Batson’s (2019) eight types of empathetic behavior as they unfold in real-time, emphasizing how non-human agents contribute to empathy within entangled material and meaningful relations. Each piece immerses the viewer in empathetic behaviors, encouraging discussion as to how empathy arises beyond human-centered frameworks. The videos highlight how empathy is generated through dynamic interactions between humans and non-humans, presenting empathy as a relational and emergent process shaped by both material-discursive intra-actions and inter-species connections. Rather than excluding humans, the posthuman approach reframes our role as co-creators through empathy.

Positioned within the field of research-creation, this presentation explores multispecies climate fiction (cli-fi) as a speculative mode of inquiry that speculates-with other-than-humans. As a process-oriented and experimental praxis that integrates thinking, making, and doing, research-creation unsettles normative discourses and practices that restrict the possibilities of research and knowledge. Here, the use of artistic approaches is particularly directed at expanding understandings of knowledge-making. In this context, speculative fiction offers possibilities for building more affective and relational understandings, for example, regarding climate change.

The work presented here centers on the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley, which emerged as part of a participatory workshop where city residents, artists, and scholars collectively imagined multispecies life in urban areas affected by climate change. Engaging creatively with participants' imaginaries, I developed the story as both a response to and an extension of their propositions. As such, the story is not a direct representation of the workshop findings, but a creative continuation, presenting a speculative exploration that embraces the multiplicity and complexity of the imaginative thinking and making processes. During the presentation, I will share parts of the the story alongside methodological reflections on research-creation and theoretical considerations of what it means to speculate-with other-than-humans in climate fiction.

The practice of speculating-with other-than-humans revealed the deep entanglements between human and other-than-human worlds, creating dialogue across species boundaries. Moreover, creative writing process uncovered new tensions and propositions that challenged and reshaped understandings of multispecies life in climate change, highlighting the emergent, situated, and responsive potential of speculative fiction as a mode of inquiry.

The increasing emphasis on speech and language in early childhood education (ECE) overlooks some of the complexities entangled within not-speaking such as environmental, microbial and affective relations which might be expressed in languages other than words. Drawing on multispecies encounters with nonlingual children, this presentation explores the potential of moving education beyond individual accountability and deficit models of human progress. By attuning to subtle registers of movement, atmospheres and sense-based ecologies, we become curious for onto-epistemologies that seem more relevant to the pedagogies and research of arts education in the post-Anthropocene.

We explore the tensions and fruitful connections arising at the intersections of arts and ECE through two cases: ‘artful sensing practices’ which are mobilised as nonlingual children experiment with multispecies movements (Churchill Dower, 2025), and multispecies research encounters with microbes in a forest (Hohti, 2024, unpublished). We attune to entanglements through inexpert experiments that help us to dismantle mastery, fostering multimodal, multisensory, and multispecies ways of knowing and challenging assumptions about differently capable bodies.

In this presentation, we pay attention to the heterogenous porosities, cracks, common worlds and alternative landscapes in multispecies inquiry that disrupt and enrich expectations of childhoods. We ask whether speculative methods and sensing practices might open more-than-human ecological spaces for creating new languages.

We propose that sensing languages enrich the more-than-human collaborations arising outside of the plan, after the event, in unsuspecting spaces and atmospheres, and can be seen as a necessary ‘ferality’ (Tsing et al., 2024, p.10), a modality vital for ‘ecologising’ ECE. In doing so, we shift the educational bullseye from knowledge acquisition to ways of knowing, and reconfigure arts education and childhood studies methodologies to foreground nested child ecosystems (Millei et al., 2025) in place of individuals as separate from environments.

In this paper, I explore and discuss relationships between human and more-than-human. I claim this concerns education in two ways. One is regarding the educational possibility of being addressed by the more-than-human, and the other is regarding care for future generations. To make this claim, I express and concretise such relationships through arts-based research in the form of creative writing, including a poem and two pieces of fiction. Starting from the idea that education is imbued with anthropocentric imaginaries and highlighting the more-than-human through the work of Haraway (2008), Curry (2008) and van Dooren (2007, 2009), I bring this further by connecting it to Biesta’s (2015b) work on the question of whether what we desire is actually desirable in education. Building on the work of Nisbet (1994) and Dewey (1916), this leads to a discussion of how progress, being central to education, needs to be renegotiated in order to become educational. In conclusion, I posit that, with a miseducated grasp and mastery of the world, human life is led to be continuously unfazed by the more-than-human face. But there is hope.

This presentation draws from an ongoing inquiry between the two authors about feminist ethics and collaborative scholarship in the academy. Together, we have asked “How do we live a ‘good’ life in the academy?”, and “How might feminist theory provoke questions about this life?” In this paper, we consider authorship practices as a cluster of factors implicated in the mundane environment of academic life, what Berlant (2011) might describe as a scene of ‘slow death’. We enter into collaborations with pre-defined scripts about what constitutes authorship, and what this entails. These scripts are part of a cluster of factors: citation metrics, author order and logics of production and scarcity that obscure the relational, ethical, generative aspects of collaborative scholarship. In our own academic practices, we have wrestled with these questions of authorship. We have noticed how conversations and assumptions about authorship reflect and produce particular geometries of power and structural conditions. In this presentation, we put Berlant’s theorization of slow death in conversation with the work of adrienne maree brown (2017) and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s (2015, 2024) writing on scarcity logics to think about how co-authorship might serve as both a site of tension and an opening for interference in academic economies. We situate our inquiry within our own stories of navigating authorship as feminist scholars positioned simultaneously as mentors, colleagues, and co-authors with one another, as well as with students, etc. We open up authorship as a question, something relationally negotiated that ebbs, flows, and shifts in response to needs and situations. As we do this, we find that these questions have implications for how we think about qualitative methodology and pedagogy. In other words, to ask about authorship, is to ask how we want to live and relate separately-together in the academy.

There is an urgent need to promote scientifically literate individuals who possess knowledge and skills in science to thrive in these scientifically advanced yet globally challenging times (Sjöström et al., 2023). This paper discusses the development of scientifically literate British women who left science education in their teenage years but have returned to learning scientific knowledge and skills in middle-aged phases of life, to address their personal needs and professional demands in science learning. We are focused on the under-researched group of women between 35-65 years (Etaugh & Bridges, 2013) because, although this age group comprise the largest percentage of the overall British population, they are highly underrepresented in the science fields (British Science Association, 2020). Drawing on the theories of transformative learning in adults and scientifically literate identity development, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with our participants, these interviews were analysed using narrative and thematic analysis, highlighting (i) how and why our middle-aged women participants re-engage with science learning, (ii) they develop scientifically literate identity, that (iii) intersects with their other identities, such as being middle-aged women. Our key findings reveal the importance of (i) emotions, including self-determination and self-efficacy belief, in passing through the liminal transformative tunnel of becoming a scientifically literate person, (ii) informal means of learning, including smart devices, (iii) assimilating, accommodating and refuting scientific information and misinformation to survive in the scientifically demanding personal and professional environment. We suggest that more research and practical implications be explored to support the development of scientifically literate adults.

References:

British Science Association (2020). APPG on Diversity and Inclusion in STEM. https://www.britishscienceassociation.org/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=d7899dce-22d5-4880-bbcf-669c0c35bda6 [Accessed 02.10.2025].

Etaugh, C. A., Bridges, J. S. (2013). Women's Lives: A Psychological Exploration. United Kingdom: Pearson.

Sjöström, J., Yavuzkaya, M., Guerrero, G. & Eilks, I. (2024). Journal of Chemical Education 101 (10), 4189-4195. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00452.

In the Muslim world, there is a slow but powerful movement happening amongst men who are challenging the negative stereotypes which depict them as abusive, misogynistic, and violent. Instead, these men are actively involved in gender justice initiatives and violence against women (VAW) prevention. This article presents findings from Qatar’s portion of our international study on Muslim Masculinities. Grounded in a Transformative Learning (TL) theoretical framework (Brookfield 2012), the study includes qualitative interviews with Qatari men, exploring their motivations for engaging in VAW prevention and gender justice initiatives. The findings underscore key life trajectories shaping men's perspectives on gender justice and VAW prevention, such as: (1) Family legacies and generational impacts, (2) Sense of personal responsibility for sisters, (3) Positive influences of religion on participants, and (4) Transformation within small social circles. These findings have important implications for policy development in Qatar and beyond, highlighting the need for VAW prevention strategies that engage men as allies within their cultural and religious contexts, leverage existing traditional social structures, and emphasize grassroots, community-based change over top-down systemic reform.

What happens to qualitative data when it travels—geographically, culturally, and linguistically—beyond the context in which it was first produced? This paper explores the generative potential of such movement through my participation in thel Many Minds data-analysis group held at the University of Susses, UK. As part of this collaborative series, I shared two interview excerpts and a reflective fieldnote from my PhD research on mother–young adult daughter relations in marginalized communities in Israel, originally collected in Hebrew and later translated into English for the group.

Drawing on Lorenzer’s (1986) concept of the scenic, I examine how these narratives were heard, felt, and re-interpreted by a multicultural group of scholars. The group process included emotional, associative responses, and line-by-line reading, creating a space where my own interpretations were both expanded and unsettled. The emotional and embodied reactions of others opened up fresh interpretive possibilities, revealed blind spots, and reframed taken-for-granted assumptions about young adulthood, gender, marginality, and intergenerational ties.

Rather than seeking a single consensus or “final” meaning, the Many Minds process embraced multiplicity and tension. In doing so, it generated insights that speak not only to the specific narratives of Israeli young women and their mothers but also to broader questions of researcher subjectivity, translation, and the ethics of working across difference.

This paper demonstrates how collaborative, transnational data analysis can function as a form of dialogical knowledge-making—illuminating how globally circulating data can foster deeper reflexivity, produce more nuanced interpretations, and contribute to transformative qualitative inquiry in challenging times.

I would like to tell you a story. A story about Madness and memories lost. A story about being silenced, being alone and stuck in the moon-shadow. It is a true story about a girl, who was deemed Mad and treated as such, but later wrote a book about her experience. The book connected her to a group of people, people who read, people who had also suffered. People who had no voice, but felt as if she was speaking for them; as if they were now a little bit less alone.

In spite of all the people who thanked the girl, in spite of her realizing that she indeed had given voice to many, she felt more alone than ever. She wanted to understand. So she set up on a journey. She returned to the ivory tower, where she had before explored Fine Arts, and knocked now on a different door. The door to Academic Research. To Mad Studies.

Through the methods of qualitative inquiry, the girl called out to others. Others who had also been deemed Mad, but refused to stay silent. People who had written books, books about Madness and becoming whole, in spite of it all. In joy she gathered them around her and asked: How did it feel to tell your story? Why did you do it? What did it change? And she listened to their voices, she listened and she felt, and she thought, and she tried to understand.

The girl is I. I invite you to come and listen to the story of the stories. The story of how, through my reserach, through other peoples‘ stories, I became myself. A little bit less alone, than before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.