Conference Agenda

Have you ever felt constrained by the rigid boxes of traditional qualitative methodology? What happens when a research begins to transgress its methodological borders? Do you seek more creative, relational, and critical ways to conduct your research in the social sciences?

This workshop offers a hands-on immersion into the frame of transmethodologies (TMs) – a space of onto-epistemological provocation that challenges the established canons of qualitative research. Instead of being yet another method, TMs encourage a critical sensibility towards moving beyond methodological orthodoxies and rulebooks to think about the agency of theories and methods. We will play with some of the main ideas that compose the theoretical mosaic of TMs, including Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of difference and rhizomatic becoming, Barad's intra-actions and onto-epistemologies, non-representational inquiry, and decolonial border thinking.

In this workshop-laboratory, we will experiment with how a TM framework might become useful in your inquiries. Working with the crucial distinction between borders as political performances that separate and exclude, and boundaries as fluid sites of potentiality and becoming, we will engage in embodied, experiential activities to deterritorialize our research practices and assumptions. We will collectively map concerns and navigate the productive tension between methodological borders and epistemological boundaries. The aim is to collaboratively weave tools, affects, and provocations for a transmethodological research practice: one that treats methodological constraints not as rigid borders to be defended, but as agentic boundaries to engage and transcend. The result, perhaps, will be embracing indeterminacy, permeability, and care to imagine inquiries that explore how matter comes to matter and what this mattering does.

Join us to rethink your methodological practice and transform your research from a scripted procedure into a dynamic conversation about methodological mattering.

In this workshop, we will investigate how performance autoethnography can serve as “a method of inquiry and analysis that engages the body as the methodological nexus upon which the text turns, moves, lives,” beyond any “epistemological hierarchy” (Spry, 2016, p.159). Following the concept of the “textualizing body” (Spry, 2016, p.162), we will produce autoethnographic data (Adams et al., 2016), interpretations, and texts—a materiality that continually makes and unmakes itself as ‘form.’

Our work will take place ‘on the floor,’ through the dramaturgical lenses of Ancient Greek theatre (Ashby, 1999), exploring what Diana Taylor (2016) conceptualizes as repetition implicit in performance: the practice of again-ness(p.26). Enacting again and again is essential to performing autoethnography as investigation because it is constructed and deconstructed through the iterative nature of both performance and research. Again-ness in performance—the repeated doing and undoing—is embedded in the word itself (the suffix -ance signaling iteration) and in the practice (Barba, 2009). A similar framing applies to the word and practice of research. According to Benozzo and Priola (2022), scholarly investigation designated as research derives from practices of “reaching again” (re- indicating repetition), tracing back to gatherer-hunter ecologies where looking again and again was vital for survival.

Diana Taylor (2016) emphasizes that performance operates as inquiry, “as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated actions” (p.25). Similarly, Soyini Madison reminds researchers that “like good theory, performance is a blur of meaning, language, and a bit of pain” (Madison, 1999, p.108). This workshop explores performance autoethnography through the organizing principles of the theatre laboratory (Chemi, 2018) and performance theories (Schechner, 2003).

This presentation considers debates and tensions surrounding differing views of qualitative research, critical posthumanism, and post-qualitative inquiry (PQI). More particularly, it focuses on the issue of incommensurability between qualitative research and PQI, as well as the tensions regarding method and methodology.

The issue of incommensurability refers to the idea that systems of thought or frameworks are so fundamentally different that they cannot be reconciled. This is the main argument promoted by St Pierre (2024) regarding conventional humanist qualitative methodology and post-qualitative inquiry, as they are premised on different ontological and epistemological foundations. We are for the most part, in agreement with this, but with some clarifications that we discuss in our presentation.

The second broad issue we focus on in relation to the differing views of qualitative research and post-qualitative inquiry is the differences between the understandings of method and methodology. Traditional qualitative methods, which rely on structured or semi-structured data collection and analysis techniques (e.g., coding and thematic analysis), may not align well with the fluid, emergent, and often nonlinear approaches of PQI. PQI, which is rooted in poststructuralism and posthumanism, can include the use of art, developing propositions, diffraction, figuration, cartography, walking methodologies, stitching, swimming methodologies, reading, writing and other nontraditional forms of inquiry that go beyond data representation. Whether these are called methods or methodology, however, or different ways of doing inquiry, is a matter of opinion In the presentation, we give some examples of different conceptions of methods and methodology, primarily through examining those writers who are sympathetic to critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, PQI, and non-representational theory (NRT). Although in some cases, methods and methodology are eschewed, in others like NRT, the methods but not the methodology are eschewed, and in other cases, the process of research is what produces the knowledge.

This paper examines the rapidly growing body of educational research influenced by posthumanist philosophies. Posthumanist philosophies refuse the binary of direct realism and social constructionism, both of which center a humanist spectator subject as the sole agent of meaning making. Instead posthumanist empiricism regards objects of study as active participants in inquiries and the world’s ongoing metaphysical becoming. Understood in this way, social inquiry is a process through which some knowing subjects, communities of human and more-than-human agents, and possibilities for action come into being while others do not. In other words, empirical research is not just a revealing of the world from a transcendent perspective, but is an immanent doing in and with the world.

The paper is a collaborative review of over three hundred articles, book chapters, and books that apply posthumanist philosophies to the practice of educational research. The review was 3 years in the making and has recently been published in the annual AERA publication, the Review of Research in Education. It was broadly inclusive and included educational research influenced by European continental and Anglo-American philosophers most often associated with the term “posthumanism. It also included research influenced by Indigenous philosophies and Black studies scholarship that critique Western humanism and call for a more ethically and politically visionary practice of social analysis.

This paper provides a concept driven review of a rapidly growing and diverse literature in the field of education organized around the theme of ethical and political responsibility. It reviews four genres of posthumanist inquiry: assemblage studies, cartographic studies, diffractive studies, and place-based research. The paper concludes with an examination of three different conceptions of possibility and futurity that inform posthumanist reconceptualizations of research responsibility. A website with a full bibliography of the 300 articles reviewed and other supplementary materials will be made available.

Culturally sensitive qualitative research in the Global South is essential for producing ethical, relevant, and inclusive knowledge. The Global South—encompassing regions in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the world—presents unique socio-cultural, historical, and political contexts that differ significantly from those in the Global North. These regions often grapple with the legacies of colonialism, under-resourced institutions, and diverse epistemologies. As such, applying Westernised research frameworks without adaptation can lead to misrepresentation and marginalization of local voices.

To address this, researchers are encouraged to adopt culturally sensitive approaches that prioritize local knowledge systems and community engagement. Key strategies include transdisciplinary collaboration, where researchers work alongside community members, policymakers, and practitioners to co-create knowledge. Participatory and decolonial methods—such as narrative inquiry, ethnography, and indigenous methodologies—help center the lived experiences of participants and challenge dominant paradigms.

Cultural competence is another critical component. Researchers must invest time in understanding the cultural norms, values, and communication styles of the communities they study. This includes avoiding assumptions, using appropriate language, and engaging local partners or interpreters to ensure accurate and respectful representation.

Despite these efforts, several challenges persist. Power imbalances between Global North and South institutions can skew research agendas and funding priorities. Language barriers and differing worldviews can also hinder mutual understanding and collaboration.

Moving forward, the field must prioritize equitable partnerships, support locally led research initiatives, and advocate for inclusive publication practices that amplify Global South scholarship. By doing so, qualitative research can become a more powerful tool for social justice, policy development, and community empowerment across diverse global contexts.

Drawing on my experience as a qualitative mental health researcher in Ghana, this presentation explores practical strategies for embedding cultural sensitivity into research design and implementation—ensuring that cultural contexts are not peripheral but central to the research process.

This study aims to explore a qualitative research method that delves deeply into interviewees’ perspectives while retaining their voices. In traditional narrative inquiry (NI), Clandinin and Connelly (2000) emphasize the importance of lived experience and propose restorying to reconstruct texts into coherent narratives, thereby analyzing the form and meaning of experience. McCormack (2004) further developed storytelling as a method to capture the interpretive complexity of participant narratives. Reflective thematic analysis (RTA), as outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006, 2021), enables systematic and in-depth exploration of participants’ accounts. Overall, NI excels at listening to and preserving participants’ voices but provides limited depth in analyzing content, whereas RTA allows for detailed examination and cross-case comparison but can be less efficient with large-scale data.

This study explores how storytelling can function as a pre-analytic tool to organize and manage large-scale narrative data, and examines how the integration of storying with reflective thematic analysis influences both participant engagement and the depth of analytic insights.

To address these aims, this paper introduces a hybrid strategy for managing extensive narrative interview data. To reduce information clutter, participants’ narratives were first organized into concise stories, facilitating the identification of key insights and the construction of causal connections. Recognizing that this integration inevitably reflects researcher subjectivity, the stories were subsequently returned to participants for verification through member checking (Birt et al., 2016).

This approach offers both methodological and ethical advantages. Beyond serving as an analytic bridge between transcripts and thematic analysis, the storytelling process fostered narrative motivation: participants were more willing to share sensitive experiences, particularly concerning mental health, when assured their narratives would be respectfully crafted. This study thus demonstrates how storytelling can enhance participant engagement while enabling effective analysis of large-scale narrative data, providing an innovative contribution to qualitative methodology.

This paper explores the persistent rejection of qualitative research in Training and Development (T&D) journals, arguing that these rejections often stem from the enduring, yet anachronistic, influence of positivist assumptions. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of hauntology and the pervasive nature of neoliberal audit culture, I contend that the “ghost of positivism” continues to dictate what counts as legitimate evidence, even in studies designed to explore lived experience and situated learning. This phenomenon is particularly acute in T&D, where evaluation frameworks like Kirkpatrick’s levels and the emphasis on psychometric instruments have fostered an environment where calculability is equated with credibility.

Through an analysis of reviewer comments on my own rejected qualitative manuscripts, I illustrate how demands for psychometric validity, large sample sizes, quantification of qualitative data, and replicability fundamentally misinterpret the ontological and epistemological foundations of interpretive inquiry. These demands, while appearing as technical advice, are shown to be ontological impositions that force phenomena to fit pre-existing measures, thereby thinning rich human change into quantifiable proxies.

I propose a “counter-haunting” approach, advocating for an aesthetic of quality grounded in qualitative rigor. This includes explicitly stating a constructivist/interpretivist paradigm, prioritizing trustworthiness (credibility, dependability, confirmability) over psychometric reliability, justifying sample sufficiency through information power, and demonstrating practical illumination through design principles and rich exemplars. The paper argues that changing this dynamic requires a collective effort from authors, editors, reviewers, and practitioners to protect methodological plurality and recognize diverse forms of evidence, ensuring that what truly matters in T&D is not overshadowed by what can merely be counted.

How can we help graduate students think like qualitative researchers? And how do we best engage graduate students in conducting their first qualitative study? Drawing from my experience teaching a qualitative research seminar at a US university, I’ve noticed that many students struggle with conceptual skills --such as configuring their interviews to effectively address their research questions. In this presentation, I will share some of the strategies I use to help students step into the mindset of a qualitative researcher. I will describe creative ways to engage students in data collection and analysis. In particular, I will highlight my approach of pairing students to collaborate throughout the semester, both in and outside of class. I invite you to engage in a lively discussion about teaching qualitative research, especially in the context of rapidly evolving AI technologies.

Borrowing the flattery and accolades vintners reserve for wine labels

We seized the sought after acclaims, as Women

- -- more deserving of those praises

Generously pouring them out like rare “compliment cocktails”

Filling our academic souls to the brim with

the truths we know,

the truths we want said aloud,

the truths we want each other to hear

and to feel

and to accept

and to hold onto ...

For years, the presenter has been conducting small, intimate qualitative studies with friends/co-authors using collaborative autoethnographic (Ellis,et al., 2011) and poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2005) methodologies to collectively (re)examine the implications, realizations, and nuances of their shared identity as “Women in academia.” Recently, the presenter has identified a unique method of “found poetry” that successfully convenes and prompts authentic, uncensored conversations amongst co-authors so that they can discuss, dissect, and debate the definition and experiences of being Women in academia, in general (self-cite, in press), and in relation to their collaborative research endeavors. In a “dinner party-like” setting, the presenter has used wine bottles’ consumption to facilitate free-flowing conversations and the wine bottles’ labels as found poetry sources for writing free-verse poetry. In these casual settings, the presenter-led poetic writing sessions provide shared creative spaces for investigating, interrogating, and ultimately clarifying participants’ identities within their personal/professional lives so that they can better understand themselves in relation to research studies they are co-investigating.

Defining one’s positionality and recognizing one’s identity in relation to scholarly work and/or academia is essential to qualitative research because a researcher's worldview, identity, and background can significantly influence the research process When these individual poetry writings are composed in collective writing sessions it can assist co-authors in clarifying their positionality within their communities, classrooms, and research fields; thereby moving collaborative research forward with a more self-awareness and truthfulness.

McCullis (2013) claims that we are all surrounded by poetry and that we are drawn to poems for the joy, meanings, and memories they bring to our lives, because “they have the ability to reveal the truth of our lives more passionately than the overlying narrative” (p. 109). Similarly, Nye (2015) sings praise for poetry’s deep attribute of being able “to pause, to look, to listen, to respect, to pay attention to variety and learn something new.” Following Nye and Percer's (2002) encouragement “to lean into our natural tendency towards poetic verse to help us make sense of these senseless time, to present our nontraditional narratives through nontraditional research practice, and to better document, for others, the beautiful complexity of our lives in a way that only poetry can capture” (self-cite, 2020), the Dream Team (DT)session presenter seeks to lead participants in a wine-based found poetry writing session with their co-authors (if also in conference attendance).

The presenter will lead DT attendees in individual self-study in a collective space using poetic inquiry “to talk about identity and communication in a more nuanced fashion” that embraces the “emotionality of doing research” (Faulkner, 2015, p. 2). Copies of wine LABELS will be provided; wine consumption (and poetry experience) is NOT required for this session but rather symbolizes that this time is meant to mimic a space where attendees can feel most natural and at ease to discuss themselves and their relationship to their research.

While all are welcome, the intended audience is self-identified Women in academia with an explicit encouragement that co-researchers attend this session together to engage in a structured version of “friendship as methodology” (Tillman-Healey, 2003) to promote the trust and safety necessary to encourage friendly conversation and later guide the raw reporting of truth telling in a way that most honestly captures poetic lives through the principles of interpretivism (Denzin, 1997) and interactive interviewing (Ellis, et al., 1997). Individual attendees are still welcomed as the goal of the DT session will not seek to capture “the totality of social life but to interpret reflectively slices and glimpses of localized interaction in order to understand more fully both others and ourselves” (Tillmann-Healy, 2003, p. 732).

The presenter hopes attendees will consider continuing this place-based poetic pursuit started in Athens, Greece by later contributing to a collective poetry publication with the present which would seek to capture the realizations of our claimed identities resulting from discussions throughout the self-study DT session.

Selected References

Ellis, C., Adams, T.E., and Bochner, A.P. (2011). Autoethnography: an overview.

Faulkner, S.L. (2015). Knit Four, Make One: Poems.

Nye, N.S. (29 September 2015). What Inspires Her Poetry.

Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (2003). Friendship as method. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(5). 729-749.

This case study explores how design education might offer hopeful, creative and affirmative ethical responses to educational practice in challenging times. Situated at a university of technology in Cape Town, South Africa, the research analyses a pedagogical intervention in which Masters of Design students and lecturers explore collaborative and innovative ways of decolonizing a text entitled "What is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable" (Schultz et a, 2018). The presentation will show how students' multimodal engagements with the text that include that include reading aloud, reflexive freewriting and artmaking troubled dominant western forms of expression that permeate learning and teaching discourse and practice. By resisting the dominant neoliberal higher educational culture that valorises speed and outputs, the collaborative practice of Slow Reading (Bozalek, 2023) provided an opportunity for students to critically engage with nuanced complexities and response-abilities that young designer face in shaping the word. While collaborative reading thickened understanding of issues around decolonizing design, the iterative reenactment of Schults et al.'s "roundtable" also uncovered how this seminal text neglects design practice in Africa. Identifying this gap in the literature reveals how multimodal collaborative engagement with texts can help transgress the Western academic canon which tends to prioritise the individual rather than the collective. Student' sharing of their lived experiences in relation to the text opened up a generative space for pushing thought beyond how the know the world and provided insights in to how education space can be activated differently.

Based on our own experiences as co-creative researchers, we aim to trouble dominant risk-aversive paradigms and crisis-prone imaginaries often put forward in institutional standards of research ethics and conduct. Rather than anticipating or ‘precautioning’ against indeterminate risks of harm and challenges that may occur in the field or later research stages, we argue for an opportunity-based, entangled ethics for co-creative research and related fields. Inspired by the agential realist approach of Karen Barad's feminist new materialism and other critical theories, opportunity-based ethics enables co-creative researchers to navigate and take advantage of the uncertainties that emerge in and through the dynamic (re)enactment of research relationalities for improved ethical and research conduct.

Narrating our own co-creative research experiences through the lens of entangled theories, we question standardized anonymization and privacy measures, enhanced informed consent protocols for ‘vulnerable’ research participants, and the anticipation of potentially ‘harmful’ influences before commencement of the research. In asking whom/what is 'safeguarded' by risk-aversive ethical standards, and for whose/which benefit, we propose three ethical principles: relationality, response-ability, and situatedness. These principles open up alternative ways of relating to the human, non-human, and more-than-human that intrinsically make up co-creative research entanglements, while taking seriously the in-situ collaborations and outcomes that unfold across various places and times. In doing so, we contribute to enhance research quality and data richness, as well as improved participant wellbeing and collaborative research benefits.

The discourse on development has often neglected its intertwined consequence on the environment. Mining activities have led to environmental crises and damaging consequences on livelihood and health of mining-affected populations. Highlighting the experiences of people residing in such a “space”, which is sensitive, inaccessible and inhabitable, the current study focuses on understanding how co-creating spaces of trust required the practice of researcher reflexivity. The field experiences from an ethnographic study on understanding the social determinants of health, of those who reside in close vicinity of mines in the state of Jharkhand, India are discussed. The process of “getting closer to a hard-to-reach community” necessitated practising critical reflexivity to address not only researcher’s vulnerability in navigating the field, but also negotiating the ethical dilemmas. Taking on Pillow’s (2003) framework on “uncomfortable reflexivity”, the messy nature of ethnographic field work is highlighted which can contribute to more ethical and insightful research.

As increasing numbers of veterans return home from deployment, the invisible wounds of war extend beyond the individual, shaping the moral, emotional, and relational lives of those closest to them. While post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among service members has been extensively studied, less is known about the moral and relational consequences experienced by their partners and families. Moral injury (MI), defined as the lasting psychological, social, and spiritual impact of perpetrating, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs (Litz et al., 2009), offers a critical lens for understanding these experiences within family systems.

This qualitative study employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to explore how current and former partners of military service members with PTSD experience and interpret moral injury in the context of their intimate and family relationships. Guided by Gadamerian principles of interpretation and meaning-making, twenty participants engaged in in-depth, semi-structured interviews designed to elicit rich accounts of their lived experiences. The study was structured around three research questions: (1) How do partners experience and interpret morally injurious events within their relationships and family lives? (2) How do they make sense of the relational consequences of these experiences within their partnerships? and (3) How do they understand the ways morally injurious experiences shape family dynamics, roles, and identities within the family system?

Preliminary interpretation suggests that partners’ narratives reflect complex intersections of empathy, betrayal, guilt, and loss of moral coherence within intimate and family life. The findings aim to deepen understanding of how moral injury extends beyond the individual veteran to influence the moral fabric of family systems. This work contributes to a growing qualitative discourse that situates moral injury as a relational and contextual phenomenon, highlighting the need for family-centered, morally attuned approaches to support and intervention.

The practice of suicide tourism refers to the traveling of individuals to other countries to seek legally permitted assisted suicide. This study employed a descriptive qualitative research approach exploring how right-to-die organizations perceive suicide tourism and its implications on the right-to-die. The study included in-depth semi-structured interviews with 12 activists from right-to-die organizations, as well as thirteen documents written by such organizations or related to the suicide-tourism phenomenon. Five themes emerged following the analysis of 12 in-depth interviews with activists from right-to-die organizations and 13 relevant documents: (1) unequivocal attitudes toward suicide tourism; (2) relationships between the organizations and the media; (3) acting to change the legal status of the right-to-die; (4) the role of the family in interactions between the organization and the person seeking assistance; and (5) reciprocal relations between the organizations and the physicians. The findings reveal ambivalent attitudes within such organizations toward suicide tourism, inherent tension among participating physicians, and complex relationships between assisted suicide, palliative care, and the physicians’ duty to promote individual choice at end-of-life.

This paper explores the complex positionality of a researcher who shares cultural, gender, and educational backgrounds with research participants. Drawing on autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), this article focuses on how researchers balance empathy with maintaining their positionality in studying the mental health experiences of Chinese female university students. The article also reflects on the impact of positionality on data interpretation and meaning-making. This study aims to explore the ethical and methodological challenges that arise when personal empathy and research neutrality intersect, as well as the importance of reflective practice for maintaining positionality when researching sensitive topics.

This paper is a byproduct of my doctoral research. During my doctoral research, I found maintaining the positionality of a researcher challenging, especially when exploring sensitive topics such as participants' mental health experiences or experiences related to racism. Recognizing this, I approached myself as the research subject and, using autoethnography (Etherington, 2004), began conducting auxiliary research to identify appropriate methods for maintaining positionality. I carefully documented my reflections after each interview and also conducted psychological consultations, recording my insights immediately in my research notebooks (Anderson, 2006). These constituted my research data. The findings suggest that researcher identity and cultural context influence the co-construction of narratives (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015), fostering deeper connections while also introducing ethical complexities.

This article argues that positionality should be viewed as a resource for research, not a constraint. By integrating reflexivity and autoethnography, this study proposes an ethically sensitive framework for interpreting mental health narratives within culturally familiar contexts. This research also offers new insights into reflexivity, researcher identity, and methodological innovation in qualitative research.

This presentation adopts a co-autoethnographic approach in which we, as co-authors, reflect on our doctoral journeys as ethnic minority “outsiders” navigating a white, Western, neoliberal academic environment. Our positionalities as first-generation, self-funded female doctoral students from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds shaped our shared struggles in negotiating academic culture, belonging, and career progression. Central to our narrative is the concept of peer generosity—the informal networks of solidarity, care, and shared values that sustained us throughout our PhD journeys.

While existing literature increasingly addresses inequalities faced by racial and ethnic minorities in academia, much of it focuses on those already in academic posts. Far less attention has been given to doctoral students aspiring to enter these spaces (Mattocks & Briscoe-Palmer, 2016). The PhD represents a critical threshold in academic pathways, where peer relationships can profoundly influence well-being, persistence, and identity development (Dericks et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2017). Although supervisory relationships are well-documented (Young et al., 2019), the informal peer networks that provide emotional and intellectual sustenance remain underexplored.

Our co-autoethnographic study draws on three years of recorded conversations and reflective journals, analysed through reflexive thematic analysis. This process allowed us to identify recurring themes of mutual support, cultural expectations, academic hierarchies, and the emotional labour embedded in peer mentoring. Through collaborative reflection, we illuminate how peer generosity countered institutional alienation and fostered resilience, empathy, and belonging.

By situating our personal experiences within broader systemic contexts, this presentation highlights the transformative potential of informal peer support among doctoral students. We argue that peer generosity offers a decolonial framework for reimagining academic relationships—one that values collectivism over competition and nurtures more inclusive, equitable spaces for marginalized scholars within higher education.

In this presentation, I explore my encounter with questions around “ownership” and “authorship,” and the contradictions that emerge from signifiers such as “I,” “we,” and “us” (Gale & Wyatt, 2016, p. 5), as I entangle my stories with those of my research participants. By assembling what Holman Jones (2016, p. 10) calls a “troubled we,” I examine a dialogical approach that explores mine and the participants’ narratives together, in order to inquire into a space that is shared yet marked by difference.

Further, I consider how autoethnographic writing—developed in response to particular encounters or moments of resonance within the interviews—can act as an opening that draws me back into the affective texture of the conversation. Placing these writings in relation to the interviews allows me to examine how meaning is negotiated, interrupted, and reconfigured between researcher and participant. These pieces do not seek to interpret the interviewee’s account but to consider how the researcher’s affective and reflective engagement shapes what the interview comes to mean, highlighting how self and other are mutually shaped through the research process.

I argue that this discontinuous and fragmentary mode of writing functions as a methodological tool for working with interviews. It allows the researcher to stay with moments of uncertainty, and tension rather than translating them into stable themes. This approach challenges the expectation that qualitative research should resolve ambiguity, showing instead how meaning and self are continually shaped through the act of writing.

This presentation builds on my ongoing autoethnographic project exploring the intersections of family history, race, and state policy in Australia. Drawing on the life story recounted by my grandmother, I trace the hidden histories of my maternal ancestors, revealing a family narrative that challenges conventional understandings of race, class, and belonging in Australian society. In July 2025, months after publishing my first paper on this topic, I conducted further archival research in Sydney, uncovering new records that illuminate the lived consequences of the White Australia Policy as both a legal framework and a racial project. The archival records I have uncovered over time reveal that my ancestors—stemming from an interracial marriage between a man from Canton, China, and a white woman born into extreme poverty—experienced forced family separation, with two generations of children removed from their parents and placed in institutions and foster care.

By situating the story of my family within broader frameworks of racial formation, this work highlights how state policies shaped—and often fractured—the lives of non-white Australians, including multiracial families whose histories were subsequently erased or sanitized in familial and public narratives. The presentation will reflect on the emotional labor and ethical considerations of uncovering family secrets through archival research, demonstrating how autoethnography enables both methodological rigor and narrative care while at the same time necessitating emotional resilience for the researcher. I also aim to illuminate how the sanitized, austere spaces of state archives—governed by public rules and rigid policies—create a challenging and emotionally charged context when one is tracing the very ways that same state harmed one’s own family. Finally, I hope to demonstrate the potential of combining family stories with archival evidence to surface hidden truths, complicate national myths of identity, and contribute to critical understandings of race, belonging, and policy in historical and contemporary Australia.

This paper is an invitation to explore what I have come to call creative-relational self-inquiry, a painful-playful process of self re-search which I engaged in for my doctoral thesis (Liwanag 2023). Building upon my use of writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson 2000) and autoethnography, and following the footsteps of those who believe in “the ‘creative-relational’ as a dynamic conceptual frame for vibrant, incisive research” (Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry 2023), I heeded the call of serious play (Mazzei 2007; Tudor and Wyatt 2023), where I learned the value of surrendering to anything and everything, trusting and believing that even not knowing, getting lost, falling apart and failing can become productive forces that give birth to new knowledge. In this process, which largely took place at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I met my shadows at play and they soon became my re-search collaborators. With them, I discovered the power of Donald Winnicott’s (2016, 439) words – that in life’s “sophisticated game of hide-and-seek… it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” By showing you my shadow collection, handpicked photos that now adorn a wall in my bedroom, I allow you to take a peek into myself and my shadows, and the spaces between and within us, hoping that you will join us as we play.

The LEAP (Little Explorers And Parents & families) project offers a movement- and arts-based intervention for pre-school children in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas in the UK. Developed by a ballet company (Northern Ballet) and building on creative adaptations made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project fosters physical, cognitive and social development through music, storytelling and multisensory play. A qualitative evaluation was undertaken to explore its implementation and potential for wider application in early years (EY) settings.

Flexible, context-sensitive methods were used to generate data with key actors from five preschools in the north of England. Methods included: interviews and written reflections from EY practitioners; observations and informal conversations with children; and WhatsApp interviews with parents. Visual data, such as photographs, supplemented narrative accounts. Efforts to involve parents/carers revealed key methodological challenges; despite multi-modal recruitment, only two parents took part and both demonstrated limited awareness of the LEAP project.

A relational evaluation framework underpinned the analysis, focusing on interactions between children, practitioners, families and the creative materials. Findings highlight the importance of trust, co-creation and embedded practitioner relationships in enabling meaningful engagement. Small group work and accessible resources supported participation, while space constraints, staff absence and language barriers limited implementation in some contexts.

This study illustrates the methodological value of adaptive, relational approaches in researching arts-based interventions within EY settings. It raises critical questions about whose voices are heard and how engagement is negotiated in under-resourced, culturally diverse communities. In challenging times, such as post-pandemic recovery, the co-construction of knowledge with practitioners and children becomes central to understanding impact and informing scale-up. Future research must continue to embrace flexible, inclusive methods that recognise the complexity of working with young children and families across diverse settings.

As arts-based research (ABR) in the social sciences has evolved over the past 30 years, it has taken on multiple forms, methods, and interpretations (Wang et al., 2017). This paper examines the concept of scholartistry, a term first coined by the Canadian poet and scholar Lorri Neilsen (1998), and expanded through three editions of Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008, 2018 and forthcoming, with the third edition being released concurrently with the ECQI conference). As developed through the three editions, scholartistry calls for both a deep knowledge of one’s disciplinary base within the social sciences as well as proficiency of a specific and/or multimodal art practice. Additionally, scholartistry is profoundly rooted in the American Pragmatism of John Dewey and William James (Capps & Capps, 2005) with its commitment to discover what we do not yet know in order to make our social life better. Profoundly, this quest for broadening circles of clarity is driven by attention to and the application of tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1967) in the process of inquiry.

John Dewey, in Art as Experience (1934) referred to the analytic engagement with the tacit realm of experience as thinking in “relations of qualities” (p. 46). Furthermore, Dewey insisted that such qualitative reasoning was distinctly different from thinking in terms of linguistic, mathematical, or even visual symbols.

The distinction between thinking in linguistic and visual symbols (with their attendant structures of metaphor and metonymy) and thinking in the tacit realm of the relationship of qualities is the essential feature of scholartistry and how one would identify a scholartist work of ABR from a symbolic ABR analysis. To support this distinction, visual examples from recent ABR will help clarify the added level of analysis that attention to tacit qualitative reasoning in images might provide.

In this paper, I present artistic research I have carried out with a group of learning-disabled artists, who have existed as a collective for over four decades, collectively known as The Professors. Methodological literatures often present participation and disability inclusion in research in idealised ways, as though if offers an easy resolution to power and oppression. Paradoxically, idealised rhetorics about inclusion may conceal and reinforce old hierarchies (Ahmed, 2012). For instance, it is often assumed that collaborative research involves selecting and sticking to one unified inquiry, which Gallacher and Gallagher (2008) call an ‘adult norm’ of linear research. I argue it is also a neoliberal-ableist one (Goodley, 2018). In this project, I have sought to collaborate with The Professors flexibly and fluidly, allowing multiple fragmented strands of unfolding knowledge production to emerge through their artistic practices, in which such approaches are well-established. The research draws on research-creation - which centres the artistic process (Loveless, 2019) – and ethnographic methods, demonstrating how methodologies embedded in The Professors’ established creative practices generate insights into anti-ableist participatory approaches. Through presenting examples of these creative practices, I show how they resist established norms of academic knowledge production, including idealised concepts of co-production, and offer radical anti-ableist alternatives. However, I will contrast these radical, creative moments with the examples which illustrate the tensions and contradictions that emerge from attempting to do this sort of anti-ableist participatory research from within an neoliberal higher education institution, which are not easily overcome or resolved.

Reference List

Gallacher L-A and Gallagher M (2008) Methodological immaturity in childhood research? Thinking through ’participatory methods’. Childhood 15(4): 499–516.

Goodley D (2018) Dis/ability Studies: Theorising disablism and ableism. Routledge.

Loveless, N. (2019). How to Make Art at the End of the World: A manifesto for research-creation. Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-to-make-art-at-the-end-of-the-world

This paper introduces a study situated at the intersection of multispecies childhood research and new materialism-oriented art education research. As part of a broader research project examining children's and young people's multispecies relations in the age of ecological crises, I had the opportunity to explore the everyday life of a children's and youth art school in Southern Finland. I examined how children's relationships with other species—and broadly speaking, with other nature—materialized during the meetings of art school groups.

In this paper, I present two dimensions through which I explored the multispecies relationality in the art classroom. On one hand, other species entered the art educational situations through representations and stories: as subjects of artistic work, as visual imagery and objects in the classroom, and as narrated stories. On the other hand, relationships with other species, objects and forces were already present, as continuously co-emerging tapestry of everyday life. This affective dimension, however, felt hard to grasp, as it seemed as a blurry ‘background’ eluding attention.

Finding ways to attune to the affective relationality beyond the explicit pedagogical context and other ‘foreground’ layers of the situation challenged me as a researcher to engage in methodological experimentation. Inspired by Linda Knight's (2021) protocol of inefficient mapping, I developed a method of affective movement mapping through drawing, which allowed me to attune to the affective encounters, rhythms, and intensities in the art classroom.

Through examples, the paper illustrates how this experimental method revealed art education situations as vibrant assemblages of diverse tempos and rhythms of movement, where the touches of hands, materials, and tools are central, and through these encounters, new stories and representations of multispecies relationality emerge.

Arts and science are often seen as dichotomous, opposites. In relatively conservative fields like business and management, endeavors that draw on creativity and emotion are treated as distinct from those relying on rigor, and reason. But what happens when scientific prescriptions, methodological templates and academic conventions do not satisfactorily facilitate our attempts to theorize and represent the worlds of our research participants? I am not an experienced arts-based scholar, nor a particularly talented artist, I am afraid. However, last year I had a serendipitous encounter with ethnodrama, a specific genre of dramatic literary writing, and analytic approaches associated with it, that opened up for me possibilities for knowing, sensing and writing that the traditional methodologies could not accommodate. In this essay, I reflect back on my recent experience with ethnodramatic analysis and writing, and its reception in the review process. I aim to argue about the potential of ethnodramatic analysis and writing to facilitate theorizing ‘that’s moving’, referring on Weick’s (1999) notion of ‘moving’ theories, i.e. ‘theories that affirm the heart’ or in other words, theories that have emotional resonance (p. 140).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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