Conference Agenda

The workshop aims to safeguard and transmit traditional local knowledge through experiential learning, and to connect contemporary audiences with the art of beadwork within Greek traditional dress.It combines qualitative engagement with tradition, the body, and materiality in research— an approach to qualitative inquiry that employs material discursive, hands-on and interpretive practices as modes of knowledge production. It creates space for discussion around the types of knowledge that are valued within qualitative research and enables participation beyond conventional, text-based academic presentation.

The workshop is structured into two distinct yet complementary parts, combining a theoretical introduction with an experiential, hands-on approach. In the first part, a brief 15-minute introductory presentation will be delivered, focusing on the use of beads both in traditional jewellery and in beaded decoration of dress more broadly. The presentation will highlight the role of beads as decorative, symbolic, and social elements, drawing on examples from the Greek context, with particular emphasis on techniques, colour schemes, and their cultural meanings.The second part of the workshop, which will constitute the largest portion of the session (1.5 hours), will take an experiential, hands-on approach. Participants, under the guidance of the facilitator, will create a replica of an authentic beaded ornament, the “Branditska” from Ormenio, Evros, applying traditional bead-threading techniques.

The workshop functions as a micro-ethnographic field, where participants do not observe from a distance but actively take part.The making of the Branditska is therefore not simply an outcome, but a process of knowledge production, in which knowledge emerges through the body, repetition and rhythm, touch, and material engagement. Beads, colours, patterns, and techniques operate as qualitative data. The ornament thus becomes a carrier of memory, gendered meanings, local identity, and tacit knowledge that is not fully captured in written form. Furthermore, knowledge production is not individual but collective, taking place within the group as participants discuss, compare, observe one another, and exchange experiences.

Materials:All participants will be provided with a complete materials kit (beads in three colours, specialised thread for beadwork, a beading needle) and a a printed booklet in English with detailed step-by-step instructions for the construction of the ornament (one per participant).

Feminist materialist and posthumanist thinking presumes that matter and discourse are entangled and co-constitutive and that neither is foundational. Instead, matter is conceptualised as agentic and all sorts of bodies are recognised as having agency. This radical move has profound ontological, epistemological and ethical consequences; it raises serious methodological questions about how we do qualitative research, and how knowledge in posthuman times can come to matter differently. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad (2007), Jane Bennett (2010), Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Donna Haraway (2015) the workshop invites participants to enact a feminist materialist/posthumanist theory- praxis dérive – a playful, political walk or stroll – which activates walking with feminist materialist/posthumanist theory as a means to unsettle anthropocentrism. In this, the workshop aims to offer a co-compositional research space for experimental encounters. It puts to work a practice of walking-with theory to attend to everyday things that we don’t normally notice or accord value to, and to bring to the fore the value of affective, sensory, embodied and relational research practices. Drawing on aspects of Carol and Nikki’s experimental research practice-ings and theoretical thinking, this workshop is structured as a three-part research-creation process: an initial theoretical orientation; a participatory, experimental feminist materialist/ posthumanist dérive where participants will get out of the room and go for a short walk; and a critical, collaborative speculative wondering regarding the matter and meaning which emerges. All materials for this workshop will be provided. Participants should bring smartphones and dress accordingly for Greek outdoor weather.

Qualitative research in sensitive fields such as bereavement, trauma, and culpability requires more than formal adherence to institutional ethical protocols. While informed consent and confidentiality remain essential, they do not capture the lived, moment-to-moment ethical negotiations that researchers encounter in practice. This has been described as ethics-in-practice — the ongoing, situated process of balancing care, responsibility, and reflexivity in research encounters.

Our Dream Team session takes up this challenge within an ongoing study on the experiences of individuals who have unintentionally caused another person’s death, either a stranger (e.g., through accidental traffic fatalities) or a close relation (e.g., children who died under parental supervision). The project is carried out by senior researchers and several research assistants who conduct in-depth interviews. This team composition sheds light on an underexplored dimension: how diverse researcher subjectivities, across career stages and personal backgrounds, shape not only the emotional experience of fieldwork but also the ethical dynamics within the team. Whereas much of the literature frames research assistants mainly in relation to power hierarchies, here we ask how shared vulnerability, ambivalence, and reflexivity circulate within the team and reconfigure ethical practice.

From the very start of fieldwork, our team encountered ambivalence: moments of deep empathy intertwined with fear, judgment, or withdrawal; the pull of closeness followed by the need for distance; the recognition that working with such material is simultaneously a privilege and a burden. Crucially, these experiences did not remain confined to interviews with participants. They reverberated within the team itself, where assistants and senior researchers grappled together with questions of proximity and distance, of supporting participants while also protecting one another, and of making sense of ethically charged encounters.

The guiding questions of this session are: How do ambivalence and reflexivity emerge in team dynamics in sensitive qualitative research? How can these processes be acknowledged and held, rather than suppressed? And what structures or practices (such as debriefing, supervision, or collaborative reflexivity) can best support researchers at different stages in coping with the emotional and ethical demands of such work?

The Dream Team format offers a unique opportunity to explore these issues collectively. In our session, senior researchers and research assistants will share short reflexive accounts of the challenges they encountered, followed by small-group discussions where participants consider parallel dilemmas from their own projects. Groups will be invited to propose tentative guidelines for fostering ethics-in-practice within research teams. These provisional guidelines will be gathered and synthesized, with the possibility of continuing the dialogue in a writing collective after the congress.

By situating ethics-in-practice not only in the researcher–participant relationship but also in the collaborative life of research teams, this session advances methodological reflection in two ways. First, it underscores that ethical deliberation in sensitive inquiry must include the dynamics among researchers themselves. Second, it highlights ambivalence as an inherent and potentially productive feature of qualitative work, one that can deepen reflexivity and open new ways of thinking about responsibility in research.

This Dream Team presentation emerges from the international initiative Systemic Voices for Peace, which invites systemic thinkers and practitioners to reflect on global crises and societal challenges through a systemic lens. Building on the Manifesto’s call for awareness, dialogue, and responsibility, our session explores the role of psychotherapy in nurturing peace, justice, and relational responsibility.

We view psychotherapy not as a neutral or apolitical practice, but as an engaged ethical stance—one that acknowledges the interconnectedness of personal, relational, and societal systems. Peace, from a systemic perspective, is not just the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, dignity, and mutual dialogue.

Through collaborative dialogue and shared reflection, we aim to share collective insights on the challenges and responsibilities that arise when systemic practice meets social and political realities. Moreover, we aim to explore psychotherapy as a space of resistance, accountability, and hope—a form of political and ethical practice that can contribute to peacebuilding within and beyond the therapy room.

In the spirit of ECQI’s commitment to relational, reflexive, and transformative inquiry, this presentation invites participants to join an open systemic dialogue about what it means to be therapists and citizens in times of global conflicts and uncertainty.

This workshop opens with embodied stillness, attending to breath, gravity, and the sensory interface of skin and environment. From this initial attunement, participants are invited to consider how the body is always entangled within material, social, and environmental relations. The session examines movement in common as a site for cultivating relational awareness, sensitivity, and generosity between human and more-than-human presences. In the context of escalating global crises, it positions movement as a means of engaging with the urgencies of our time, offering embodied, dialogic strategies for fostering care and cooperation across difference.

Context and Rationale:

Movement-based research can actively and collaboratively engage people in shaping more liveable futures. Through embodied behaviours and tacit negotiations its relational and participatory nature is uniquely positioned to work across difference, language, and culture. This work choreographs connections between bodies by attending to relationships with the spaces and socio-cultural contexts around them, developing awareness of bodily borders and boundaries and collaborative working practices between humans and the material world that present opportunities to behave ‘otherwise’ (Akomolafe 2022).

Guided by new materialist (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013) and post-qualitative approaches (Manning, 2016; St. Pierre, 2011), the workshop treats movement as an emergent, co-constituted process rather than a representation of fixed ideas. Bodies are not discrete, self-contained entities but dynamic nodes in a web of relations, constantly intra-acting with more-than-human presences that co-shape our experience.

Research Questions:

• What do we know through the body that cannot be accessed otherwise?

• How are tacit negotiations initiated and sustained across collective movement?

• How might embodied attunement offer tools for education, mediation, and civic dialogue?

• What can movement reveal about our shared vulnerability and interdependency with human and other-than-human worlds?

These provocations connect with the conference’s call to harness the strengths, synergies, and transformative practices that emerge in spaces of interconnectedness, shared vulnerability, and hope.

Workshop Structure:

The 90-minute session will unfold in two movements:

1. Inside – attuning and negotiating

We will work through relational movement scores that explore proximity, distance, shared rhythm, and collective decision-making. Participants will attend to micro-gestures—weight shifts, hesitations, accelerations—developing embodied awareness of the tacit negotiations that underpin collective life.

2. Outside – mapping relations in and out of place

The practice will spill into the streets of Athens, where participants will undertake embodied mapping—a mobile, sensory documentation of the city’s space-time mattering. We will notice how material surfaces, and temporal flows invite or disrupt movement. Using paper and pencil, participants will record textures and traces of relation. These experiential maps will then act as a blueprint score for a final group improvisation when we return inside.

Theoretical and Methodological Contribution:

The workshop aligns with the conference’s commitment to multimodal, experiential, and embodied ways of knowing. Rather than seeking closure or definitive answers, the workshop generates conditions for polyphonic dialogue and embodied sense-making, aligning with the conference’s aim to foster transformational change, rehearsing embodied ways of being and doing that gesture towards more inclusive and equitable futures in the present (Machado De Oliveira, V. (2021). The session contributes to a growing movement within qualitative research that embraces embodied, arts-based, and relational practices as vital tools for shaping the futures we will inhabit together.

Towards the end of the session, participants will be invited to submit their notes, drawings and documentary evidence to form an experimental embodied writing collective to valorise the session outcomes. We will explore experimental approaches to communicating and representing our lived experiences encountered in situ through digital AI. Exploring how to then respond to this virtual iteration in the material world we will consider where this speculative fabulation (Truman 2018) might take us as we engage in an iterative process in which live and virtual embodied experiences inform one another in an exponential loop.

References:

Akomolafe, B. (2018, June 18). The otherwise: What must we protect? Bayo Akomolafe Blog. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/the-otherwise

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity.

Machado De Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. North Atlantic Books.

Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press.

St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post-qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In Denzin, N.K. & Lincoln, Y.S. (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (4th ed., pp. 611–625). SAGE.

Truman, Sarah (2018) SF! Haraway’s Situated Feminisms and Speculative Fabulations in English Class, Studies in Philosophy and Education, no. 38, 31–42.

This qualitative study explores the construction of professional identity among psychology students at a Greek public university through the framework of Dialogical Self Theory. Conducted during a professional identity development workshop, the research explored how internalized voices of significant others—originating from sociocultural contexts such as family, peers, educational environments, media, and dominant societal narratives—shape students’ self-positioning in relation to their choice to study psychology. Fifteen graduate psychology students participated by recalling impactful utterances from influential figures and representing these voices as internal characters engaged in an imagined dialogue around their career choice. These dialogues served as rich narrative data, reflecting the students’ internal meaning-making processes. Positioning Microanalysis was employed to examine the unfolding of internal dialogues. A first-step analysis included the identification of the agent (the internal speaker), the addressee (to whom the agent is speaking) and the inner audience (which other internal self-positions are listening to). Next, after identifying and labeling the micropositions, labels were aggregated into wider categorizations and micropositions were then grouped under mesopositions. Further interpretative developmental analysis revealed dialogical patterns such as internal conflicts, cyclical dynamics, the negotiation of authority, and the emergence of previously unvoiced or transformative I-positions. Preliminary findings indicate that professional identity is not a linear formation but a fluid, negotiated process marked by dialogical tensions and integrations. Voices representing familial expectations, societal pressures, and institutional discourses often conflicted with emergent self-authored voices, revealing both barriers to and breakthroughs in identity development. This study demonstrates the utility of idiographic, dialogical methodologies in examining internal multiplicity and emergent dialogical phenomena within professional identity construction processes. It further highlights the role of reflective narrative practices in facilitating the development of students’ professional identities.

After chugs of beer, sips of champagne, and tastings of wines

We turned our bottles over to see the poems we could find

We counted syllables, we borrowed the words

We wrote these poems as three mothers

As liquor danced on our palates,

And compliments spilled onto our pages

Penned poems personified in vino veritas

And became toasts to one another

Defining one’s positionality is essential to qualitative research work as a scholar's worldview, identity, and background guide and shape their research process; thus, identity work becomes a dynamic, ongoing construction and re-construction of one’s identity. For this study, three MotherScholars conducted qualitative research that utilized collaborative autoethnographic (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), friendship (Tillman-Healey, 2003), and poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2005) methodologies to collectively re-examine the implications and realizations of their shared MotherScholar identities. “MotherScholar” is an intentional stylization of the term originally coined by Matias (2011), a Pinay anti-racist scholar. The stylization signals an attempt to ease guilt and hardships associated with trying to balance two identities by accepting we are always “mom” and always “scholar” (blinded, 2020, p. 50).

This study was a conversation amongst friends, around a table, drinking wine, and writing found poetry as a vehicle to discuss the definition and experiences of MotherScholarhood to support better understanding of our shared identity within our personal/ professional lives – including what we perceive to be our identity, what we end up projecting to those we interact with, and who our dearest and closest scholarly friends recognize in us. This collaborative self-study assisted us in clarifying our positionality within our homes, classrooms, and research fields.

The paper will share selected found and inspired poems crafted by each of the MotherScholars – sonnet, haiku, and free verse – and discuss the process of found poetry from wine bottle labels.

This study centers the voices of Arab youth at risk in Israel (ages 18–25), who experience intersecting marginalities related to gender, age, socioeconomic status, and ethnic-national identity. Through dialogue, the study explores how youth perceive and navigate socio-political, cultural, and interpersonal risks. As a national minority facing opportunity gaps, governmental neglect, and heightened tensions - particularly amid war - these youth exemplify the urgent need to conduct research with and for marginalized communities, recognizing their agency and deepening understanding of the risk situations they face.

Guided by Emerging Adulthood theory and a Context-Informed Perspective, the study employs Grounded Theory methodology (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). Twenty-five Arab young adults receiving welfare services participated in semi-structured interviews on intersecting risks. I conducted interviews in Arabic, my native language and that of the participants. Data were transcribed, thematically coded, and analyzed using the constant comparative method, supporting the development of categories and theoretical linkages directly from participants’ narratives.

Findings revealed complex patterns of identity negotiation and risk perception. Participants navigated conflicting ethnic-national, local, and religious identities, with these challenges intersecting across three risk dimensions: interpersonal (family violence, neglect, isolation, anxiety, and loss of meaning), socio-cultural (gender restrictions, educational barriers, limited opportunities, weak support systems), and sociopolitical (community violence, institutional discrimination, limited trust in authorities, and language-based exclusion).

Listening to these voices builds context-based knowledge and highlights the urgency of designing social work interventions sensitive to both identity and structure. The findings demonstrate that identity and risk are closely linked, shaping ongoing cycles of vulnerability among Arab youth in Israel. These young people confront the dual challenge of personal growth amid a fraught political landscape. This research calls for social work practice and policy that integrate cultural context, promote equality, and foster practical interventions to strengthen resilience, especially during times of crisis.

What does fatherhood look like in the 2020s? How do men express themselves as fathers in an era saturated with images and expectations of what a man should be? Dad 2.0 – Identities in Motion is a visual journey into an interdisciplinary research project that explores the multiple meanings and representations of fatherhood in Finland. This qualitative study is part of a broader research initiative at the University of Eastern Finland: Religion, Meaning and Masculinities – Religion in the Lives of Men in Finland (Research Council of Finland).

Dad 2.0 combines qualitative methodology with a co-research approach and arts-based research. The project began with 24 fathers from diverse backgrounds—including nuclear families, divorced and single fathers, rainbow families, and immigrant fathers. Each interview began with a discussion about the participants’ everyday images of fatherhood, followed by a narrative interview and, optionally, a photographic portrait session with the researcher. In the end, eight fathers chose to be photographed, and several others shared personal images from their daily lives.

This presentation explores the multiple father identities and values expressed through these visual and narrative materials. The data highlights the diversity of fatherhood, the reshaping of identity and values, and the tensions between traditional gender roles and emerging forms of masculinity. Masculinity and fatherhood are no longer fixed categories—they are continuously negotiated in everyday life: between strength and vulnerability, pride and inadequacy, inherited traumas and new possibilities.

Based in pragmatism and post-structuralism, I explore how discontinuity is in itself already an enacted and embodied everyday curricular strategy. We sleep to avoid a stressful situation. We break a promise in order to avoid being penned in to a corner. We hide a part of our self to avoid ridicule. In other words, we use multiple selves to avoid the restrictions of a singular one. The self betrays the self. The self lives in a state of dis-integration.
Further still, I propose what pedagogies might look like based on disjunctions. Pedagogies of dis-integrations foreground and even create the gaps that allow for the self to become other. These pedagogies that values gaps will not measure or require fidelity to the original, but instead facilitate the (re)creation of newly relevant concepts, episodes, actions. Simultaneously, they will not require production from or translation of all modes to that of a singular “academic” (or discursive or productive) mode. These pedagogies aim to split the idea of the continuous lived experience and the integrated self. They embrace but does not require translations, in between zones, mixed modes, hybrids. These pedagogies ask, what can we do with gaps? And to answer that necessarily means looking at what we already do with gaps. How are we already escaping?

Background

At-risk young Arab women in Israel experience multiple layers of oppression resulting from their intersecting identities as members of Arab society, as part of an ethnic minority, as women, and as individuals living in situations of personal and familial vulnerability. Their marginal position shapes both their life experiences and how they view their future. Emerging adulthood is a key developmental stage marked by personal responsibility, decision-making, and forming a desired lifestyle. Research shows this period involves identity formation, setting life goals, and planning steps toward them. Future perception plays a central role in motivation and the ability to act toward goals. This study adopts a context-informed perspective that examines how sociopolitical, sociocultural, and interpersonal contexts shape future perception.

Methods

The sample included 30 Arab young women aged 18–29 identified as being in situations of risk and involved in formal support frameworks such as welfare services or civil-society organizations. Data analysis followed Strauss and Corbin’s grounded-theory approach, enabling exploration of the processes through which participants construct and interpret their perception of the future.

Results

The analysis revealed one overarching theme, “Constructing the Future as a Narrative,” encompassing four interrelated subthemes: “Between Overthinking and Avoidance,” reflecting tension between fear and hope; “Independent Personal Future,” focusing on autonomy and stability; “Future as a Space for Personal Repair,” emphasizing healing and self-recovery; and “Future as a Path Toward Social Justice and Repair,” highlighting transformation of pain into social contribution and collective change. Together, these subthemes portray the future as a horizon of hope, resilience, and transformation.

Implications

These findings highlight the need for context-aware interventions that foster autonomy, support goal setting, and strengthen coping capacities. By providing professional and social support, such programs can empower young Arab women at risk to overcome barriers and build safe, independent, and meaningful futures.

Artificial intelligence (AI), often celebrated as an engine of progress, is implicated in the escalating planetary crises of climate breakdown, mass extinction, democratic erosion, and widening inequality (McQuillan, 2022). Far from immaterial, AI relies on infrastructures of energy, water, minerals, and labor that intensifies ecological collapse and global dispossession (Crawford, 2022). Each interaction with AI is tethered to extractive chains that accelerate “slow violence”—the gradual, dispersed harm that unfolds across generations and borders (Nixon, 2013).

Once mediated by AI, qualitative inquiry, often framed as small-scale, relational, and human-centered, becomes entangled in the extractive systems it might otherwise resist. That is, the slow violence of AI is not external to our work but an intensifying condition shaping who speaks, who is silenced, and whose suffering is rendered (in)visible. For qualitative researchers, these realities raise urgent ethical challenges. Institutional ethics frameworks, dominated by procedural compliance, cast AI as a neutral tool (Bennett, 2025), a narrow view that risks reproducing colonial logics of extraction, where infrastructure remains invisible and unexamined until it breaks down (Star & Ruhleder, 1996).

In this paper, we theorize slow violence as both an ethical and representational problem for qualitative inquiry, performing an infrastructural inversion to expose AI’s technical and epistemic systems (Bowker, 1994). We ask: What does it mean to produce knowledge through systems complicit in environmental and social harm? What kinds of subjects are we becoming when our methods rely on extractive infrastructures? Confronted with these questions, researchers may be tempted to disavow the violence that enables convenience, feeling shame, ambivalence, or resistance in the face of complicity. Rather than seeking resolution or denial, we reimagine research ethics as a practice of dwelling within these tensions, acknowledging complicity, foregrounding entanglement, and cultivating modes of inquiry that strive toward responsive care (Raffaghelli et al., 2025).

This qualitative study explores primary school teachers’ reflective experiences following the implementation of an intervention in six Grade 4 classrooms in Greecefocused on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and integrated Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) strategies, delivered an AI-enhanced Learning Management System (LMS) traditional printed materials.The core instructional focus SEL competencies—including self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship, and responsible decision-making—while SRL strategies were explicitly taught and embedded within the flow of learning activities, enabling students to apply goal-setting, self-monitoring, and emotional regulation during their engagement with SEL content. Teachers participating in both modalities documented their post-intervention reflections in structured journals, offering rich narratives about their pedagogical choices, classroom interactions, and the evolving role of technology in supporting emotionally meaningful and cognitively self-directed learning. Through a thematic analysis of these reflective accounts, the study how teachers conceptualized the integration of AI in SEL practice, how they navigated the co-teaching of emotional and metacognitive skills, and how their own professional perspectives were shaped by the process. ituated within the theoretical frameworks of the CASEL model for SEL and Zimmerman’s theory of SRL, interplay between affective and regulatory dimensions of learning. Emerging teacher reflections indicate pedagogical value both implementation settings, with the AI-supported environment student engagement, emotional expression, and autonomous learning. study contributes to ongoing discussions around ethically grounded technology integration, reflective teaching practice, and innovation in emotionally and cognitively rich learning environments.

This qualitative study explores psychotherapists' lived experiences and perceptions of engaging with generative AI in a simulated therapeutic context. Employing an exploratory research design, we conducted a simulation where three systemic family therapists participated in role-play sessions with ChatGPT, which was prompted to act as a therapist. Participants adopted the roles of a client from a fictional distressed couple with a child, directing the conversation based on a provided scenario. Following the simulation, we conducted in depth interviews to understand their personal experiences as role-playing “clients” as well as their professional reflections as practitioners. A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed several key findings. Participants consistently reported a surprising sense of being understood and validated by the AI, noting its ability to ask reflective questions and offer support. However, this was invariably tempered by the critical observation of a lack of authentic human presence. They highlighted the absence of non-verbal cues, tone of voice, and embodied connection as a decisive limitation, leading to interactions that often felt generic, repetitive, and ultimately superficial despite the AI's technically competent responses. Building on these empirical findings, we engage in a theoretical conceptualization, proposing a systems thinking view of AI in therapeutic practice to understand the multidimensional effects of the inevitable AI presence in the room. This systemic lens reframes AI not merely as a tool, but as a relational actor that can potentially stabilize or disrupt therapeutic and family systems, posing specific risks. The study concludes that a critical, systemic understanding is crucial for anticipating how AI is integrated into human relational networks, highlighting implications for therapeutic practice, ethics, and the future of family and therapeutic systems in a postdigital era.

Debates on artificial intelligence (AI) and its role in the Anthropocene unfold less as prospect-opening inquiries than as polarized stances, shaped by systemic fatigue and eschatological anxieties over limits already reached. At such a moment—when the foundations of thought seem unsettled—we are challenged to think at the limits of the thinkable, to risk the unthinkable, and to resist systematization as the domination of humans by reason. This paper responds to that challenge through a speculative, artistically informed inquiry.

Drawing on the author’s art installation Creatures Cluster as a symbolic schema of interconnected eco-logies, and on Platonic prompt-dialogues conducted across successive ChatGPT versions, the project explores anamnesis (knowledge as recollection) as a politics that seeks the improbable and incalculable within organological relations, enabling new connections that open spaces for speculation. Here, AI is positioned not merely as a tool but as an immanent, maieutic (generative) function, analogous to Socratic provocation: a self-reflective process staging thought through otherness.

Hovering between method and (un)concealment, logocentrism and paradox, logic and myth, the inquiry refuses absolute thinking, instead cultivating a dialogical praxis that enables polyphonic, multilayered engagements with diverse intelligences that evade closure—there is no absolute ground for any epistemology. In this mode, the paper proposes a shift from anthropocentric logic toward allocentric realization through techno-logical alienation. This shift neither seeks timeless truths nor treats AI as an inevitable agent tasked with delivering them. Instead, it articulates a language of co-existence that speaks from within crisis rather than transcending it. Anamnesis is thus explored as a transformative process nested within AI’s recursive feedback, where knowledge is co-constituted through relation in time and as time, as difference engaging difference, and where dialogue becomes an event rather than a debate.

This qualitative study explores the complex and multifaceted perceptions of mental health therapists regarding the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their professional practice. As AI tools become more prevalent in healthcare, understanding the perspective of practitioners is crucial for effective and ethical implementation. Using a Thematic Analysis approach, this research explores in depth the insights of eight Greek female therapists, aged 28 to 45, to uncover their views on AI's potential and limitations.

The analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed three primary category-themes: opportunities, concerns, and potentiality. Participants identified AI's potential to enhance their therapeutic practice by providing time and cost-effective assistance in areas like research, organization, and improving accessibility to mental health services. However, a significant sub-theme of resistance was also prominent, with the majority of therapists expressing reluctance to use AI to substitute core components of their therapeutic work. A major concern that arose, is the perceived inability of machine learning to replicate and apply essential therapeutic skills such as empathy, emotional awareness, and genuine understanding.

Despite these concerns, participants acknowledged AI's future potential, highlighting the need for structured training, strict and close monitoring, clear guidelines regarding GDPR and data privacy while having governmental bodies form a thorough legal framework. Along the same lines, a prominent motive for AI’s adoption has been the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Overall, this research reveals the perspectives of therapists, who recognize the technological opportunities while remaining cautious about AI's capacity to replicate the human elements of therapy and follow rules of data privacy. While the small sample size limits generalizability, the findings provide a foundational understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with AI adoption in mental healthcare, paving the way for future, larger-scale investigations into this critical topic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Come explore with us.

References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thinking with disability

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

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

Spinning analysis

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

Session Plan

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

In the session, we will:

1. Introductions and overview of the session

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

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

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

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

Following the session we will:

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

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

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

References

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

doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2013.301310

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

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

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

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

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