Conference Agenda

In 2021, we, a group of then early-career literacy scholars of color collectively known as the Literacy Futurisms Collective-In-the-Making, put forth a conceptual framework, literacy futurisms, consisting of a constellation of five interrelated concepts: the ancestral/collectivist, playful/imaginative, intersectional, translingual, and decolonial (The Literacy Futurisms Collective-in-the-Making, 2021). Through our work, we sought to invite scholars to metaphorically dialogue with us around a series of provocations aimed at re-envisioning and re-claiming the future(s) of literacy and educational research.

Our goal now is to re-gather, with some of us joining in person and others virtually, 1) to invite an international community of scholars to engage with us around the original provocations we set in motion in 2021; and 2) to reflect on if and how our own praxis has shifted in the current sociopolitical climate we are encountering as scholars of color in the U.S. To that end, we frame this session presentation around the following overarching questions, which we will invite the larger community to reflect on alongside us: 1) How can we reimage literacy and educational research for the future in a world where white supremacist domestic terrorism is normalized? and 2) What stories, counter-narratives, and testimonios do we and our communities share surrounding experiences of increased and unwarranted violence, surveillance, and criminalization? The goals and the questions we seek to explore in community with other ECQU attendees are grounded in our firm belief that knowledge production through collectivity disrupts the coloniality (Smith, 2012; Patel, 2016) and neoliberal precepts of the academy (DeRocher, 2018), and it is in the dislocation of “the academy” that we might start to unravel and learn from the decolonial ways of being and doing that have sustained us to this present moment.

We draw inspiration from the work of collectives that have come before us such as the Black Girls' Literacies Collective (Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2016) and the Fugitive Literacies Collective (Player, Coles, Ybarra, 2020) that are reclaiming literacy and literacy education for BIPOC communities. For us, transforming traditional literacy and educational research spaces into those that center and celebrate BIPOC practices and knowledge(s) is a form of reclamation and of resistance to coloniality; it is about creating space where we can lift our histories, identities, and each other. As such, we continue building our conceptualization of literacy into one that refutes narrow, traditional, and prescriptive literacies for the privileged, and is deeply-rooted in an ancestral/collectivist, playful/imaginative, intersectional, translingual, and decolonial collective vision of literacy for and by BIPOC–Literacy Futurisms (The Literacy Futurisms Collective-in-the-Making, 2021). We ground this shared vision in notions of authentic cariño (Abril-Gonzalez, 2020; Bartolomé, 2008; Curry, 2016) and radical love (Freire, 1998; hooks, 2000) for one another, and embrace the nature of interdependence (Campano et al, 2020) and communal being (Rusoja, 2017) extending beyond the goals of the individual into a collective well-being.

In this session, we seek collective uplifting by engaging in critical praxis (Freire, 1970) in accordance with our coloniality- and neoliberalism-resisting vision. We will begin by highlighting and celebrating the scholarship of BIPOC scholars whose work embodies, shapes and materializes the meaning of Literacy Futurisms since even before our collective theorization. Then, we will facilitate shared dialogue and co-creation among “presenters,” “discussants,” and “audience members” to collectively envision and “illuminate on the future” (Toliver et al., 2019, p. 68) by inviting others to be in community with our collective, grappling with what literacy could be across time and space and to join us in a revisiting of our Literacy Futurisms provocations. The session will include various multilingual and multimodal points of entry (e.g., art, poetry, writing, drawing) to invite everyone in the session to play, dream, and theorize alongside us as co-conspirators (Love, 2019) as we imagine the “different tomorrows [that] are possible” (Freire, 1998/2007, p. 55) for literacy and educational research.

As we wrote in 2021, “we are everything we hope academia to be: collective, not competitive, and drawn together from a place of love, joy, hope, and humanity” (p. 5). Now, as more advanced scholars, we welcome the opportunity to invite the ICQE community “to open your minds, hearts, and spirits” and to join us in “collectively reclaim[ing] potential futures of [educational] research” (p. 5) alongside us.

Mark is standing here in front of you, the bodies collective? Where is the collective? Jess and Ryan are in North America, Davina and Sarah are in the UK, Claudia in Switzerland, Alys in Australia. Karin and Tatiana are here at the conference somewhere. For different reasons they cannot be here in this room with us. Or can they? Let’s see who will join us online? Can we have some kind of physicality together? Can we breathe together across continents?

The bodies collective has been searching for collaborative practices and relational connection in what we call bodyography since first meeting at ECQI in Leuven. And since the covid pandemic we have been experimenting with physical connection over long distance. At the same time we have always questioned hierarchy, especially the hierarchy between mind and body, that seems to fit in so well into our brave new online world. What hierarchies might happen, and how can they be flattened in live in the online-extended space between us? What do we want to do together in this half-open space?

These questions will guide us in a playful collaboration to explore possibilities of experiencing connectedness in our body whilst being connected with some people online.

In this session, we aim to explore the notion of “collapse” and the potential it holds for qualitative research. We start by sharing moments of “collapse” (in four vignettes) taken from our own research, and invite participants to discover how we identified, lived, materialized and conceptualized “collapse” in various ways. Such moments of “collapse” were (i) found in material objects from ethnographic fieldwork, (ii) built into research design to evoke ideas for creative problem-solving, (iii) explored as a technique to unravel multiple meanings, stories and relationalities, (iv) chosen as an (unsolvable) task by a research participant to explore his own capacity to create.

Vignette: Yimin Zhang

An environmental volunteer found an abandoned bird nest in a local orchard. There is a fleck of orange fibres woven into the nest. Where could this orange color come from? There are no orange grasses or trees around. The volunteer told me: “[The colour comes] from the carpets of the neighbors. Here is the tradition, the carpets are tapped outside to remove the dust. And then birds come to pick the wool. They often have favourite colours. Here is orange. In the park there is a tit always taking only blue and violet. They have favourite colours, those tits.”

For me, this is a compelling example of how nature actively incorporates human traces into its own processes, creating a moment of collapse between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ and challenging the traditional dichotomy between human and nature.

Vignette: Anastasia Badder

‘Imagine Cambridge runs out of water by the end of the year’. Following a creative workshop bringing together water industry and water activists, an industry representative reflected: ‘occasional failures’ in water systems are typically framed as technical problems, explained to ‘customers’ in those terms, and generally accepted as such. But that day, responses went beyond what he expected in ‘strength and…anger’. Relationships with water are ‘not simply about the pipes and pumps’, he realized; they are as much about ‘life-giving properties’ and ‘emotional…and spiritual connection’; indeed, perhaps he experienced such connections outside the office. The challenge for the water industry is therefore ‘how to reconcile those…connections with the prosaic business of supplying water.

Vignette: Gabi, Anastasia, Yimin, Gog, Nia, Arshima, Salman

Colleagues from four continents agreed to an experiment and task. They looked at photographs around the access and use of water (such as (a) pouring water from a plastic or glass bottle, and (b) taking it from an open (natural) source). They were invited to perform these acts, if they could, and to later associate freely and write about their relationships with water. The same images of and around the use of water evoked meanings and questions of astoundingly different nature: “Is it free or constrained?” (Y); “Is it inside or outside of me? (Go); “Handpump or tap water: Does it matter for consumption?” (G) “Can you appreciate it if you never lacked it?” (N); “Does drinking from a glass – as opposed to a plastic container – grant you higher status”? “Is feeling the pain of environmental destruction real or just a discourse”? Images can be powerful tools in research and as devises “collapsing” multiple realities. Making the lines of implicit connections with those different realities, perceptions, and perspectives visible, can give methodological strength and stimulate new forms of exchange.

Vignette: Madelaine Wood

An artist engages with the task of ‘translating’ a poem into a different semiotic mode. He attempts to represent a chosen poem as a visual image. He puts himself to the test and attempts to find ways to represent two different temporalities (and contradictory modes of being – absence and presence – a person waiting and a person seeing another one arriving) in ONE single image. Putting two images next to each other is not an option, as he considers this “a (too) cheap trick.” He tries other ways of getting closer to his vision by using AI and trying out different prompts. Dissatisfied with the result and his (apparent) inability to solve the puzzle of un-collapsing the un-collapsible, he considers having exhausted his means, artistic energy, and resources and moves on to another poem.

Together with participants, we will discuss the potential of ‘collapse’ as a method to ‘think and feel beyond’ dichotomies (e.g. the human/non-human, Barad 2007), disciplinary boundaries, and the (un-)predictability in research design (Jackson & Mazzei, 2024), to build sensitivity for new emerging relationalities, perspectives and creative energies. We will create a canvas to document our collective thought process and keep a record of its outcome.

This Dream Team explores possibilities posed by writing and movement. It builds on our previous work on academic writing otherwise (Taylor et al., 2025; Taylor & Benozzo, 2023). In considering writing’s movements as a multiplicitous connectivity of physical-affective-sensuous-materialities, we hails new writing imaginaries into becoming through movement. We are interested in writing and movement, writings’ movements, on the moves writing might make, and on how writing moves us.

Theoretically, we are inspired by Deleuze’s question: ‘It is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of affecting the mind outside all representations; it is a question of making movement itself a work, without interposition ... of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings, gravitations, dances or leaps which directly touch the mind’ (Deleuze, 1994: 8). We work with this to enact posthumanist feminist materialist praxis that sets bodies, hands, thoughts in motion to imagine and do writing differently and, via this, to devise new ways of doing qualitative research.

We invite Dream Team participants to enact movement in various ways, forms and modes: physically, affectively, sensorially. The smallness of the movement doesn’t matter – it's what the movement does and enables i.e. writings’ disruptivities– that matters.

Writing’s movements are felt in hands and skin, in-on bodies-hearts-minds. Remembering to learn to write as children, our mothers’ hand holding ours and moving our hands to shape letters. Perhaps we recall learning to write as a form of regulation: marching unruly letters into ordered obscure sentences – learning to write in the right way. And the physicality of writing: holding a pen/pencil correctly; writing so much you get a hard bump (a callus) on the middle finger! Alternately, now, using fingers to type may make our hand-writing feel laborious, and the words on the page seem clumsy and not ours. We may also ponder generational styles of writing: cursive/ cursivo/ kaunokirjoitus.

We invite participants to engage in four hot spots (punto nevralgico) and a collective writing activity to explore and co-create the potentialities of writing’s movements, how the many folds of writing’s movements put our bodies in motion; and how micro-movements and micro-sensings traverse and shape us and/as the writing.

Our four hotspots:

Physical movement has become part of many scholars’ research practices, for example via walking methodologies (Springgay & Truman, 2018; Taylor, 2020; Walking as Research Praxis, 2025). Moving is not only a somatic entangled assemblage of human and non-human relational bodies, it also includes “the affective, the political, the institutional, and the biological” (Shildrick, 2015, p. 18). At this hotspot we invite you to write in movement heterotopia (Foucault, 1967), where writing spaces are made from layers of meaning and/or relationships to other places.

Do bodies write their stories with the shadows they cast, as statements of our always relational and always unfolding positionality? How are shadows writing themselves into our bodies? How is the world writing itself onto us, with us, without us through movement and shifting light-object formations? Like ancient monuments built to create symbolic visual effects during astronomical events, this hotspot is an invitation to think/engage/move/write with shadows and light to explore writings happenings in more-than-human ways, as a dance and immanent choreography that calls forth shapes, patterns, contours, colours.

Writing’s body movements. While we write, the legs move, the lungs breathe, the eyes shift between the computer keyboard, the fingertips touch pencils and keys, the organs produce sounds, the heart beats, the blood flows. The head sways. In a calm that is only apparent, the body writes, moves, and makes noise. The body grows tired; the organs grow excited. This hotspot is an invitation to produce thoughts on the body that moves-writes. It is an invitation to imagine what space we can give, in research, to the movements of the flesh.

How do we write without words? What happens when we try to? Is it possible? Or, what else becomes possible? There are forms of writing which don’t rely on words. Boone & Mignolo (1994) discuss how alternative forms of writing were destroyed by colonisation, rendering hieroglyphic, pictorial, and coded systems of writing invisible and ‘primitive’. This hotspot invites participants to refuse the colonial gaze of writing by writing-moving without words, and to make marks/write with images, drawing, paint, and found materials other than pen or pencil.

Alongside the hotspots, participants are invited to a collective writing activity that aims at imagining-inventing an alphabet that is unrecognizable and nonrepresentational. How might we communicate in new ways through new individual-collective marks as they appear, materialize and do things on paper.

The Trojan Horse Greek legend recounted by Roman poet, Virgil, in Aeneid, and Homer, in the Odessey, tells of the Greeks who, after 10 brutal years warring with the Trojans, turned to creative subterfuge to take their foe off guard. Near defeat, the Greeks constructed a wooden horse, hiding soldiers in its cavity. Mounting a brilliant ruse, the Greeks feigned defeat by presenting the horse to the city of Troy as a peace offering, then pretended to sail away. While some Trojans were skeptical of the offering, most were emboldened by their city’s triumphant win. Swayed by the horse’s stature and the populace’s pride, the equine was hauled into the city as a trophy. While citizens slept, Greek forces snuck from the horse, opening the city gates for the returning army to infiltrate and destroy the city, ending the war.

This Dream Team session reimagines the Trojan Horse figuration, recasting its metaphorical significance from deceit and concealed threat to consider capacities for inspiring speculation and activation of strategies, bypassing defenses and polarizing politics to invite non-confrontational and transformative change in troubled times. Delegates will convene to integrate theories and techniques of Expressive Arts (EXA) with qualitative inquiry, envisioning production of a generative Trojan Horse. Following, EXA is introduced to provide context for the session’s interactive components including inspiration for initiating an international EXA Inquiry Writing/Making Collective.

Introducing EXA as a Field of Practice

A small, international contingent of psychotherapists and faculty in the 1970s, initially trained in conventional western theories of psychology, became critical of the medical models of mental illness and treatment practices. Each had experience in the arts and struggled with keeping modes of creative engagement central to their work. Collectively, they became the shapers of the EXA field and for decades embraced their arts practices to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas about human health and wellness. EXA is an intermodal process of engaging individuals and groups, joining two or more sensory modalities--movement/dance, sound/music, visual arts/imagery, and poetry/writing--to facilitate expressive possibilities. EXA offers a non-judgmental space for externalizing experiences, offering alternative pathways when verbalization is less optimum or unavailable. Especially generative when engaging groups, EXA highlights lived experiences through activation and honoring of embodiment, resulting in fostering of community and social cohesion. EXA emphasizes the artmaking process over artistic production, employing a 'low-skill, high-sensitivity' framework, meaning participants engage in high-sensitivity processing of mind-body connection requiring low skill or no formal art training.

Where Expressive Arts and Arts-Based Research Touch

What is the physical, social, atmospheric and/or emotional terrain that compel our turn to the arts, making it difficult or impossible to explore a complex world otherwise? What principles and practices of EXA assist arts-based researchers in enacting methods that cultivate habits of ‘thinking about’ social and educational phenomena alongside habits of ‘doing with’ bodies, art, affect, and movement? As educational arts-based researchers (ABR) trained in EXA, we wander and wonder through our work with such questions. While EXA and ABR are distinct fields, they share important territory. Both EXA and postfoundational arts-based research practices (e.g. a/r/tography) draw on body-centered, modalities of dance, music, writing, drama, and visual art. The creative process rather than the end products attunes to and follows sensorial provocations. We experiment with where and how EXA and the proliferation of Arts-Based Research touches, departs from, and holds underexplored potentialities--all of which we are eager to explore with delegates.

Cultivating Creative Subterfuge

As EXA facilitators and researchers, we understand the importance of building a flexible container to support session emergences, while not premeditating or flattening paths. Following is what might thoughtfully instigate and flexibly hold our session:

20 minutes: Overview of EXA as Practice and Inquiry Mode

Presenters will provide a brief EXA overview and introduction to EXA as inquiry mode.

30 minutes: Engaging EXA as Inquiry Mode

Illustrating and practicing EXA as inquiry, presenters will facilitate multimodal activities, using the following guiding question: What can a collaboratively envisioned, creatively constructed, and strategically intelligent metaphorical academic equine do to subtly introduce compassionate subterfuge aimed at taking hyper-conservativism’s presently noxious contagion in academic realms off guard, for good?

40 minutes: Cultivating the Conditions for an EXA/INQ Writing Collaborative

We dream of a collective creatively disrupting the currently-amplified ethos of human (sic) supremacy, separatism, and rapid capitalism. Harnessing momentum from the session, we aim to cultivate conditions to transport compassionate subterfuge in higher education, sorting what it means to be companions of the strategically intelligent Trojan Horse.

This Dream Team has been collaboratively developed by members of the Walking as Research Praxis group. We invite you to join us in co-creating an experimental walking praxis of speculative wanderings, temporal rhythms, space-place potentialities and affective intensities for sensing past-present-future bodies, relationalities and sensorialities.

Recently there has been significant interest in walking as a critical qualitative method (Pink, 2008; Evans & Jones, 2011; Lasczik et al., 2021). Scholars have theorized and actualized walking as a mode of accountable and response-able walking-with (Springgay & Truman, 2018); as place-space methodology (Fairchild, 2021, 2026); as relational and processual posthuman methodology (Taylor et al., 2023); as an ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2015); and as inspiration for art-ful academic writing otherwise (Taylor & Fairchild, 2025). Much of this research re-imagines walking as an inventive, experimental, less elitist, more inclusive qualitative methodology; and an attunement to the infrathin - the potentiation of a relational field that includes what can be felt but cannot quite be articulated (Manning, 2017, p. 99).

Conceptualizing walking as a more capacious human/non-human/more-than-human bodily mattering, and located in a feminist materialist posthuman theory/method/praxis that connects bodies/landscapes/time/temporality, our Dream Team resonates with the conference themes of relations between human, non-humans, history, philosophy, culture, mobility, visibility, creativity, more-than-landscapes, and…and…and.

We begin with a brief introduction to walking research. Next we move out of the room into the surrounding environs to engage in a series of Speakers Corners Walkings where we stop at a Corner, a member of the WARP collective gives a brief account of their walking research, and then gives a theory-praxis provocation for us to walk with to the next Speakers Corner. We then return to the conference room for a discussion of the matterings that arose from this research-creation activity, attending to the question: how does walking as research praxis shift qualitative research methodologies?

Speakers Corners Walkings provocations include:

Ways to challenge whiteness, which Ahmed (2007) conceptualizes as “an ongoing, unfinished history” (p. 149) and “institutional habit” that coheres, redirects, and (im)mobilizes what bodies can do. How does whiteness shape the “what” that is “around” (p. 151) and privilege habits that contour spaces that [our] bodies leave behind.

Ancient Chinese culture treats spacetime as a multilayered-crisscrossed flowing river where words, meaning, and mattering (un)entangle in a perpetual movement. How might we consider walking as a mindbodyheart movement, materializing possible entanglements among mindbodyheart calligraphy/words/painting/sculpture/trees, and other nonhuman beings across/with/into a past-present-future flow of meaning/being?

How can we contest walking’s normativities, its assumption that walking is done by an upright, bipedal, boundaried body? We invite you to do/enact walking as errancy, as unwillingness to obey rules–to walk a wavering line–a line that loops, knots, curls, furls and unfurls, that knits other lines into it–so as not to re-produce a straight White line but, instead, produce multiple lines, lineages, and connectivities. Feminist in/discipline (Taylor, 2020) reimagines walking as a path to sensing-feeling-knowing otherwise; as a feminist materialist ethico-onto-epistemological political praxis.

The Angel with One Wing is a nexus point for thinking about walking-with young children’s entanglement with British colonialism, slavery, and plantation ownership. English country estates are indelibly linked to brutal legacies of slavery and colonialism (Vergès, 2019, n.p.). These histories become sanitised to justify colonialism, settler colonialism, and neocolonialism; the pristine house a monument to Western progress narratives…but scratching the surface reveals the blood and bones on which these legacies have been built.

The new mobilities paradigm (Urry, 1999; Sheller, 2017) explores walking as participatory, future-oriented, sensory, experiential, and place-based encounters for reimagining ‘sustainability’ from a social justice perspective. Including more diverse voices enables the emergence of more socially just mobility systems and practices that consider varied experiences (Sheller, 2018). How can we depart from one-size-fits all “expert” planning for sustainable urban mobility and instead work with an innovative speculative co-design methodology embedded in everyday places to produce alternative knowledges?

How might walking-with Athens help us attend to the marks of centuries, of industrialism, capitalism, progress, modernity? How are these marks felt and rendered visible? How do they tremble? What do they generate? Glissant’s (2021) philosophy invites us to experiment with the potential of trembling as a way of being-with, as a way of unfixing certainty. Tremblings are whirlwinds of transhistorical encounterings that immerse us inextricably in the world and its peoples in the everywhens and everywheres, in and beyond Athens.

This Dream Team deploys walking in methodologically playfully ways to disrupt habitual un/noticing, to invite you to wander/wonder (MacLure, 2013); and to collectively co-create new research insights.

This session offers a supportive space for researchers to consider the mix of capacities they bring to their work and to design one small practice they can try after the conference. The approach is whole-person and heart-centred. It names five elements in a circle, each linked to a way of knowing and acting: 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; different people will find different mixes that serve them. The five-elements framing within a research context first emerged as a heuristic device in my study of ‘community’ in community-led housing, but here it is used as a tool to bring attention to the qualities and activities of the researcher.

Who the session is for

Researchers at any career stage and from any field who use qualitative approaches, including those who are curious but cautious about reflective or embodied practices. There is no ideal profile. Participants are invited to notice what already helps them, and, if they wish, to explore one new practice.

Session flow

1. Welcome and framing (10 min):

Brief introduction to the five elements and the session principles: there are many good ways to be a researcher; start with your strengths and choose your own area to stretch into.

2. Private self-mapping (10 min):

Participants mark a simple radar/circle for Fire/Water/Earth/Air/Space and note where their current mix helps their practice.

3. Menu of micro-practices (10 min):

The facilitator will outline how each element offers small, low-effort practices to try, for example:

o Earth (embodied presence and participation): one deliberate act of being there – joining a practical activity, walking the site or using the senses to notice materials, rhythms and movements; optionally, translate a recurring observation into a simple checklist.

o Water (emotional perception and reflection): a three-minute feelings/clarity memo after interviews or meetings.

o Fire (purpose and care): check alignment of your core purpose and vision at the start of a project; build in a one-sentence values check before a design or sampling decision.

o Air (analysis and clear language): identify your most effective media to work in for analytic tasks (visual, verbal, writing, etc); define one ambiguous term before coding; sketch a brief mind map.

o Space (openness and intuition): take a five-minute pause (quiet sitting or gentle walk) before major analytic decisions; allow time for daydreaming and a mix of recreational activities to bring in unexpected influences; keep a short insight log.

4. Optional pair/triad share (10 min):

Prompt: ‘One strength I appreciate; one practice I might try.’ Feedback only if requested.

5. Stations with examples (25 min):

Participants will have the chance to browse tables with simple materials they can adapt. One table will include illustrations from community-led housing (for example, prompts for mapping a shared situation, or a short ‘who/for what/with what authority/how recorded’ community guide). Another might invite attention to more-than-human aspects (tools, spaces, regulations, ecologies) and how a chosen practice might engage them. The specific examples will be confirmed closer to the time.

6. Commitment and close (15 min):

Participants will be asked to note the practice they will try, when they will try it and how they will gauge whether it helped. Those who wish can add an email to join a light-touch post-conference writing circle to share short reflections.

Accessibility and care

Materials will use clear layout and plain language. People will be welcome to move, rest or step out as needed. Quiet participation is valid and there is no requirement to speak. Where possible, examples will be offered in text and visual formats.

Expected outcomes

• A one-page Whole-Person Researcher Canvas that participants can take away and adapt.

• A personal plan for one micro-practice to test in their own setting.

• An optional writing circle to collect short reflections after the congress (for a blog post, zine or short memo).

• For those interested, access to example prompts and templates from the community-led housing study.

Facilitator

Anna Rose Hope, a researcher working with community-led housing in England. Research methods include constructivist grounded theory and situational analysis. Current interests: developing a toolkit for community in policy and practice; exploring how purpose, emotional clarity, embodied presence, analytic care and openness can be brought together in research, and how small, well-made practices can support collaboration.

This Dream Team session will explore poetry as a radical, affective, and indigenous method of inquiry—one that disrupts traditional academic forms and centers embodied, emotional, and political knowledge. Poetry Inquiry is not merely a stylistic choice; it is a methodological intervention that foregrounds voice, vulnerability, and resistance.

Drawing on previous work (Garcia-Meneses, Enciso Domínguez, and Chanez-Cortés, 2023), we will engage with the concept of the schizo-affective poem as a form of epistemic rupture. We want like to keep exploring how poetic expression can channel rage, exhaustion, and resistance within neoliberal academic structures. The poem’s fragmented, multilingual, and emotionally charged form challenges the sanitized, rationalist norms of academic discourse, offering instead a visceral, affective critique of institutional violence.

We will situate such poetic practices within post-qualitative and affect theory frameworks, arguing that poetry allows for the articulation of experiences that are often unspeakable in conventional research formats or conventional settings like higher education. We will also examine how poetic inquiry can serve as both data collection and analysis—capturing the nuances of feminist pedagogies, identity, and resistance in ways that are deeply relational and ethically attuned.

As a dream team, we will work on original poems as data and result, inviting participants to engage with the emotional textures of feminist praxis, specifically pedagogical/teaching practices. We will also reflect on the ethical dimensions of poetic inquiry: whose voices are amplified, how emotion is represented, and what it means to write with, rather than about, participants.

At the end, the participants could choose to be part of a research project or just continue writing poetry by themselves.

This Dream Team session invites qualitative researchers into a critical, collaborative exploration of the methodological, ethical, and epistemological tensions which arise when generative AI enters the qualitative research space. As a team working in inclusive education, we have been experimenting with Microsoft Copilot to support a Critical Discourse Analysis of autism-related briefings by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (April 2025) and Donald Trump (September 2025). These texts, situated within the Trump administration’s broader discourse on autism, offer a politically charged site for interrogating how language constructs disability, authority, and inclusion.

Our experiment was driven by methodological curiosity. Could AI meaningfully support interpretive analysis? What happens when we delegate parts of our analytical labour to a machine trained on probabilistic patterns rather than lived experience, theory or context? What emerged was a series of epistemic ruptures. Despite detailed prompts, Copilot routinely omitted key theoretical framings, such as the medical model of disability, and failed to engage with contradiction, ambiguity, and silence. It flattened nuance, misrepresented ideological tensions, and struggled to synthesise commentary meaningfully. These gaps were not incidental; they revealed the limits of AI’s capacity to “read” texts critically, especially when those texts are ideologically saturated and socially situated.

In response, we refined our approach: breaking down tasks, embedding theoretical cues, and manually editing outputs. This improved coherence but underscored a deeper concern about AI’s tendency to reproduce dominant narratives, erase marginalised voices and bypass the interpretive reflexivity which sits at the heart of qualitative inquiry. Our experience raised urgent questions about authorship, agency and the politics of automation in research.

This Dream Team session is not a demonstration of best practice, but an invitation to think together about the risks, contradictions, and possibilities of AI-assisted qualitative research. We will begin by briefly sharing our process and reflections, including examples of AI-generated outputs and the gaps we encountered. From there, we will facilitate a series of interactive exercises and discussions designed to surface collective insights, discomforts, and provocations.

Together, we will explore questions such as:

• What does AI routinely miss in qualitative analysis, and what does that reveal about our own methodological assumptions?

• How do we ensure rigour, reflexivity and ethical integrity when using generative tools?

• Can AI ever “understand” context, ideology, or lived experience, or is its role better framed as scaffolding rather than analysis?

• What kinds of qualitative work are most (or least) suited to AI assistance?

• How might we teach students to use AI critically, rather than uncritically?

• What does it mean to co-author with a machine, and how do we navigate questions of voice, power and representation?

We will also invite participants to experiment with live prompting, critique AI outputs and reflect on their own experiences (or hesitations) with AI in research, teaching and supervision. The session will be structured to allow for small-group dialogue, collective note-taking and the emergence of shared themes or provocations.

Our hope is that this Dream Team will forge a writing collective which valorises the outcome of the session through a joint publication, blog series or methodological manifesto. We are particularly interested in capturing the tensions and creative possibilities which arise when qualitative researchers engage critically with generative tools, especially in fields such as inclusive education, where language is never neutral.

This session is not about technological mastery, but about methodological vulnerability, critical reflexivity and the politics of knowledge production in an era of automation. Whether you are experimenting with AI, resisting its use or simply curious about its implications, we welcome you to join us in thinking (and dreaming) together.

In 2025, we, the “Reimagining Schools Collaborative” led the Game Changer “Re-Imagining Schools: A Journey of Playfulness and Hope” at ECQI Edinburgh. These sessions were a mix of semi-structured and free-flowing experiences of playful inquiry into co-dreaming new futures in education. Building from this, our 2026 Game Changer uses our emerging perspectives on education and reimagining schools to practice connections, collaboration and engage in global flows. In our 2025 ECQI session, the activities gave us reflective and creative insight into these questions and what they mean for different communities around the globe from which we have constructed a new series of questions/activities designed to push more critically into the essential questions posed by the Reimagining Schools Collaborative: what is, what if and what’s next?, exploring imagination and investigating possibilities to reshape experiences and spaces of schooling and education for a more equitable and sustainable future. Focusing on the goals of qualitative inquiry and the theme of the 2026 conference, we explore artful and critical methodologies to witness, to learn from, and to be in dialogue with practices that stretch the boundaries of education. It is an offering of paths that connect theory and practice, dreaming and doing, local wisdom and global urgencies—always asking: how can we learn differently, so that we can live differently?

In our Game Changer for 2026, we deepen our questioning to include: What does learning/education look like when it serves everyone: peoples, communities, and the planet? How can we shift from being told what our future will be to actively creating it ourselves? Re-worlding. Our sessions aim to make visible how imagination moves from "what if” to "what we do.” The solutions for the problems we face globally cannot be answered by a select few within academic contexts. We must engage with a poly-vocal approach that includes a variety of modes of expression and understanding. As such our Game Changers embody the conference purpose to, “actively and collaboratively engaged with history and with the futures we all shape” (ECQI 2026, CfP).

The Game Changer activities weave together modes of inquiry from arts, sciences, and Indigenous wisdoms, and offer experiences where education steps beyond its conventional walls to redesign how we learn, how we relate and how we care for the world, honor our shared vulnerabilities, and celebrate our interdependencies. Exploring post-human and post-qualitative paradigms in education and society, we see this historical moment as ripe for transformative change, challenging static relationships between theory, practice, research, and pedagogy.

The story we are creating in our Game Changer Sessions is not about a formula. Our Reimagining Schools Collaborative focuses on imagining prototype futures where learning is relational, regenerative and deeply grounded in the reality and dreams of each place. The Game Changer sessions emphasize the realization that young people exist as their own vast and complex systems of knowledge and that the knowledge they intuitively hold is powerful, brilliant, and wonderful. Recognizing the significance of youth perspectives, this Game Changer highlights their agency, visions and leadership as central to meaningful dialogues on the transformative power of imagination within education. One goal is to use art and imagination to impact wider global education policies by inviting young people, some of whom are already leading their own actions and propositions, to articulate, visualize or embody the issues.

Our three Game Changer sessions will include session leaders, remote organizers by Zoom, youth participants and the session attendees. The purpose of the in-person/zoom hybrid is to include youth participants from around the globe as part of the working sessions. Each of the three days can be attended as the sole session, or participants may attend all three. We consider each session as a point of perception in our world-building experiences, holding traces of how we can transform learning spaces into spaces of belonging, agency, and collective repair.

Day 1: What is (embodiment)? Co-creating the frame for existing systems of global education.

Day 2: What if (flow/collaboration)? How do we move through entanglements of colonial realities and post-colonial futures? Exploring new ways of “world-making”

Day 3: What’s next (point)? We locate generative geographies of change. Day 3 is about the living tensions and the beauty that emerges when diverse communities of educators, artists and young people come together. Structured to inspire intergenerational experimentation with raw artistic materials and to explore the challenges confronting global education

policies, this Game Changer will culminate in a report/policy brief which embodies a call to action for researchers, educators, students and communities alike.

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

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

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

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

Results

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Structure of the Game Changer.

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

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

Deliverables

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