Conference Agenda

In our final year of doctorates in systemic practice, we are challenging ourselves to find ways through colonisations of land, aging, health and bodily communication. We explore the complex, multidimentional, relational flows that move across bodies, land and institutions. In writing up we hold on to systemic, diffractive, polyphonic, exploratory constellations, evolutions of liminality, to find hope in collaborating in peripheral, inbetween spaces, in an uncertain world in flux.

Against the backdrop of this year’s congress theme, this paper explores how the creative, material, and community-based practice of contemporary knitting shapes our way of being in and responding to the world. Furthermore, it asks how we might engage in qualitative inquiries while acknowledging the vibrant entanglements and assemblages of the non-human, advocating for non-textual documentation as well as speculative processes as essential parts of arts-based research.

In my ongoing PhD project, I explore the growing resurgence of knitting as a communal activity and its potential to shape the practitioner’s understanding of everyday life, asking how practices of social, material and embodied collaboration evoke forms of care and response-ability (Haraway, 2016). I advocate for a movement between the boundaries of theory and practice, one that treats making as thinking, and, as such, I experiment with qualitative methods that embrace and take the interplay between human and non-human seriously. During my time as a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, I was introduced to the concept of a/r/tography. To me, the concept, which stems from an “understanding of arts-based research as enacted living inquiry” (Springgay et al., 2005), resonated with my research’s aim of engaging with materials as active participants, and in continuation thereof, understanding how creative, embodied practices influence the ways we know and experience the world.

Based on a series of knitting workshops conducted during my research stay, I explore how a/r/tography can serve as a method for engaging participants with their everyday lives through the material act of knitting. As practiced in a/r/tography, I also draw on my own lived inquiry as a knitter, weaving in autoethnographic reflections and exploring how these experiences inform my research.

The arts are becoming more common in management education to move beyond traditional teaching and prepare students for the complex, uncertain, and value-driven challenges they face in organizations and society. Despite their growing application, the field remains fragmented, marked by divergent definitions, epistemological foundations, and varying degrees of artistic integration. This paper addresses this fragmentation by drawing on 70 qualitative case studies that highlight aesthetic epistemologies as well as constructivist and experiential approaches.

This study explores how the arts are integrated into business education in diverse forms such as poetry, photography, and performance. It does so through a systematic review of peer-reviewed research (1998 and 2024). The study follows PRISMA standards and employs a transparent, traceable methodology supported by Zotero, R, and OSF. This process strengthens credibility and rigor in qualitative reviews which is increasingly relevant with the growing use of AI.

Thematic coding synthesizes key debates and epistemological foundations in the literature, deepening understanding of artistic inquiry and its educational intentions. It also showcases methodological diversity while highlighting the strengths and limitations of these experimental and creative practices, particularly in transdisciplinary settings.

Building on these insights, this paper introduces a comparative framework that makes a distinction between arts-based, arts-informed, and arts-related teaching methods. This framework positions practices along a continuum of artistic integration, ranging from immersive to illustrative uses of art, while clarifying their educational purposes and outcomes. The framework clarifies different ways of integrating art in qualitative inquiry and reducing ambiguity in terminology.

By mapping both the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of integrating art, the study advances theoretical clarity, provides educators with a practical tool for reflection, and supports transdisciplinary research on the transformative potential of the arts. It also fosters methodological innovation and sparks critical discussion on the role of arts-based inquiry in transdisciplinary settings.

This presentation is a blend of immanenent writing, psychogeography and street-art based on a long-term visit to Florence, the cradle of the Rennaisance, to ask questions about the contemporary return of fascism in Europe. it is born from a curiostiy with British poets in Florence, colonials but also radicals who provide an ideal position for an interrogation of politics and place. The aim is to follow the lives of Grand Tour poets, exploring their own resistance to British culture to develop an artis-based refelction of Italian protest, but also wider assemblages of dissent. The talk will involve the pressentation of twelve art works accompanied by immanant writing, poetry and movement.

This study explores the teaching of writing as an art form, based on teachers’ experiences. More specifically, it focuses on creative writing as an out-of-school activity and the art form known in Finland as literary art (Swe. ordkonst). The aim of the study is to explore how teachers of literary art for children and youth, within the context of basic education in the arts in Finland, express their teaching practices. We pose the following research question: What do literary art teachers express that they do in literary art education within basic education in the arts? The study is grounded in performative theoretical perspectives, based on relational ontology, and we use poetic inquiry as method of analysis. Expressions from six literary art teachers are interwoven into five research poems. The results show that teachers in literary art emphasize writing as an art form and highlight writing as a complex, moving, affective, unpredictable, and co-creative process. The role of the literary art teacher can be seen as hybrid, where the teacher is simultaneously a writing artist, educator, and reader.

This presentation discusses findings from an arts-based qualitative activity that is part of a longitudinal PhD thesis project. The larger study explores the lived experiences of a polyamorous network (polycule). Eight members of an interconnected polycule were invited to create individual collages that visually represented their personal journeys, identities, and relational dynamics within polyamory. Drawing on feminist, queer, and relational ontologies, this project privileges participant meaning-making, inviting multiple truths to coexist in visual and narrative form.

Collage, as both method and product, offers a unique way to access and represent the layered, non-linear, and affectively rich terrain of polyamorous life. Participants engaged the medium to explore themes such as boundary negotiation, fluid kinship, emotional labor, and the interplay of autonomy and connection.

The resulting presentation features reproductions of all collages, accompanied by brief participant narratives and key interpretive themes that emerged. Through this multimodal presentation, the project seeks not only to illuminate how polyamorous people conceptualize and communicate the complexities of their relationships, but also to foreground the potential of visual methodologies in qualitative research on intimate life.

This work contributes to broader conversations in sexuality studies, visual sociology, and arts-based research by demonstrating how creative expression can make space for voices often marginalized in normative narratives of love and partnership. The presentation invites viewers to engage visually, emotionally, and intellectually with the participants' representations, and to consider how collage can serve as both an archive of experience and a form of resistance to dominant relational scripts.

Summary

This Dream Teams Session will be led by Karin Hannes and Richard Siegesmund as we apply a tool, an Analytical Apparatus for Visual Imagery (AAVI), constructed from artistic models for formal visual analysis and developed in response to an increasing interest in visual research methods across disciplines in the fine arts and social sciences. Through this tool, researchers—particularly those who may lack the formal artistic skills for the deconstruction and analysis of visual images—can elicit a more robust descriptive language from participants and achieve a richer and more comprehensive analysis of visual images collected during participatory visual research such as photovoice or photowalk methods. In many projects that collect images, the role of images is often limited to either assisting participants in verbalizing their experiences or supporting a particular narrative story line evolving from the data. AAVI invites scholars to consider adding a compositional, tacit, layer of analysis to visual research based on the image's material intrinsic qualities.

For the 90-minute Dream Steams, we invite participants to bring visual images that they have collected in their research. For participants who are interested in learning about visual analysis, but do not have their own images, the session leaders will share images from their own research (Hannes & Siegesmund, 2022; Hannes & Siegesmund, 2024) showcased during the session .

Agenda for the session

0.00 – 10.00 minutes: Introductions

10.00 – 30.00 minutes: Introduction to AAVI applied to photovoice research.

30.00- 45.00 minutes: Participants attempt AAVI analysis with their own images.

45.00- 65.00 minutes: Share. Did AAVI produce new insights? How to push AAVI further.

65.00-75.00 minutes: Individual work further analyzing one’s image set. Pushing AAVI analysis deeper.

75.00-90.00 minutes: Final reflections, including possibilities for writing up insights gained for a future methodological paper

Rationale

Artistically inspired visual data, beyond photography, have been increasingly used in qualitative and creative research. This turn towards the visual image accepts that the researcher and participants are actively making the image, not simply recording an event (Riddett-Moore & Siegesmund, 2012).

This arts-based turn to the making of visual data raises two new problems in analysis. First, there is often more to the creation of an image than an illustration of predetermined semiotic or narrative meaning. Images emerge in complex and nonlinear ways (Manning, 2016). Second, many social scientists have never been formally trained in artistic creation; therefore, they do not have the proper skill set for creative analysis (Dierckx, Zaman & Hannes, 2022). Phillip Vannini (2015) argues for the need to develop non-representational methods in the social-behavioral sciences. In the case of the visual, we see this as pressing the distinction that John Dewey (1934) made between recognition and perception. Recognition is the categorization of semiotic representation. Perception is the aesthetic non-representational analysis of the felt phenomenological qualities that a visual image conjures (Siegesmund, 2012). Such interpretations require artistry.Non-representational level of data can be brought into language by researchers who are knowledgeable about visual art characteristics (Brown & Collins, 2021; Freedman & Siegesmund, 2024); Following Dewey, we argue that visual images can do more than just illustrate ideas or concepts. Images, through their relationships of tacit qualities, contain felt somatic meaning.

The Analytical Apparatus for Visual Imagery (AAVI) (Hannes and Siegesmund 2022) was developed to help social science researchers—particularly those who have not had formal training in the making of fine art images —to recognize the tacit qualities that shape the interpretation of a visual object, and bring them into the conversation with all image creators involved in a project and (where appropriate) the broader public.

References

Brown, N., & Collins, J. (2021). Systematic visuo-textual analysis. The Qualitative Report, 26(4), 1275-1290.

Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Minton Balch.

Dierckx, C., Zaman, B., & Hannes, K. (2022). Sparking the academic curriculum with creativity Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 22(1), 3-25.

Freedman, K., & Siegesmund, R. (2024). Visual methods of inquiry. Routledge.

Hannes, K., & Siegesmund, R. (2022). An analytical apparatus for visual imagery applied in a social-behavioral research. International Review of Qualitative Research, 15(2), 278–302.

Hannes, K., & Siegesmund, R. (2024). Presenting an analytical apparatus for visual imagery (AAVI) in socially engaged research practice. In H. Kara (Ed.), The Bloomsbury handbook of creative research methods (pp. 135-146). Bloomsbury.

Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.

Riddett-Moore, K., & Siegesmund, R. (2012). Arts-based research. In S. Klein (Ed.), Action research: Plain and simple, (pp. 105-132). Palgrave.

In an era of global changes and mental health challenges, qualitative researchers strive to reflect the emerging realities in their areas of inquiry. In my doctoral research, I used the concept of relational space, which includes human and non-human elements, verbal and non-verbal interactions, emotions, embodied responses... and more. The exploration of relational space also takes into consideration the environment and systems in which we live and function. As a systemic practitioner researcher, I explore the intricate interplay of the relational space that emerges in the conversation between client and therapist and the relational space of the different voices that emerge within the therapist. Through the use of reflexive writing, I focus on the relational conversation between my client and myself, as well as my inner dialogue and thoughts and feelings. In a way, I create a professionally employable space for the personal. The collaborative dialogue between these relational spaces creates relational ripples, which in turn open up possibilities and generate transformative practices in the psychotherapy process.

In this Dream Team session, participants will have the opportunity to engage in experiential exercises to explore the relational space in therapy, both the relational space between client and therapist and within the therapist. They will experiment with ways of using reflexive writing as a methodological tool, applicable and useful to practitioners who need to respond to current mental health challenges. Through the use of reflexive writing and collaborative discussion, participants will deepen their understanding on the impact of their own relational space in the therapeutic encounter and how the interconnectedness of relational space between client and therapist and within the therapist encourages collaboration and dialogue in the therapy room. In the end of the Dream Team session, participants will produce a collective writing, which will reflect the joint efforts of the team to create relational ripples and will showcase the interconnectedness of our relational spaces.

Dominant traditions in physical education (PE) have framed movement primarily through natural science paradigms and physical skill models, positioning teachers as technicians who apply behavioral principles, established categorizations and performance pedagogies. This narrow view risks reinforcing ableist perspectives and elitist norms. What makes movement education distinctive in PE, is its potential to value both the concrete (skills, performance) and the abstract (principles, concepts) as intertwined and embodied phenomena that can promote inclusive, and holistic forms of learning. Thus, teaching about movement in PE entails moving beyond scientific reasoning alone, toward creating pedagogical conditions of non-representational thinking and action.
In the present study, these conditions are dealt with through the concept of intellectual acrobatics. Via a Deleuzian perspective, intellectual acrobatics refers to a process of destabilizing and reassembling established assumptions and categorizations, by inviting pedagogy to take bold conceptual and practical leaps. As such, the aim of this study is to examine whether and how intellectual acrobatics can position pedagogy-as-creation in PE, enabling teachers to think and work with movement in ways that generate new, yet-to-be-realized possibilities.
By using Deleuzian notions of thinking-with-signs, I initially explore dogmatic images of thought within PE and their implications for how movement is taught and learned. Afterwards, the concept of intellectual acrobatics is suggested as an alternative approach for reimagining movement education within PE. Running, as an example of locomotor movement, is used to illustrate how intellectual acrobatics can open multiple ways of encountering signs in, with, and about learning to run, each demanding equally diverse pedagogical responses. I finally consider the capacity of this concept to reorient contemporary PE, offering new perspectives for how movement might be understood and taught.

This study explores how metaphor writing supports future teachers in
shaping their professional identities and responding to the complex
challenges of our time. Metaphors are approached as “technologies of the
self” (Foucault, 1988), enabling student teachers to reflect on who they
are and who they aspire to become in a world marked by uncertainty,
interdependence, and crisis.
Through the creation of metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) about ‘the
environmental education teacher’, participants engage deeply with their
own experiences, articulating evolving understandings of teaching,
responsibility, and care. These figurative expressions serve as sites for
both personal reflection and collective meaning-making, revealing how
teachers’ ethical sensitivities emerge in relation to others and to the
more-than-human world.
Metaphor writing in this study was embedded within three university
courses, where relational interaction, dialogue, and self-reflection
formed the core of pedagogy. In these participatory spaces, students
explored how their experiences, perceptions, and aspirations could be
expressed and reimagined through metaphor, positioning learning as
relational, embodied, and transformative.
By foregrounding creativity, collaboration, and reflection, the study
contributes to the qualitative research community by demonstrating how
imagination and affect can engage future teachers with global and local
crises. It advocates for pedagogies grounded in imaginative,
self-reflective practices that foster resilience, ethical responsibility,
and transformative teaching. Metaphor writing emerges thus as a generative
approach for reimagining teacher pedagogy in response to the
interconnected challenges shaping education today.

Young children’s excited curiosity, wonder and adventurous pursuit of experience epitomise a world-in-formation. Their educational journey either expands or curtails their creativity, imagination and empathy. Neoliberalist values and institutional pressures in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) in England often pressurise educators into outcome-focused teaching, forcing them to navigate complex political terrain (Moss, 2024). I focus on the hope offered by the alternative of a pedagogy of adventure, encouraging children to go knowingly into the unknown and to pursue their rhizomatic desire lines, as they seek to share everyday spaces with the human and more-than-human.

Through autoethnographic narrative from a nursery, I show that giving time and space to children’s ‘becoming-with’ allows a growing resonance with the world, challenging dominant egocentric values (Biesta, 2013). Two children noticing a spider’s web became a powerful story as data and of data, permitting a turning and re-turning (Barad, 2007). It led to thinking with data, allowing it to thicken, becoming more than itself (Ungar, 2017) within its wider narratives. Slow pedagogy (Clark, 2023) created entangled spaces and places. The children’s subsequent decision-making evidenced the affective condition of (be)longing, enmeshing their past, present and future hope (Kraftl, 2024).

The children’s thirst for (lost) knowledge and their subsequent attachments to the more-than-human, to place and to space evidence the joys which transcend standard boundaries. Methodologically, using this data from the ‘unruly edges’ (Tsing, 2015) unearths sensory, affective connection and new ecological possibilities. It places ECEC settings as potential democratic sites at the centre of interconnected communities.

In this paper, we explore collaborative scribbling, drawing, and writing as a research approach and how drawn and written marks became entwined with our thinking, creativity, and everyday lives over a period of three years. This paper presentation draws on a previous study in which literature’s thing-power created movements in student teachers’ learning diaries during a university course on children’s literature and drama in early childhood teacher education. To explore the affective and material power of literature, we employed a creative approach of visually playing with scribbles, sketches and collages when tuning into the movements we could sense in the learning diaries. The collaborative process became affective, embodied, material, and achronological, and extended across several events, modalities, and platforms. Here, we explore a new line of thought and inquiry about the continuous presence of movements, tensions, and meaning-making through written and drawn marks —lines that are not straight but quivering, remaining as visible moments of dialogue. For this paper, we each chose an event that felt significant from our previous study to continue to draw from, with, over and along those quivering lines. At the same time, we explore how they bend and move as part of our shared analytic processes. We are curious about the productive and nonsensical movements of quivering lines and messy marks as part of academic research and life; such marks are always collaborative, material and relationally performed. Thus, we ask: What playful, unruly, insipid and consequential meanings and relations can these marks perform?

This paper explores the ontological possibilities of in-service teachers’ engagement in deep listening (Gershon, 2020; Oliveros, 2005) with children. Deep listening is “a fully embodied attention to another’s expression so deep that you can hear the alignment between her intentions, attentions, and expressions” (Gershon, 2020, p. 1170). Deep listening is a means through which teachers can make space for a deeper, embodied understanding of children’s emerging knowledge and identities, “in an apprenticing rather than a hierarchical expert relationship” (Watkins & Lorenz, 2002, as cited in Laryea, 2018, p. 3). Using concepts centered in diffractive methodologies (Barad, 2007) I explore the nonhuman agency of deep listening within the embodied practice of in-service teachers in a graduate-level teacher learning program. Teachers in this language and literacy program engage in recursive inquiry cycles based in asset pedagogies (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017) using video analysis of their interactions with children that are based in rural and urban settings in Alaska.

Alaska Native scholars forward the importance of deep listening in pedagogical spaces (John Shields, 2018; Kawagley, 1995; Merculieff & Roderick, 2006). According to Kawagley, “To the Yupiat, listening not only with the ears, but with the mind and heart are essential to becoming aware of patterns and events that reflect natural laws” (1995, p. 2). Merculieff and Roderick admonish western educators to “stop talking” in their work in Alaska Native classrooms.

Working diffractively from data fragments that “glow” (MacClure, 2013, p. 661), I seek to understand what is created when teachers engage in deep listening in their learning-practice (Strom & Viesca, 2020) with children. What agentic role can deep listening (silence, awareness) play in the educative entanglements in which teachers are becoming alongside children within their learning-practice (Strom & Viesca, 2020)? What becomes in those spaces of deep listening?

This session will use an autoethnographic narrative to showcase how white women willfully colonize academic spaces such as classes, institutional resources, research and service opportunities in higher education. The idea of white women as Ms. Ann in the notorious Jim Crow era in the United States has not ended, but just shifted to identical roles in similar spaces. From the “White Woman’s Burden” to purposeful roles as a class traitor with a white fragility complex, this session will explore an embellished version of events witnessed in academia, where the never ending tide of neocolonization of higher education by white women unrelentingly dominates the role, identity, and place of women of color . Over the period of ten years, autoethnographic data such as conversations, events, emails, class periods, publications, and presentations have been collected and systematically evaluated to determine the roles of power between the white women and the women of color. Qualitative research methodology was used to analyze the data to create a narrative of thick description capturing the patterns of behavior of the army of Ms. Ann’s found within academic settings. The session will be presented as a combination of prose and storytelling and will include time for questions and feedback from the audience, as well as provide a community environment for solidarity and suggestions for coping, action and nonaction.

Social constructionist epistemological approaches call for a critical appraisal of academic knowledge and for a critical investigation of academic practices. However, often, beliefs circulating in academic discourse as academic knowledge remain unchallenged and are being considered as given truths. Social epistemology has argued that it is via community practices, like publication processes, that such beliefs acquire the status of true beliefs and calls for an investigation of such processes. In this presentation we use the case of a widespread belief about critical literacy origins as an example to illustrate how a social epistemological discourse analysis (SEDA), a kind of qualitative inquiry, can facilitate the challenging of academic knowledge and the disruption of certainties in academic discourse. SEDA is an approach we are currently developing, which brings together social epistemology and discourse analysis. For example, we suggest that the discourse analytic notion of intertextuality, that is the exploration of how texts relate to each other, can facilitate the examination of how academic knowledge gets constructed within the system of academic publications. Critical literacy (CL) is a very popular approach in fields like critical pedagogy, emphasizing the interconnectedness of power, ideologies and literacy practices. A wide-spread idea is that CL originates in Paulo Freire’s work. In this presentation, we challenge such an idea by reporting our intertextual analysis of published, conceptualizing texts about critical literacy, that is analysis of their interrelations. Our analysis suggests a fluid conceptualization and beginning of CL not necessarily associated with Freire. We conclude by advocating for subjecting widely entrenched academic beliefs and academic discourse to scrutiny as a prerequisite for a critically informed praxis.

In recent years, higher education institutions in the UK have widely espoused the language of disability inclusion. However, the fundamental logic of the university remains founded on elitist and exclusionary principles. In this paper, we mobilise the figure of the parasite (Serres, 2007) to explore the complex micro-politics of being a worker with investments in anti-ableism, situated within, against and beyond (Bell & Pahl, 2018; Lather, 1991) the contemporary neoliberal-ableist university (Goodley, 2018; 2024). In Serres’s account, the parasite takes up a somewhat ambivalent relationship with its host; sometimes benefitting from its power, sometimes syphoning resources out, and sometimes more directly disrupting and opposing hegemonic power from within. We will theorise different possible parasitical relations to the university, before drawing on our experiences of the two year, university-wide Wellcome Anti-Ableist Research Culture (WAARC) project, to illustrate how these may unfold in practice. Whilst both academic leadership and professional services work is often – albeit in different ways – assumed to involve complicity in neoliberal practices of academic governance and control, we surface examples of resistance which often involve bending, avoiding or disrupting ableist organisational logics. In this paper, semi-fictionalised creative writing allows us to explore the relational politics of anti-ableist working practices, without revealing sensitive details. Through critical reflection and analysis, we will highlight the tensions and creativity involved in attempted academic anti-ableism, whether they change these logics on a grand and enduring scale, or whether they are small and fleeting.

This autoethnographic study examines the complex negotiation of professional and personal identity through the lens of a U.S.-based academic navigating a transnational research collaboration, against the back drop of rising political uncertainty. Centered on the lived experience of a mother and scholar participating in an academic collaboration in Ireland, the work explores the emotional, ethical, and embodied labor of working and parenting during a time of rising political instability in the United States.

Drawing from personal vignettes and narrative reflections composed over a six-month period (January–July 2025), the research engages with themes of transnational belonging, fear, identity, and the moral tensions of professional mobility in turbulent times. The methodological approach used draws on autoethnographic traditions that center memory, relationality, and embodied experience as core sites of knowledge production. Vignettes were crafted from field notes, journal entries, memory and personal recordings, and analyzed thematically through iterative cycles of reflection, synthesis, and relational meaning-making. The analytic process foregrounds affective resonance, social context, and narrative clarity, inviting readers into an exploration of identity that is both deeply personal and socially situated.

Emerging from this work are interrelated themes of relationality, moral anxiety and identity rupture and reconstruction. Findings point to the embodied tensions between care labor and academic labor and presence and absence, in a globalized higher education environment. Experiences of parenting while abroad are placed in direct conversation with political realities at home, including safety concerns and growing authoritarianism. These tensions reveal both the emotional demands and ethical strain of cross-border work in politically volatile times.

By weaving personal narrative with scholarly inquiry, this autoethnography offers insight into how international collaboration, professional identity, and parenting intersect in complex, sometimes contradictory ways. It calls for a more human-centered and ethically attuned understanding of working, parenting, and living through political upheaval.

This autoethnographic article explores my journey as an adult educator navigating the often-stressful landscape of traditional positivistic scholarship within academia. Through a series of arts-based research (ABR) engagements, including poetic inquiry, I examine how these creative practices provided a cathartic space for personal and professional growth, challenging the dominant epistemic norms that often constrain academic identity. I delve into the emotional labor involved in reconciling my pedagogical philosophy with institutional pressures, revealing how ABR fostered a deeper understanding of my role as a researcher and teacher. Findings illuminate the transformative power of ABR in cultivating resilience, fostering critical reflexivity, and offering a more holistic approach to scholarly inquiry that prioritizes well-being and authentic expression. This work argues for the integration of ABR as a vital methodology for adult educators seeking to reclaim agency and cultivate sustainable scholarly practices beyond the confines of conventional academic expectations.

This Dream Team session proposes to rethink and reimagine the life of data through qualitative and postqualitative lenses by considering data’s capacity to act, transgress, trouble, and produce. In Western research, data is often objectified as a passive, inert, and disorganized resource to which order and value are added thanks to humans’ analytic acumen (MacLure, 2013; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018). As researchers, we are taught to manage data as technicians (St. Pierre, 2024), to filter, code, and categorize it in order to make it worthy by academic standards. Data is therefore largely treated as a commodity which is insufficient in itself—some ‘thing’ that’s always in need of (higher) human intervention and transformation. In this Dream Team session, we therefore ask: what might happen if we consider data not as passive but as active, as able to shape and transform us as much (if not more) as we attempt to shape it?

Building from scholarship rooted in decolonial thought, posthumanist theory, and Indigenous epistemologies, this session invites participants to explore how data exceeds positivist categories, partakes in affective flows, and productively troubles the unfolding of research encounters. Rather than stabilizing data as fixed representation, we wonder how we can engage with data as alive, relational, and unruly. Isn’t data is, after all, a label we feel we must put - for fear of not being deemed rigorous enough - on the encounters that make our research projects?

We therefore offer to explore, during this session, collaborative and creative ways of being and becoming with data (rather than seeking to master, order or contain it), prompted by the following theoretical elements:

Drawing on Barad’s notion of intra-action (2007), we acknowledge that we are, in fact, constantly intra-acting as we merge past and present selves through working with the data. Going further, relying on our own lived experience, as posthuman autoethnographers, has the power to overturn the exploitative paradigm and means we have to forge relationships with our own voices as data;

Working with MacLure’s concept of glowing data (2013, 2023), we attune to how data-as-lived-experience can provoke, unsettle, and transform the very conditions and methods of research;

Some core principles of pluriversal praxis (Escobar, 2018; Ortega, 2025) require that we think with data in ways that refuse the fiction of one universal world or epistemology. We accept that they lead us to see and accept that data lives within relations—stories, lands, and memories that exceed capture or translation;

Some Indigenous perspectives view and honor data as gift, as Kovach (2021) suggests, rather than seeing it as a disposable kind of commodity. This view has the capacity to alter our practices, ethical commitments, onto-epistemological orientations, and methodological choices.

The aim of this Dream Team is not to develop yet another set of procedures for dealing with data but rather, to listen and reach for frictions and reciprocities as we recognize data as a co-participant in world-making, and collectively engage with ways of becoming with data differently in our research projects. We are particularly interested in what emerges when researchers acknowledge being “taken elsewhere” by data—into uncharted affective, material, and relational terrains.

Participants will therefore be invited into a collaborative exercise to map how they currently perceive their relationship with data and where some of the theoretical elements shared above might take them. Using storytelling and visual mapping tools, we will sketch where resistance, friction, boundaries, contradictions, and flows are encountered, thereby attending to the multiple ways in which vibrant data moves us, resists categorization and ownership, and troubling the assumption that one universal truth resides in data waiting to be unlocked.

This paper introduces Wheeling Ethnography, an innovation in qualitative data collection designed to study embodied experience, affective regulation, and the illusion of agency within engineered environments of late modern capitalism. Combining two well-established methodologies - sensory ethnography and situational analysis - Wheeling Ethnography anchors sensorial observation around an anthropological node: a focal participant whose immersive engagement with human and non-human actors becomes the center of analytical rotation. From this node, three systematic rotations unfold. Nodal rotation attends to the participant’s sensory immersion and bodily attunement; social rotation traces interactions among patrons, staff, and material infrastructures; and sensorial rotation captures the ambient sounds, lights, and rhythms that scaffold emotion, perception, and behavior. Together, these rotations form a “wheel” that moves fluidly between layers as situations evolve.

Borrowed from the emic metaphor of the “Wheel of Fortune,” this framework transforms a cultural symbol into an etic methodological tool. Developed through fieldwork in two off-Strip Las Vegas casinos catering primarily to local residents, the method privileges naturalistic, real-time observation without interviews. This approach yielded rich data on micro-interactions, embodied gestures, and atmospheric cues as they unfolded, revealing how spatial design and sensory conditioning choreograph affect and agency while exposing the patterns, disruptions, and absences of everyday life.

Wheeling Ethnography offers a portable and transparent framework for qualitative researchers seeking to capture the infrastructural logic of a field, from casinos and gyms to airports and cafés, providing a new grammar for data collection on the construction of sensorial experience and emotional regulation in late modern capitalist environments.

This presentation recounts my effects to cultivate a research practice capable of capturing the more ‘invisible’ dimensions of practices encountered during fieldwork. The atmospheres seemingly vibrating with tension. The moments we experience as reverberating throughout our bodies. The pre-linguistic forms of communication which always, at times unknowingly, inform and shape our research journeys.

Inspired by Critical Disability Studies and Critical Phenomenology, this presentation draws on a two year-long fieldwork conducted as part of my ethnographic doctoral research studies (carried out between March 2023 to March 2025). The aim of this study has been to better our understanding of disabled families’ lived and embodied experiences of negotiating the meaning of disability – of their families – with professionals throughout the Danish social welfare system. Following these families to and from such encounters has been a humbling experience. I quickly came to the realisation that it required more than written descriptions to fully depict their lived realities. I needed a way to capture the palpable yet unspoken tensions that so characterised these intimate and private spaces; a way to capture the non-verbal communications of articulate, pathic bodies. To fully understand the families’ attempts to negotiate successfully with the system, the importance of considering the pre-linguistic language of the pathic body cannot be understated.

Reflecting on the concepts of ‘bodily empathy’, ‘embodied self-awareness’ and ‘embodied intersubjectivity’, I realised that the solution to capturing these important ‘invisible’ dimensions of practice was to be found in a more creative approach to methodology. Thus, phenomenological writing, poetry, sketching and knitting became my trusted research tools. This talk will delve into each of these methods, detailing the essential ways they shaped and informed my research journey from beginning to end.

In this paper, eight practicing psychologists, a dog (Oscar), white cockatoos, crimson rosellas, blue gums, plum blossoms, the words of theorists of eco-psychology and post-humanism joined together for two days with the mountains of the Darug and Gundungurra peoples of Australia, to explore questions about psychology and its capacity to respond to the climate crisis. We designed a series of psychoterratic exercises for this purpose: (1) a bio-graphical definitional ceremony, (2) a series of short lectures and readings set to the poetics of open dialogue, (3) a sympoietic vegetal-thinking exercise, (4) a bush-psychogeography and (5) a final reflection on praxis. We present our findings, written in bricolage, a compost of experiences and ideas both horizontal and vertical, written, drawn and photographic.

This institutional ethnographic study was conducted in two Social Services Departments in Israel through participant observations and individual interviews with social workers, management staff, and support personnel over several months. Observations included participation in professional meetings, supervision sessions, and daily departmental activities.

Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theory of recognition as a dimension of social justice, this study explores how social workers explicitly articulated their need for professional acknowledgment and how the ethnographic research process responded to these demands. Throughout fieldwork, practitioners consistently expressed frustration with the invisibility of their complex work and the challenging conditions under which they operate within bureaucratic systems.

The ethnographic methodology's emphasis on prolonged engagement created temporal space for recognition to develop, moving beyond superficial encounters to deep witnessing of practitioners' daily realities. The practice of "being there" communicated to social workers that their work was worthy of sustained scholarly attention, countering narratives of professional marginalization they frequently encountered.

Participant observation became a form of professional validation as researchers engaged seriously with the complexity of social work practice, learning the nuanced skills required to navigate bureaucratic systems while maintaining client-centered approaches. Through detailed fieldnotes and attentive listening during interviews, the research made visible invisible aspects of social work—the emotional labor, strategic thinking, ethical dilemmas, and advocacy efforts that typically remain unacknowledged.

This methodological recognition operated through reciprocal processes: as researchers demonstrated genuine curiosity and respect for practitioners' expertise, social workers gained confidence in articulating their professional knowledge and challenges. The ethnographic encounter functioned as a space where professional identity could be affirmed through scholarly engagement, creating what Fraser might recognize as cultural recognition that acknowledges the value and legitimacy of social work practice.

The findings reveal that ethnographic research functions beyond data collection—it becomes an active practice of recognition directly addressing practitioners' needs for professional validation.

A new primary school curriculum was launched in Ireland in September 2025. This new, four-stage, curriculum contains five curriculum areas. Curriculum specifications for each of these areas were published in September 2025. One of these curriculum areas is Arts Education. The curriculum specification for arts education advocates an integrated approach in stages one and two, and a more differentiated approach to arts subjects (drama, music and art) in stages three and four.

The presenters are teacher educators in (primary school) drama and members of the National Arts Education Curriculum Development Group. Their participation in the latter prompted them to explore the roots of drama as a subject in Ireland’s primary curriculum with reference to their own roots in drama/theatre and education. In this exploration, they use themselves as sites of inquiry, juxtaposing and making each of their voices explicit as they trace the routes that brought them, along very different trajectories, to becoming teacher educators in (primary) drama and, more recently, to curriculum development.

In their paper, the presenters draw on six hour-long conversations over the course of nine months to untangle their experiences within the dominant discourse of drama education in Ireland in which the previous drama curriculum (1999) was nested. They show how this untangling enables them to also untangle their emerging understandings of themselves as teachers/artists/researchers as they begin to work differently, as per the new curriculum specifications, with student teachers.

In their exploration, the presenters invoke the evocative power of duoethnography, and embrace the opportunity it provides to engage in meaningful self-study in the presence of each other.

Democracy has developed a bad reputation in the past decade and is often experienced as challenging, strenuous, frustrating, broken. We witness an increasing inclination towards “benevolent authorities” in the so called Western cultures, in the deluded belief a single person would make better decisions than an informed and democratically skilled collective. Faster for sure – better? Undoubtfully not. There have been a lot of insightful analyses to describe the reasons for these phenomena from psychological, politological, sociological and transdisciplinary viewpoints. But the question is: how can participation succeed? Can we contribute in democratic learning as researchers, teachers, counsellors,…?

In this Game Changer-Workshop we’ll explore how democratic experience can be actively promoted, felt, and studied through creative qualitative inquiry. Across three 90-minute sessions, participants will engage through theoretical input, experimental exercises and collective reflection, working together to generate insights into how inquiry itself can function as a democratic act. Implementing contemporary theories, we will look at emotions as relational forces that shape participation, dialogue, recognition and hence possibilities of encounter. Participants will examine how emotional dynamics influence the ways communities engage with one another, and how shared reflection can deepen collective understanding and intraconnection. By combining embodied practice with reflective discussion, the session creates a space in which inquiry becomes an act of co-creation, valuing multiplicity, vulnerability, and shared meaning-making. Depending on the size of the group we’ll engage in different kinds of playful experiments and collective decision-making, following the principle of “listening before judging” and find out, if and how this approach can help to develop and deepen democratic processes.

The topic addresses broader societal and scholarly challenges: how to foster inclusive, dialogical spaces for belonging and knowledge creation, and integrating affective, participatory and experimental approaches into qualitative research. By foregrounding relationality and shared reflection, the session invites researchers from diverse disciplines—including social sciences, arts-based research, participatory methodologies, and civic engagement—to co-develop approaches that respond to pressing societal questions.

By the end of the three sessions, participants will have experienced democratic research practices firsthand and contributed to a shared output that embodies inclusive, participatory, and affectively informed inquiry. This approach exemplifies how creative qualitative research can address urgent societal questions, supporting the development of research practices that are both responsive and generative.

Recent developments in qualitative research invite us to move beyond anthropocentric inquiry toward practices of listening and responding to the more-than-human world. Building on phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), dialogical philosophy (Buber), systems thinking (Capra), appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider), humble inquiry (Schein), the recognition of sensing, feeling, thinking and intuition as equally valid and complementary ways of knowing (Goethe, Harding, Jung) and deep ecology methodologies (Macy, Seed), this workshop offers an experiential approach to qualitative research with non-human agencies.

Participants will explore a sequenced process that combines immersion, embodiment and dialogue. The participants will attune to a natural element (plant, stone, insect, breeze…) and practice “imaginative inhabitation” with that element for a time. They will then engage in appreciative ecosystemic dialogues, listening to what emerges when humans give voice to the more-than-human perspectives.

The workshop culminates in co-created artworks or performances weaving together these voices, followed by a joint reflection on the ethical, epistemological and methodological implications for qualitative research.

Rather than merely discussing on the more-than-human perspective, this session enacts a form of “radical listening” and “dialogical phenomenology,” expanding the methodological repertoire of qualitative inquiry. Participants will leave with concrete practices for incorporating arts-based, phenomenological and ecological sensibilities into their research design, fieldwork and analysis.

Limited to 16 participants; outdoors (if possible with local circumstances).

References:

Buber, M. (1984). I and thou. Clark.

Capra, F. (2014). The Systems view of Life. Cambridge University Press

Grieten, S., Lambrechts, F., Bouwen, R., Huybrechts, J., Fry, R., & Cooperrider, D. (2017). Inquiring into Appreciative Inquiry: a conversation with David Cooperrider and Ronald Fry. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27(1), 101-114.

Harding, S. (2009). Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Green Books.

Jung, C. G. (1973). On the nature of the psyche. Princeton university press.

Macy, J. & Young Brown, M. (1998). Coming back to life: practices to reconnect our lives, our world. New Society Publishers

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). The Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge

Schein, E. (2013). Humble Inquiry: the Gentle Art of Asking instead of Telling. Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Seed, J., Macy, J., Fleming, P. & Naess, A. (2007). Thinking like a mountain. Towards a council of all beings. New Society Publishers

Wahl, D. C. (2005). “Zarte Empirie”: Goethean Science as a Way of Knowing. Janus Head, 8(1), 58–76.

Can connection and collaboration really co-exist together? Institutions such as academia and the Canadian voluntary sector are increasingly encouraging collaboration. Research has shown that the increase in collaboration is rooted in the larger socio-political-economic project of neoliberalism that promotes “doing more with less,” that is, cost-effective mechanisms for larger productivity and outputs. Similarly, collaboration has become a band-aid on both sides of a macro-dynamic in which institutions leverage collaboration as a cost-effective means to increase productivity while academics and/or medium-scale nonprofit organizations use collaboration to resist institutional pressures and optimize their successes. However, from a humanist perspective, can connection and collaboration really co-exist together in the neoliberal, capitalist, heteronormative context that we live in?

This game changer interrogates the paradox between connection and collaboration in qualitative research. Within academic and community-based inquiry, relationships are often celebrated as ethical and participatory; yet, connection is frequently tethered to the timeline of a collaboration, dissolving once a project ends. What does it mean to build genuine relationships that are not contingent on productivity, deliverables, or shared outputs? This gamechanger explores how relational ethics might be reimagined beyond the logics of collaboration toward a practice of connection that honors temporality, care, and autonomy.

Reimagining relational ethics invites us to explore the constitution of relational ethics. While relational ethics is often conceived as a shared moral framework grounded in reciprocity and mutual understanding, relationality is inherently contingent upon individual values, histories, and affective orientations. As such, relationality cannot be fully mutual, it is singular, partial, and lived differently by each participant. This tension exposes a fundamental paradox: ethics assumes collectivity, while relationality resists it.

Hence, can we ever achieve truly ethical relationality that is mutually understood? In theory, yes—codes of ethics, institutional/community guidelines, and laws create frameworks that assume shared moral ground. Yet, in practice, relational ethics are shaped by individual factors such as one’s relationship to shame. The more deeply shame is buried, the more it constrains one’s capacity to be relational. As a result, relationality remains asymmetrical, often reinforcing a systemic cycle in which collaboration becomes a proxy for connection, a structural bandage covering affective disconnection.

The outcome of this project takes the form of a Museum of Failed or Finished Collaborations: a research-creation installation that curates fragments of relational collapse in qualitative inquiry. This living archive gathers traces of projects, correspondences, and emotional residues that mark the afterlife of collaboration: emails never sent, ideas left unfinished, moments of silence that followed care. Each artifact stands as evidence of the paradoxes that shape our scholarly relationships: connection tethered to collaboration, ethics presuming mutuality, and the buried shame that determines our capacity to relate. By materializing what academia routinely conceals: the endings, asymmetries, and quiet failures that structure relational work, the museum invites participants and viewers to reflect on how knowledge is co-constituted through rupture as much as through reciprocity. In doing so, it reframes failure not as absence but as a methodological site of feeling, accountability, and ethical re-imagination.

Session 1: The Paradoxes of Relational Ethics

The session begins with a conceptual presentation of three paradoxes that frame the project: (1) the paradox of connection and collaboration, where relationality is sustained only through productivity; (2) the paradox of ethics and relationality, in which ethics assumes mutuality while relational experience remains asymmetrical; and (3) the paradox of shame and ethical capacity, where unacknowledged shame shapes how and whether we can be relational at all. This opening situates participants within the emotional, ethical, and methodological tensions that give rise to the museum.

Session 2: Building the Museum

Participants are invited to co-create the Museum of Failed or Finished Collaborations. Through guided prompts, they contribute fragments of unfinished projects, collapsed relationships, or unspoken endings: emails, reflections, screenshots, sketches, or anonymous notes. These contributions become “artifacts,” displayed digitally or physically, forming an emergent archive of relational rupture. This process transforms personal experience into shared inquiry, allowing participants to witness the systemic conditions that make failure a structural inevitability rather than an individual fault.

Session 3: Completing the Installation

The final session returns to reflection. Together, participants re-enter the museum to interpret what has been assembled, tracing patterns of connection, disconnection, and repair. Discussion focuses on how these paradoxes might reorient qualitative research toward a more honest ethics: one that values endings, asymmetries, and emotional residue as knowledge. The installation remains a living archive, a collective gesture toward accountability and creative closure.

This Game Changer will explore barriers to collaboration and opportunities to facilitate paradigmatic shifts towards more equitable co-existence and co-flourishing. It will consider how we can ensure that justice and, in particular, multispecies, social and environmental justice have a seat at the table and are taken seriously. This may involve a shift from pusillanimity to magnanimity and the necessary integration of spiritual health and growth into learning and teaching.

This Game Changer explores how bringing slow-pedagogies into Higher Education can help us rediscover our place in the universe. It recognises that a reflexive turn is needed if we are to transcend dualistic thinking and explore co-presencing and genuine meeting with the more-than-human. If the practice of ecological pilgrimage as a methodology for re-imagining our fraught relations with the world is to realise its transformative potential, however, it needs to engage with and contribute to the biomedical sciences, especially where they seek to explore inter and transdisciplinary approaches to complex planetary health challenges. One Health and the related fields of Ecohealth and Planetary Health offer opportunities for such transformative work. There are many obstacles, however to such collaborations. A particular obstacle to such transformations lies in the analytical traditions and habits of those working in STEM disciplines and their historical siloing away from the SHAPE disciplines, where process-philosophy and methodological pluralism and diversity may have already contributed to a Great Turning (Macy and Brown, 2014) into re-imagining and re-creating the world. It will challenge One Health to build on its recognition of equity as a guiding principle (OHHLEP, 2022), to address its anthropocentrism and historical animal, plant and fungi blindness.

In this Game Changer, we draw on walking practices to consider how qualitative researchers can engage with quantitative researchers whose disciplines may still be invested in and wedded to objectivism, rationalism and materialism, anthropocentrism and androcentrism. This can challenge us to make sense of our grapplings and struggles when facing into the realisation that the Cartesian model is still running our institutions and that God is an engineer or mathematician. Descartes maintained that truth is found only in clear and distinct ideas. For Thomas Aquinas, however, truth is a passion of the heart for “the objects of the heart are truth and justice” (Sheldrake and Fox, 1996, p.73). A concern for justice is therefore a game-changer, providing it is recognised as central and foundational to the inquiries we engage in and lives we lead. But what if our collaborators have not bought into this brave new world and are content working on technofixes to preserve the old order? What if our collaborators do not recognise the rights of more-than-human animals, rivers and the life-sustaining systems we depend on? These represent very real tensions and challenges within the academy.

Walking affords unique opportunities to slow down and come into relational ecological presence. The significance of this shift in mode of being has been recognised by philosophers, writers and researchers from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Gros to Solnit, Kahn and Ingold. It is perhaps best summed up by Thich Nhat Hanh’s invitation to find peace in every step. Stepping off the busyness of life to gain perspective is therefore a serious activity and one that has been recommended as a search for presence, grace and right-relation. It represents a shift from ego to eco and as such can be viewed as ecological pilgrimage: a journey on foot through which we learn to live our questions. This shift embraces the wholeness of experience and the many epistemic practices through which we become more ecological. The pedagogical potential of pilgrimage allows us to explore fourth person knowing (both at the level of the individual and the collective) and to encounter and resolve conflictual tensions in our relationships with ourselves, others and the more-than-human.

This Game Changer will be of interest to pedagogues, psychotherapists and other professionals working in reflexive interdisciplinary ways to promote health and flourishing and interested in exploring how education can guide and heal the soul. It is hoped that this will allow us to take our path making more seriously to better realise transformative learning and fourth-person knowing.

References:

Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2014). Coming back to life : the updated guide to The work that reconnects. New Society Publishers.

Sheldrake, R., & Fox, M. (1997). Natural grace: Dialogues on science and spirituality. Bloomsbury.

One Health High-Level Expert Panel (OHHLEP). (2022). One Health: A new definition for a sustainable and healthy future. PLoS pathogens, 18(6), e1010537. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.ppat.1010537