Conference Agenda

Through the stories of seven doctoral students and two professors who supported their dissertation journeys, this session will explore how biography and individual as well as shared context(s) shape researchers' methodological choices. Particular attention will be paid to data collection and analysis techniques that departed from or pushed the boundaries of canonical qualitative methods, such as hip-hop lyrical elicitation, artifact elicitation, walking interviews, experiential dialogues, arts-based methods (e.g., stippling, drawing) and mosaic line drawing analysis. Authors will highlight how their own ways of knowing, participants' ways of knowing, and/or the geo-political-economic context in which their work took place compelled their choices and led them to a place where they felt authentically present in their research. By examining how these scholars arrived at research methods authentic to themselves and sensitive to their participants, the authors will illuminate common themes that reveal the deeply personal and even social nature of methodological decision-making. Our analysis of these narratives reveals three distinct, yet occasionally overlapping, pathways to methodological innovation. First, some researchers harness their natural creativity, finding freedom from conventional constraints to develop novel approaches. Second, others leverage their commitment to structure, using systematic frameworks as containers that paradoxically enable innovation. Third, scholars who have experienced marginalization often develop methodological breakthroughs that unlock knowledge about previously underexplored experiences and communities. Across all three pathways, a central truth emerges: while pursuing authentic and personally meaningful research can be a demanding journey, it offers profound rewards. Such approaches not only expand the boundaries of human knowledge in meaningful ways but also support scholars' own healing and growth while building community and relationships that transcend traditional academic boundaries. Researchers who embrace authentic methodologies create spaces for vulnerability and new awareness—both for themselves and the world they study.

Qualitative interviews with marginalized participants risk flattening complexity by focusing on a single, dominant identity, which can reproduce epistemic injustice. Addressing this in the context of India's rural-to-urban youth migration, we use a single interview as an exemplar of co-constructed conversation. Our aim is to demonstrate how a researcher, practicing epistemic humility, can attend to the dynamic surfacing and receding of multiple identities throughout the interview. By applying principles from Conversation Analysis (CA) and Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). This micro-analytic approach tracks how conversational turns and shifting contextual frames enable or quiet certain topics.

The analysis organizes around three interlinked concerns grounded in the exemplar. First, securing conditions for voice: participant-defined boundaries around dress, mobility, and setting, together with learned micro-etiquettes, shape what can be said; the conversational flow shows an early chapter of caution and a later chapter of competence, both of which need to remain audible in the record. Second, negotiating knowledge and authority in everyday navigation: the participant evaluates local remedies versus exploitative claims and moves into rights-talk with institutions and markets; pairing event-with-feeling and fact-with-meaning questions, and reenacting brief scenes, helps surface practical decision rules and “power-in-action” as the talk unfolds. Third, replotting identities and futures: counter-stigma caste talk coexists with roles as student, friend, hosteller, worker, engineer-in-training, and daughter/sibling; talk about returning to serve one’s home region reorders priorities across moments, echoing recent calls to treat positionality as dynamic and situational rather than fixed. Finally, we offer strategies for making co-construction explicit and putting epistemic humility to work. By treating the interview as jointly authored and carefully attending to conversational dynamics, researchers can hold multiple identities in play. This produces a plural, thick, and accountable representation of participants' knowledge.

This presentation is a call to imagine, celebrate, work with and revalue stuckness – a feeling/idea often evoked when speaking and reflecting on qualitative research, but one that has not been sufficiently thematized and studied. We engage with stuckness and think with another concept – stickiness – to consider the affects and ideas that may hold us back and sustain the normativity of stuffy academic (writing) practices. Even within the uncertainty we experience, staying stuck can be an embodied resistance to normative expectations of productivity, of being fast and effective. In our presentation, we play with the idea of stuckness as a movement that can help detach from these sticky expectations. We aim to show some of the multiplicities of stuckness and ‘re-member’ (Barad, 2017) our own experiments with academic writing on the move. We use this as a prompt to dwell in moments of stuckness as a constraint but/and, most importantly, a possibility, pleasure, and hopefulness. Stuckness can be a prompt to take action, lure to seek new companions and to change the assemblage. It can be an invitation to inhabit incoherence and indeterminacy as a reorientation and recalibration of normative academic pace and rhythm in the movement of writing bodies. It is a generative space, a place-space to dwell in. Towards these aims, this presentation is an invitation to think about 1) How do we experience stuckness and its trouble(s)? 2) How does stuckness feel, taste, look, sound like? 3) What can stuckness become/what can become out of stuckness? Feeling stuck in academic writing and research can feel daunting; however, this sensation could be equally productive and generative. Stuckness, we propose, unsettles certainties and potentially can compel us to think, write and act otherwise.

How to properly acquire informed consent is among key questions in ethical research practice. Rather than a one-off event, existing methodological literature has helped us to understand giving an informed consent as a process of negotiation, which is imbued with complex and shifting power relations. In our own research we have found, however, that it is often difficult to grasp or articulate these complex, embodied and affective processes in research participation. In this presentation, we approach these negotiations with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2003) concept of periperformatives, to see whether it helps us to put our finger on some of these elusive elements of research encounters. Building on J.L. Austin’s classical work on performative utterances, with periperformatives, Sedgwick draws attention to interactional moves that cluster around and about performatives, commenting on or conditioning them. While giving an informed consent in a traditional sense may be understood as a performative speech act, periperformatives happen around and “in the neighborhood” of performatives: the potential participants’ often subtle expressions of doubts and interests, the researcher’s worries and wishes, and how these circulate and become apparent through various forms of interaction. We argue that periperformatives in research encounters are fuzzy and difficult to grasp, yet they hold affective and performative power and are important in terms of both the unfolding of participation and research ethics. By using the methodology of memory work, we tapped into our own research processes to explore how periperformatives as a conceptual tool may transform our thinking about research consent. In our presentation, we pull our reflections together and discuss how attending to periperformatives may sensitise us to recognising complexity and processuality of participation.