Conference Agenda

This project explores Collaborative Audio Narrative as a radical, affective, and interdisciplinary method for feminist inquiry. Drawing from Narrative Productions Methodology, the project positions narrative not just as a storytelling tool, but as a body—a site of encounter where researcher and participant engage in body-to-body dialogue that transcends language. This method invites listeners to feel, resonate, and be moved.

The project emphasizes the relational and affective dimensions of sound, treating sound as resonance and knowledge, and noise as a productive, transformative force. The results are not traditional transcripts or case studies, but curated audio stories—podcast-like episodes blending voice, ambient sound, and abstract textures. These soundscapes provoke affective engagement, capturing tensions, contradictions, and resistances voiced by intergenerational women in academia as they reflect on their conditions, challenges, and the reproduction of academic systems.

We ask: which bodies matter in academia? From an affective perspective, a body is not limited to flesh and bone—it can be a building, a policy, or a piece of technology. In neoliberal academic systems, non-human bodies are often prioritized, while patriarchal structures devalue human bodies—especially those of women, mothers, racialized scholars, and gender-diverse individuals.

This method honors collaborative knowledge production, where participants are co-creators. The presentation includes audio excerpts and reflections on the ethical, technical, and affective dimensions of producing them. Listening becomes a political act—tuning into feminist resistance, institutional violence, and collective hope.

We argue for more studies that center collective, emotional, and embodied voices—moving beyond the frameworks of organizational and clinical psychology. In challenging times, Collaborative Audio Narrative offers a transformative lens for inquiry.

In a world marked by division, this study addresses the challenge of fostering peace by re-establishing dialogue between "reason" and "unreason," a rupture diagnosed by Michel Foucault. We argue that understanding the pain of others is a micro-practice of peace-building. This research asks: Can we move beyond textual interviews by using participant-provided images of suffering as a bridge for dialogue?

This qualitative study explores how a rigorous interpretation of visual narratives can become a form of peace education. We conducted in-depth interviews with three young adults who have experienced profound emotional suffering, treating their personal photographs as primary data. Adopting Ralf Bohnsack's "documentary method," rooted in Panofsky's iconology, our analysis prioritized the images' formal structures (composition, staging, perspective) over their narrative content. This approach "brackets" preconceived knowledge to reconstruct the shared, tacit "habitus" or "documentary meaning" behind the images.

Findings reveal that the photographs' formal compositions eloquently "document" a shared habitus of conflict and isolation. Images of a grasping hand near glass shards or a fallen tree blocking a path visually articulate a tension between agency and self-harm, and a state of being "cut off" from peers.

This method transforms the ethics of viewing pain. By focusing on how images construct meaning, the researcher is forced into a slower, more respectful engagement. This shifts empathy from a fleeting "I feel sorry for you" to a structural understanding: "I see the predicament you are in." This rigorous visual interpretation, therefore, offers a path for qualitative inquiry to foster relational connection and build peace in challenging times.

In the world as it presents itself today a lot of people like myself give in to doom and despair. Hope is sometimes seen as naive, despair as its opposite then seems to come accross as sophisticated. But in precarious times when we do not know what is going to happen - and in what order - neither stands on solid groud. Contrary to either possibly leading to inaction, I argue for a position beyond hope and despair - a position of humility, that allows for continued "trying" our best.

Whether understood more as a theory, a lens, and/or a methodology (Cho et al. 2013), intersectionality is a generative approach to research interested in critical issues of inequity. Within qualitative inquiry, intersectionality has been deployed in various ways in collaborative community-based research (CBR) projects, often with an emphasis on intersectional praxis (Fine et al. 2021).

As we have found in our three-year Intersectionality in Action Partnership project, putting intersectionality into practice across all stages of qualitative community collaboration is full of challenges. Is this a “good problem” to have? Understanding how relationships and practices in CBR unfold across time is crucial to answering this question.

Drawing on a range of methods (interviews, mini focus groups, short questionnaires, mapping exercises, and activity notes) deployed with the members of two housing research teams in Alberta, Canada, our research explores the joys and pitfalls of learning and doing intersectionality over the life cycle of community-partnered research. We are thus interested in an unfolding process over time. In this paper, we share our preliminary attempts to develop a temporal mapping approach to situational analysis (Clarke et al. 2016)—a method that “supports the analysis of multiple temporalities and processes” within the “wider configurations of elements that shape process” (Knopp 2021). In doing so, we consider the importance of temporality itself as a vector of power within intersectional research relations (cc Freeman 2022).