Conference Agenda

Reflecting an individualistic and neoliberal vision, qualitative research can tend to assume the individual as its’ unit of analysis, reducing everything to the individual as a site of transformation. Our contribution takes a post-anthropocentric approach to qualitative research and aims to reimagine and reconstruct the ways the subject/subjectivity has been conceived in our respective disciplines starting from the influences of poststructuralism. We explore how subjectivities can be conceived and understood beyond the individualistic reductionism of the concept of the individual, and argue for a relational and ethical approach to the concept of subjectivity that accounts for the multiplicities of bodies. Through a range of material-discursive methods we examine and enact the constitution of subjectivity within three philosophical currents – poststructuralism, posthumanism, and feminist new materialism – and outline how these debates have entered, or could enter, social sciences, humanities and psychology. Our presentation highlights how, considering the contributions and insights of posthumanism and feminist new materialism, subjectivity is not simply a social practice conducted by conscious and intentional individuals, but is an enacted bodily, discursive, and material encounter that activates and constitutes multiple iterations of hybrid subjectivities. Rather than considering subjectivity as an exclusively human, social, and intersubjective social construction, we conceive subjectivity as a discursive, material, and transpersonal production in continuous becoming. Thanks to this change in perspective, it becomes possible to rethink women, men, multispecies kin, and others in social, material and organizational action, and in wider contexts and practices. We illuminate starting points for thinking-with and about subjectivity that is ethically sensitive to discursive-material dimensions which resist an excessive focus on the individual and align with micro-political activism in qualitative research.

The way we perceive time, and particularly the future, has tangible implications for our day-to-day lives. As Facer (2019) argues, we live the present in relation to the futures we can imagine. Our relationship with the future is deeply intertwined with meaningful emotions that guide our lives (Zembylas, 2022) and can influence our sense of agency (Osberg, 2010). Amid a policrisis, the future appears grim, precarious, and at risk of extinction (Todd, 2023). In the face of AI, climate change, and the rise of totalitarian political regimes, the future is not equally accessible to everyone (Mager & Katzenbach, 2021; Tutton, 2022).

Against this backdrop, education has increasingly been framed as a tool to prepare individuals to adapt to what is to come (EU Union of Skills Strategy, 2025). However, this approach does not address the more fundamental existential questions of temporality, such as the continuation of our species and intergenerational care. Furthermore, educational spaces historically committed to collective transformation, such as adult education, are now increasingly shaped by neoliberal priorities (Finnegal & Grummell, 2020).

This paper explores how creative androgenies can offer ways of thinking with and embodying the future, cultivating empowerment, care, and agency amid the complex uncertainties of seemingly inescapable futurity. Drawing on the concept of ancestry and the practice of becoming a good ancestor in The Work That Reconnects (Macy et al., 2014), it situates ancestral care within broader questions of power, justice, and relational ethics. In doing so, the paper highlights how adult education can serve as a generative space for connection, collective agency, and transformative existential practices.

This paper presentation will offer an overview of an international research project made up of six transdisciplinary researcher-practitioners (Rolla Lewis, Peter Whitehouse, Nelly Ndirangu, Yuki Minamii, Jeff Fifield, Leah Salter) with a conjoint interest in eco-relating, trees and action research. All authors are Taos associates and Social Constuctionist practitioners amongst other professional identities and research disciplines. Working through and across these potential differences was one of the many layers of learning.

Over the two years of the project, we forged relationships with each other and each actively developed a close relationship with a tree, as part of an eco-relational “research grove”. We met regularly with each other online and with our trees in person in our own contexts; and invited our trees into the research project as co-researchers. The trees helped set the pace of our project and set the context to how we met each other as human participants. The process slowed down and was transformative on many levels. Through this presentation I will tell stories of transformation and how the project supported new understanding of how we move through the world.

As Arne Naess suggests “we are not only creatures, but creators. The world is always in the making” (2002). We are always “intra becoming” through a “worlding” process (Karen Barad, 2007). The research was an emergent beyond-human experience, where we were intra-acting from within relationships and between phenomena; creating and telling stories about what was happening for us, as we went. The project confirmed for us that we live in an entangled, diverse, moving, temporary, pluralistic, participatory, transmaterial world . I will be cross referencing "Transmaterial Worlding"- developed by Gail Simon and Leah Salter as mutually influencing and being influenced by this research (Simon and Salter, 2019).

The 2026 ECQI Call for Proposals invites theorists to harness transformative practices that interrogate the interdependency between the human and the more-than-human. Positioned within the context of education in the United States, this project reimagines the material-discursive entanglement of Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) using Feminist New Materialist thought. In thinking with Karen Barad’s concept of the material-discursive and Anna Tsing’s concept of the feral, this proposal interrogates the becomings and doings of social structures to extend Tsing’s concept of the feral into the humanities.

In this paper, I use Tsing’s definition of the feral and deploy the material-discursive to reveal ruptures in human and more-than-human entanglements. I extend Tsing’s concept of physical human infrastructure to incorporate mechanisms of social control (social norms and policies) to demonstrate how the feral can be extended and foreclosed by human and more-than-human agents. Using DQSH, this project attunes to how drag aesthetics, once relegated to nightlife, has become feral.

In the hyperpolarized political climate of the United States, I use DQSH and drag aesthetics to rethink the doings and undoings of book bans. By attuning to mechanisms of social control through drag histories, this project interrogates modern book bans as an entanglement of current and historical events. This paper provides examples of how drag aesthetics and expression have been foreclosed in history to rethink modern attempts at foreclosure. Using the archive as an apparatus, this onto-epistemological project aims to reveal how social controls intra-act with modern drag aesthetics and highlights the need for the qualitative community to harness transformative methodological practices through dialogue and collaboration in and through disciplines.

Background: This presentation incorporates community dialogues to improve crisis response in Canada. As part of a collaborative project between the University of Calgary and the Distress Centre Calgary, a World Café was held in January 2025 with community members, academics, and service providers who work with individuals experiencing crisis. Crisis was broadly defined as a state in which an individual’s coping strategies are insufficient to manage a stressor.

Methods: A World Café methodology was used to facilitate inclusive conversations at tables. Questions explored gaps and challenges in crisis response, inclusive supports, partnership development, and resource distribution. Data was collected through audio recordings at each table as well as field notes. Data was analyzed thematically.

Results: Key themes that emerged included: (1) culture and access to resources, (2) collaborative and inclusive service development, and (3) community-centred language practices. Culturally responsive communication, co-designing supports, and limitations of technology and flyers to access services were highlighted.

Discussion: The results demonstrate the emotional dimensions of crisis response and trust building. This study also underscores the importance of participatory methods to explore lived experience in order to offer inclusive crisis interventions. This research contributes to knowledge on qualitative inquiry that centres community voices and co-creation of crisis interventions.