“We will not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and to know the place for the first time” (T. S. Elliot, No 4 of ‘Four Quartets’, 1942).


KEYNOTES:

Performing Research or Researching Performance: The View from the Martial Arts
Sara Delamont Cardiff University, Wales UK

The vogue for presenting qualitative research results as performance pieces has produced monologues, poems, short stories, dialogues, plays and dance events. Drawing on what Gary Alan Fine has called a peopled ethnography of two martial arts, one French (savate), one African-Brazilian (capoeira), strategies for studying embodied performativity are outlined. The virtues of traditional, ‘peopled’ (re)presentation and the possibilities of creative performance of results are explored.

Modernism, Postmodernism and a Potential Failure of Nerve
Paul Atkinson, Cardiff University, Wales, UK

My talk will alert us to a potential paradox in contemporary textual practice. Textual experimentation has been widely advocated and practised. It has been justified in terms of methodological and epistemological perspectives associated with postmodernism. However, in turning a collective back on modernism, there is a danger of overlooking the truly revolutionary practices of modernist literature. Equally, there is a danger that among qualitative social scientists, a textual practice of an essentially realist/romantic form is detectable that reflects neither modern nor postmodern sensibilities.

The Eight International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from May 16-19, 2012. The theme of the 2012 Congress is “Qualitative Inquiry as Global Endeavor”.

The 2012 Congress will offer scholars the opportunity to debate these issues, to foreground qualitative inquiry as a shared, global endeavor, while engaging the politics of advocacy, pro and con, to form coalitions, to engage in debate on how qualitative research can be used to advance the causes of social justice, while addressing racial, ethnic, gender and environmental disparities in education, welfare and healthcare.

Sessions will take up such topics as: the politics of advocacy; value-free inquiry; partisanship, bias; the politics of evidence; alternatives to evidence-based models; multiple and mixed-methods; public policy discourse; indigenous research ethics; decolonizing inquiry. Contributors are invited to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new presentational formats (ethnodrama, performance, poetry, autoethnography, fiction). Such work will offer guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns.

On May 16 there will be pre-conference special interest group events and on May 17, morning and afternoon professional workshops. The Congress will consist of keynote, plenary, featured, regular, and poster sessions. There will be an opening reception and barbeque as well as a closing old fashioned Midwest cook-out.

We invite your submission of paper, poster and session proposals. Submissions will be accepted online only from August 15 until December 1 2011. Conference and workshop registration will begin October 1, 2011. To learn more about the 8th International Congress and how to participate, please visit our website:

www.icqi.org