May 15-18, 2019
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

QUALITATIVE INQUIRY AND THE POLITICS OF RESISTANCE

The 2019 congress is committed to a politics of active and passive resistance, to non-violence, to bearing witness to injustice, to refusing to take no as an answer, refusing to be silenced, refusing to accept assaults on critical, interpretive inquiry, refusing to abandon the goal of social justice for all. It is committed to confronting structures of repression which keep people in marginalized states by repressing critical consciousness. The truth cannot be repressed. Justice will prevail. We call for a politics of hope, acts of activism, discourses of resistance which imagine the impossible.

We are global citizens trapped in a world we did not create, nor want any part of. Our public institutions are under assault. Academics and pacifists critical of the public order are branded as traitors. The 2019 Congress offers scholars the opportunity to foreground, interrogate, imagine and engage new ways of a politics of resistance and critical qualitative inquiry in these troubling times. Sessions will take up such topics as: research as resistance, redefinitions of the public university, neoliberal accountabil­ity metrics, attacks on freedom of speech, threats to shared governance, the politics of advocacy, value-free inquiry, partisanship, the politics of evidence, public policy dis­course, indigenous research ethics, decolonizing inquiry.

Scholars come to the Congress to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new technologies of representation. Together we seek to develop guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns. We share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference. As critical scholars our task is to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage realistic utopian pedagogies of hope.

Scholars from around the world have accepted the challenge to gather together in common purpose to collectively imagine creative and critical responses to a global community in crisis. The Fifteenth International Congress offers us an opportunity to experiment, take risks, explore new presentational forms, share experiences, problems and hopes concerning the conduct of critical qualitative inquiry in this time of global uncertainty.

We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time (T. S. Elliot, No 4 of Four Quartets, 1942).