International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry: Call for Proposals

It is that time of year again.  The International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry is getting ready for Year 13--2017.  The Digital Tools Special Interest Group needs your submission.  I have posted the call for applications below.  Or, you can go to our web page for more information, and to see what we have been up to.  The submissions are due at the beginning of December, and the conference is in mid-May.  Join me on the University of Illinois-Champaign campus for another exciting year discussing qualitative research with fellow hard core aficionados! 




https://digitaltoolsforqualitativeresearch.org/

The Digital Tools track at ICQI 2017

The theme of the 2017 Congress is “Qualitative Inquiry in the Public Sphere,” and the Digital Tools for Qualitative Research SIG will once again host a special track during the conference. Please note that the emphasis of this SIG is on the intersection of digital tools and qualitative researchers rather than the findings of qualitative studies that address questions of technology use. See prior programs for examples and consider submitting sessions on distance learning, computers in the schools, etc. to other tracks or to the general Congress.
You may submit poster, paper or panel proposals related to the conference theme and/or to one of the following themes:

• Digital Tools for Qualitative Research:  What are they (old and new; hybrid or repurposed)?  What are the various and intersecting sub-groups of tools that comprise qualitative research technology? How are they being used?  What constitutes good use?  How do we know?
• Methodological Quandaries:  How are qualitative researchers making sense of the methodological issues raised by the use of digital tools? What methodological tasks are served by the use of new tools?  How do digital tools impact the use of different interpretive frameworks?
• Ethics and Social Justice:  What ethical issues do these tools raise?  Whom do they help?  Whom do they hurt?  How is justice or injustice occurring through the use of digital tools in qualitative research?
• The Literature of and Theoretical Perspectives on Digital Tools in Qualitative Research:  How are we theorizing and contextualizing these tools? How do researchers’ affiliation with or critique of these tools shape our communities of practice?
• Other: A topic of your choice that addresses our focus on the intersection of digital tools and qualitative researchers (or digital tools and qualitative methodologies).

Submitting a poster, paper or panel proposal

Please submit your abstracts to the Digital Tools for Qualitative Research SIG through the conference website:http://icqi.org/submission.

• Abstracts must be 150 words or less.
• Each submission should clearly specify its category: poster, paper or panel.
• Choose the Digital Tools for Qualitative Research track during the submission process.
• To assist in the grouping of papers, you might also identify one of the themes described above (Digital Tools for Qualitative Research, Methodological Quandaries, Ethics and Social Justice, The Literature of and Theoretical Perspectives on Digital Tools, and/or the Congress theme – “Qualitative Inquiry in the Public Sphere”).
• Submission Deadline: December 1, 2016.
• Proposals that are not accepted by the SIG will be considered for inclusion in the general Congress.

Publication in "Qualitative Inquiry"

I am extremely happy to announce that I have just had an article published in Qualitative Inquiry. 
 
Judith Davidson

The Journal Project: Research at the Boundaries Between Social Sciences and the Arts

Qualitative Inquiry January 2012 18: 86-99, doi:10.1177/1077800411427850

1 January 2012; Vol. 18, No. 1

URL: http://qix.sagepub.com/content/vol18/issue1/?etoc

This publication makes me particularly happy because "The Journal Project" and the Exhibit that grew out of it seemed like such risky work.  It was risky to study self in this way.  It was risky to fool with arts-based research.  It was risky to consider exhibiting--going really public in the way that I did.  

My thanks to Norman Denzin and the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI)  for believing in my work and supporting me, as a qualitative researcher, to try the risky.  I was able to push my personal boundaries as a qualitative researcher.  I have come through the experience better able to engage with many qualitative research topics from a new and more informed perspective. 

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: 2012 International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry

Image by jisc_infonet via Flickr

Call for Proposals!!!

You are invited to submit a paper abstract for a proposed session at the 2012 International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry. 

The proposed panel is titled:

Gender Practices, Technology, and Teens:  New Perspectives from Qualitative Research

Co-chairs/Organizers are:  Judith Davidson, UMass-Lowell & Lois Scheidt, University of Indiana, Bloomington

Description of the Panel: 

Gender practices, that is, acts of definition, identification, and interaction with others in ways that demonstrate one’s gendered perspective, have been with us as long as we have been human.  Not surprisingly, in today’s digital world, gender is closely intertwined with emerging technologies.  Gendered images and assumptions are built into the presentation and uses of technologies, and technology users make use of digital modes to practice gender.  This is as true, for teens, as it is for other age groups.  Teens, who are in a gendered transition as they are leaving childhood and entering adulthood, can offer particular insights into issues of gender practice.  In this session, we present a collection of papers that employ qualitative research to look at the intersection of the teenage years and emerging technologies, using this focal point as a lens for examining gender practices.  Our goal is to enlarge our understanding of gender practices, technology, and teens through the presentation of research studies that provide intense and detailed insight into the ways teens are both shaped and shaping of individual and cultural gender possibilities through the new technologies in their lives. 

As a sample, here is the abstract for the paper, I plan to give as part of the panel:

What Teens Talk About Sexting Reveals about Gender Practices

In this paper, we will report on a three-state, mixed-method, interdisciplinary, and comparative study of teens and adults views of sexting, which was funded by the US Department of Justice.   Specifically, we will be discussing the findings regarding gendered practices that arose in the qualitative research data collected from 123 youth, who participated in a total of 20 focus groups in Massachusetts, Ohio, and South Carolina.   In talking with teens about their views regarding sexting, we found teens acting out powerful expectations and beliefs about males and females (our data did not include any youth who identified as Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual or Transgendered).  The topic of sexting, which sits at the intersection between acceptable and unacceptable expressions of sexuality, was a powerful means of unearthing territories of ambivalence in teens’ gender practices.  This led us to the development of a model to describe the range of behaviors that fall under the heading of sexting.  Our model builds upon teens descriptions of gendered relationships to describe a continuum from non-aggressive to implied aggression to overt aggression.  In this presentation we will present the model and discuss the qualitative research evidence that undergirds it. 

For questions about the panel, please contact:  Judith_Davidson@uml.edu

Please submit your abstract by no later than November 1, 2011 to Judy Davidson at Judith_Davidson@uml.edu.  Decisions for the panel will be made by November 15, 2011.  The proposal will be submitted to ICQI by December 1, 2011. 

Thank you and look forward to compiling a very interesting group of papers and spurring a challenging discussion. 

The Journal Project at International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry

I am sitting in Illini B--my gallery space for today and tomorrow. It's interesting to be quiet and just look at the things as they have been arranged on the dividers.

A few people have wandered in...not sure they were looking for me, but they stopped to look. A couple of people have stopped to fill out the prayer slips.

I am going to be giving my "gallery talk" at 3:30--that's coming up in 15 minutes. I am not sure I will have an audience, but I am here.

International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry...May at the University of Illinois

Image by Jeffrey Keefer via FlickrI have two program pieces accepted for the Seventh Annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.  It will be held in May at the University of Illinois in Champaign, Illinois. 

Here is a description of what I will be doing:

7^th Annual International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry

University of Illinois—Champaign, Illinois

Thursday May 19-Saturday May 21, 2011

Friday May 20 and Saturday May 21

Illini Room B: 

Art Exhibition:  The Journal Project:  An Interactive Exhibit Bringing Together Arts, Technology, and Qualitative Research

This exhibit explores the split between technology and the arts in qualitative research.  In this study, 18 months of personal journals were analyzed in qualitative data analysis software and through arts-based approaches.  In the exhibit, social science posters mix with fiber arts (felt and multi-media pieces) to create a multi-dimensional approach to data analysis.  The goal is to demonstrate the strengths of both methods of interpretation and the ways we can learn from their interactions.  

Gallery Talk:  Friday 3:30 pm

Judith Davidson, Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts-Lowell

Issues and Practices in Arts-based Research

Chair: Liora Bresler

Participants: Donal O'Donoghue, Liora Bresler, Petula Ho Sik Ying, Judy Davidson

Discussant: Johnny Saldana

Overview:

Arts-based inquiry is based on the notion that the processes and the products of arts can contribute significantly to research. The concept of arts-based research (ABR) as a methodology, generated in the early 90s, grew and expanded rapidly, spawning distinct genres and communities. This panel examines various approaches under the umbrella of ABR, focusing on the concepts of relational practice, embodied inquiry, and ethics of self and others involved in documentary films. Presentations will also discuss the practices of cultivation of “habits of body/mind” for intensified engagement in conducting the research, and qualitative data analysis software involved in ABR.

Technology and Arts-based Research:  The Question of Aesthetics within Qualitative Research

Judith Davidson, University of Massachusetts-Lowell

One University Avenue . Lowell, MA 01854 .

Qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) has been available to qualitative researchers since the early 1980’s, but few qualitative researchers have made use of it in relationship to arts-based research approaches.  Not only have qualitative researchers using arts-based approaches shunned the use of QDAS tools, but the general consent within the field has been that the use of these technologies for the conduct of qualitative research, would necessarily be an unaesthetic experience.  Drawing upon my Journal Project (a study of my personal journals that employs QDAS and arts-based approaches), the work of Mark Johnson (philosophy of aesthetics) and Liora Bresler (aesthetics of qualitative research), I seek to develop an alternative perspective that joins technology and arts-based research in qualitative research through a grounding in the notion of aesthetics.  In this way I hope to develop a discussion that will allow qualitative researchers to participate more thoroughly in the global research conversation of a digital age. 

You can get to the conference and the program at this url:

http://www.icqi.org/ 

Books from the ICQI conference

Image via Wikipedia

It's been a long hiatus from blogging, but that's what the end of the semester will do to you.

A week ago I was at the ICQI conference in Champaign, Illinois (what fun!) and as my annual treat I picked up an armload of new books.  I feel strange carting off this much paper in this age of online communications.  I am not sure how much longer this tradition will continue.  I may find myself 'beaming down' the latest book into my I-Phone or some other device.  But for now I have this nice pile of fresh pages.

Here are my choices:

Erotic Mentoring:  Women's Transformations in the University by Janice Hocker Rushing (Left Coast Press).  This is the one I've started to read.  I like her invitational style (which she attributes to encounters with Ellis and like-minded qualitative researchers).  I was particularly interested in this book because of the possible connections to my own journal study.  There is a strong Jungian perspective here, something I haven't run into for a while. 

Autoethnography as Method by Heewon Chang (Left Coast Press).  I was very curious to see how a qualitative research methodology text would be translated through the eyes of autoethnography.  I also met Heewon at the conference--she was sitting near me in the session on coding organized by Ray Maietta--and it was then that I realized she was one of the winners of the first QSR teaching grant.  Now I am curious to talk with her more about the ways she is using NVivo with autoethnographic content.  You can do it, of course, but for the technophobic, technology is often frowned upon with more humanistic content or approaches.  Heewon--I will be calling! 


Guyana Diaries: Women's lives across difference by Kimberly Nettles (Left Coast Press).  I thought this book would be an interesting opportunity to read a real ethnography--not another methodology book--not that I distain methodology books.  In keeping with my journal project, it seemed like this would be a place to encounter some good feminist theory.  Nettles describes her studies of The Red Thread Development Corporation, a woman-run activist organization. 

Poetry as Method:  Reporting Research Through Verse by Sandra Faulkner (Left Coast Press) couldn't help but catch my eye.  Faulkner not only talks about representing research in poetry but also explores the ways poets processes parallel/intersect with similar processes of researchers.  She also provides guidelines for evaluating research poetry. 

Finally, I've been searching for a book(s) that would be helpful for moving students into doing online research, and that's why I came home with Janet Salmons Online Interviews In Real Time (Sage).  I looked at several other books on related topics, many with a more comprehensive approach but Salmons seemed the most engaging.  It is very hard to buy books about new technologies because once the book appears, you know the technology has moved on.  It looked like it offered advice that could hold with a range of technological changes. 

It's summer, so back to blogging!