The Twelfth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

The Twelfth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry will take place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from May 18-21, 2016.

The theme of the 2016 Congress is “Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times”. Critical qualitative research is under assault. Qualitative scholars struggle to obtain tenure, their research is often underfunded, the journals they publish in are given low impact scores. Scholars around the world, inside and outside the academy, struggle against the regulatory practices of neoliberalism.

The 12th International Congress offers scholars the opportunity to foreground, interrogate and resist these practices, to engage in a politics of advocacy, pro and con, to form coalitions, to engage in debate on how qualitative researchers can resist the pressures of neoliberalism. The Congress will be an arena for advancing 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: tenure battles, redefinitions of the public university, preoccupations with neoliberal accountability metrics (journal impact factors, teaching evaluations, research funding scores), attacks on freedom of speech, threats to shared governance, the politics of advocacy, value-free inquiry, partisanship, the politics of evidence, alternatives to evidence-based models, 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 what 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 Twelfth 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.

On May 18 there will be pre-conference special interest group events and on May 19, morning and afternoon professional workshops. The Congress will consist of keynote, ple- nary, spotlight, featured, regular, and poster sessions. There will be an opening reception and barbeque as well as a closing old fashioned Midwest cookout. We invite your submis- sion of paper, poster and session proposals.

Submissions will be accepted online beginning on August 24 until December 1, 2015.

Conference and workshop registration will begin September 7, 2015.

For information: http://icqi.org