Falling in love with Mary, Patti and Betty, again!

 As Viv says there was too much to process as time and the conference speeded up. This is probably the last blog for a while (ridiculously early Sunday morning US time). Saturday was the day of Ken, Malcolm and Cindy all giving well received presentations and of our  collaborative Bristol presentation... more of which later ... but our heroines of the conference were not ourselves (phew!) but, once again, the radical shape-shifting feminist women who dominated Saturday afternoon in different ways (and barely, rarely or not at all , mentioned D & G!!) the African-American poet Mary Weems was extraordinary, as were the other women in her arts-based panel on 'mothering' , using poetry, song, film and live performance.

Half the conference fell in love with Patti Lather (again) for her blend of scholarship, humour and radical determination. Patti and Betty (see below)  took part in two sessions in sequence on the last afternoon, the first on post-qualitative research and the second on political methodology ... and they frankly rocked and stole both shows. I was certainly in that half!! Patti is coming to Bristol this summer to run a workshop (July 16th) , so if you are from Bristol want to work with her there and to qualify for that workshop...get reading her book  'getting lost' which is the criterion for a place in the session.

Meanwhile the other half of the conference (its a qualitative conference, remember, with at least seven overlapping halves) fell in love with Elizabeth St Pierre (Betty)

who sat dressed in elegant black from head to toe, and ripped into the positivist end of qualitative research, who had missed out on so many paradigm shifts they were not even in the conversation and with whom she was just plain BORED. again incredibly scholarly,, scorchingly angry really, but all deleivered with a gloriously dry humour.
Betty and Patti did a double act on post qualitative research  ...  (a suggestion for the future of radical qualitative research that really struck a chord for me was philosophical ethnography., more of which, later).

We'll tell you about our session, [which was more mixed this year (we can't always be fabulous), but gave us some really interesting responses and ideas about whee to take our work] and about the last night cook -out later -right now its nearly half past four in the morning and iIneed to pack up and get to the Amtrak station.