Travelling home

Okay well that's it again for another year and we are all headed home. I'm not sure what happened to all the other potential bloggers, but thanks to Donna West our QI newbie for the photos, video and blog of yesterday's proceedings. It was a really great conference with lots of highlights from panels that included Bristol participants.

I agree with Donna that the Bristol panel with Patti Lather was stellar , visually exciting thanks to McLean's artwork and fun (so thanks to Sue Porter for getting this off the ground). Our Pierre Riviere panel was the other collective Bristol group effort which went very well, despite being the very last slot at the end of a very long congress. The panels with Patti Lather, Pierre Riviere and the friday night performance of "leaning", based on/around  Ron Pelias's new book: 'leaning: a poetics of personal relations' were all videoed by Glenn, so hopefully at some point we will make those sessions available. In the meantime here are a few of the illustrations from Sue and Ann's excellent "dollmaking' paper from the Pierre Riviere project. I think we should bring the these papers back to Bristol and present them as part of the university identities theme too. No point in being stellar in Chicago is nobody at home knows what you are up to:

Myriad books were launched at the conference, recommendations from me would be:

Tami Spry's (2011) Body, Paper, Stage Writing and Performing Autoethnography (Left Coast Press)

Soyini Madison's (2010, but new to me) Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance (Cambridge University Press)

Norman Denzin's (2011) Custer on Canvas Representing Indians, Memory, and Violence in the New West (Left Coast Press) -mentioned below by Donna West.

The other recent text that I've found really excellent this year, which also jointly won the QI book award this year, was 

Marilyn Metta's (2010) Writing Against, Alongside and Beyond Memory:
Lifewriting as Reflexive Poststructuralist Feminist Research Practice ) Peter Lang. 

I particularly like the first two chapters of this book in which she sets out her methodological stall as the basis for presenting three very differently authored and interwoven life narratives.

Highlights of the conference 

Well I agree with much that Donna says below, although I thought another  highlight in terms of critical visual inquiries was her own short extract from her work on deaf-hearing families, which i hope we can present at Bristol too. There was also a stunning and very performance-based panel on fathers and sons - including extraordinary contributions from Norman Denzin and Bryant Alexander. The work that seemed to wow everybody that I missed (again) this year was from David Carless and Kitrina Douglas - but at least they are from the UK, so with a bit of luck and a good wind, we might be able to persuade them to do an action replay in Bristol. They have not been to visit us for a while, so we'll see if we can persuade them. 

David Carless and Kitrina Douglas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It really was an excellent conference this year and one that I particularly enjoyed, both in terms of being stimulated by other people's work and getting a lot out of my own contributions. QI really is a very good, critical and generous international space in  which to showcase the work of CeNTraL.  Well, that's probably it for another year, although on the way home, buzzing with all the ideas, thoughts performances and discussions of the 7th Congress, I confess I was already half forming and abstract for a panel next year!!!!!