Keynotes, Thursday 5.30pm-7.00pm

The full conference opened yesterday evening in the grand, wooden-floored, high-ceilinged ballroom of the Illini Union. Norman Denzin opened proceedings with the usual fulsome welcome to 1,900 delegates:

Not the clearest of images, but you'll get a sense of the grandness perhaps.

The capoeira still on the screen was not Norman's, but was in place for Sara Delamont  from Cardiff, the first keynote, whose recent research has focused on ethnographies of capoeira in the UK. Here she is in action,so to speak (though you'll not be able to see much):

Her main call was for ethnography that, as she put it, 'looks outwards',  in essence a critique of autoethnographic work. 'It's a wonderful time to be collecting data...Other people are more interesting than we are.'

...a call echoed by Paul Atkinson, Dr Delamont's colleague from Cardiff, whose central point was that the 'crisis of representation' has led to too much emphasis on readerly, linear, personal narratives with little intellectual pretension. 'Sentimental realism', he terms it.

There was no time for questions and the conference moved onto the delicious cook-out, which, to their credit, they were brave enough to attend.

Onto today, and it's the collaborative writing panel this morning, with Susan Williams, Ken Gale and me amongst others. More on that later. Wish us luck.

Jonathan