May 18th first day in Chicago

Well here we are in Chicago (Barack Obama's home city and very proud of him they seem to be too) on the first leg of our journey to the International Qualitative Inquiry Congress 2009 at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. I am here with Jonathan Wyatt and Ken Gale (EdD graduates who are also coming to collect a prize for their dissertation which received an honourable mention in the QI 2009 dissertation awards ), Viv Martin and Artemi Sakellariadis (PhD graduates) and Ying Ling Hung from the EdD. We are meeting up with Cindy Gowen (EdD graduate) in Urbana on Wednesday.

We are presenting a plenary at the congress ( a rare honour) on Saturday. You can view the abstract of our plenary by putting Speedy into the search mechanism of the 2009 congress programme. We are also giving several other presentations as well as representing CeNTraL at the collaborating sites network.

In the meantime, however, we are exploring Chicago en route. We got here late tonight and tomorrow have plans to visit the Art Institute first of all. This is a great week to arrive here as the new and much heralded modern wing of the museum opened on Saturday, and has free entry all this week!!

I am passionate about modern art so I'm really looking forward to being first in the queue when the museum opens
this morning. Chicago is also quite architecturally stunning, partly because Illinois is so flat and the Chicago sky line, built on the shores of lake Michigan, rises so magnificently and can be seen for miles around. There is also an abundance of astonishing art deco buildings amidst the more modern sky scrapers. This afternoon, we are going on an architecture tour up the river organised by the Chicago Architecture Foundation and this evening we are going to Rosa's blues club.

Sound a bit too much like a holiday? Well this is the relaxing bit in a way- and its a pity to go all the way to the States and not see anything of it apart from the congress. Nonetheless in between all this, Artemi is rehearsing us all for the madrigal that we are singing during one part of our presentation. Jonathan and Ken are having a working lunch to run through their spotlight on using Deleuzian conceptualisations in collaborative writing and I am making us do a run through of the Bristol Plenary before we go to the blues club. Phew!!

On wednesday, if we survive all of that on jet lag, we are picking up two cars downtown and driving the 100 miles south to Urbana.
I'll keep you posted.

Jane Speedy May 18th 2009