May 23rd -final day

Well here we are, final day of the conference and a lot to organise for our own plenary session, as well as going to hear other people's work. Our colleagues from UWS (see below) presented several chapters from their forthcoming book (pub shortly by Peter Lang) which took really richly nuanced stories from pedagogical settings and framed them using Deleuzian conceptualisations.

Jonathan and Ken presented with the rest of their writing group (Tami Spry, Ron Pelias, Larry Parker)

and we presented our plenary, which was exciting to do and clearly evoked interest and discussion and received positive feedback. It was interesting to notice how, when presented with multiple entry points to our work, the audience responded from their own disciplines and theoretical perspectives which helped us to more clearly position ourselves. Jonathan and Ken were interested in the space between them and how to inscribe that space, as was Cindy in relation to China, but the rest of us are more concerned with developing the ethical knowhow that might collectively build and sustain community, however transiently, and it was interesting also to notice how much the collective activity of coming to QI and producing this plenary sustained our sense of collective endeavour.

There was a last minute glitch in that the building supervisor arrived to find us re-arranging the chairs and announced that we were not allowed to re-arrange anything as the building was unionised and were also not allowed to use the tables we had stacked up in order to mount our projectors. It looked, at the last minute, as though we were not going to be able to use any technological equipment. However, he then went way out of his way to produce projector trolleys for us all in time for our session and all went well.

After the session we went out for a quick drink to celebrate Ying Lin's birthday

Happy birthday Ying Lin!!!!

before returning to the Illini Union one last time to see Jon and Ken receive their honorarium and attend the QI 'town meeting' which started with a an acknowledgement by Patti Lather of the work of Joe Kincheloe, who has recently died and to whom this congress has been dedicated.

We then all went to the last night party, which was a traditional southern cookout, accompanied by live cajun band music. Last day tomorrow!!