It's that time of year again and there's a flurry of e-mails going back and forth from a range of us here in Bristol and from UK to USA, to Australia and back again as we begin to prepare for the Sixth International Qualitative Inquiry conference in Urbana Champaign Illinois. This year a record number twelve of us (plus Glen Hall, Sue Porter's partner) are going from the Centre for Narratives and Transformative Learning at the University of Bristol - Jane Speedy, Malcolm Reed, Laurinda Brown, Viv Martin, Artemi Sakellariadis, Cindy Gowen, Ken Gale, Jonathan Wyatt , Mclean Percy, Ann Rippin, Sue Porter, Dan Doherty - that's three GSOE staff, five recent graduates and four current research students.
A few of us are meeting up in Chicago next Monday (24th) with colleagues from the States and Australia. The conference starts in Urbana Champaign on Wednesday. There's a lot going on and everybody is doing a lot it seems. I'm involved in a live book review session for Laurel Richardson's new book 'last writes' and Jonathan and I are also assisting with a collective biography workshop and forthcoming publication alongside Susanne Gannon from the University of Western Sydney. I won't begin to list the number of things Jonathan and Ken are doing -they are running a workshop together and love this conference and contribute more and more to it each year. If you want to look up what each if us is contributing, look up our surnames with the search tool in the online conference programme and list of abstracts.
Most of us are giving a paper of our own and many (eight) of us are engaged in the collective Bristol plenary. My paper is in a 'performative writing' panel chaired by Viv Martin and Elyse Pineau from the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale on friday morning and I'm putting the finishing touches to it today. I'm working at home and my family are all out, so in a minute I' m going to practice giving my paper to the bathroom mirror to see how long it takes.
There is also a large group of us involved in the 'Bristol plenary spotlight event' which is on Saturday afternoon. This particular session aims to showcase the very prominent and innovative position that we are carving out for u ourselves in Bristol as leading international players in the generation of collaborative forms of writing as inquiry and in the development of theoretical and ethical know-how in this field . We have a great panel this year showcasing fragments of some of our best work using collective biography; generating writing as inquiry methods using web2 technologies - in this case twitter; exploring the complex ethical and personal dilemmas about authorship and ownership that collaborative work in the academy highlights and expanding the arts-base of social research by exploring different realities, including the magical realities evoked by 'ghost' writers.
We'll tell you more about our spotlight and how it is received as we get to it, but if you are interested, you can keep track of the congress and what is going on by exploring the congress website.
Today I'm just shaking the cobwebs off the blog and alerting you to it...but do follow us as we go and add your comments. We may add a little something next week, but really we are setting off next Sunday (23rd). Jonathan and/or I will probably blog every day as he is my co-blogger this year (gives us something to do as we are usually awake half the night!!)
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