The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

Day 1

Today I set out for The Sixth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. My morning began at 6am when my mother drove me to the airport. Traveling from Boston to Chicago, I then had to spend a good 3 plus hours in the bus station waiting for my ride to Champaign. Here I thought I’d grab a deep-dish pie to inaugurate my arrival to Chi-town. Little did I know that what I was downing as a mid afternoon snack, a Pizza Uno single serve deep dish, was once voted the most unhealthiest pizza in the United States.

I felt sluggish and bloated after too much sodium so spent the bus station afternoon tucked away in a corner watching Veronica Mars on my laptop. What did we do before wireless Internet?

My bus took off at around 4 p.m. and all of these memories came pouring in of taking buses in Mexico—choosing my favorite seat to the right of the bus driver so that I could see out the front window; being too cold from the air conditioner; watching various types of scenery pass by and by.

Back in the Midwest, what had felt like hours upon hours of farmland and franchise, I arrived to The University of Illinois.

I checked into my on-campus housing which, disappointingly, had no wireless connection in the room! There went my hopes of watching Glee this week.

The University of Illinois impressed me. It’s a huge college town with tons of stores, shops, but also a lot of interesting culture and a feel of community.

The theme of this years program was entitled Qualitative Inquiry for a Global Community in Crisis where, founder of the event Norman Denzin states, attendees would have the opportunity to share experiences, problems and hopes concerning their conduct of critical qualitative inquiry in this time of global uncertainty. For the next few days I got to hear presenters discuss various methods, projects, and research related to topics of poverty, academic freedom, researcher safety, indigenous human rights, human rights violations, torture, political violence, and justice as healing.

I am excited and hope to get some ideas for my own dissertation which, I am hoping by next year, I will have a clearer idea on what I will focus on.





Day 2

Today’s sessions were dedicated to works exclusively presented in Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish. I got to hear students, professors, and researchers from countries such as Chile, Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and also Brazil. Themes ranged from qualitative research with diabetes patients, to autoethnographic research of natural disasters in Chile, to participatory action research with indigenous Colombians.

In all it was a very interesting day and I got to practice Spanish with many of the people in attendance. In particular, I enjoyed a Spanish speaking lunch with a Ph.D. student named Laura, and her boyfriend Oscar, from Galecia, Spain. I felt an overwhelming sense of pride when a Colombian man told me that I speak Spanish with a Mexican accent!





Days 3 and 4

These past two days at the conference were so inspiring. Yesterday I attended a workshop with Norman Denzin on Performance Ethnography. We broke up into groups to perform moments of tension where race, class, and gender have intersected in socially situated moments in our lives. We were to particularly concentrate on experience, post 911, in an airport. I worked with a group of women—two from Chile and one from Ecuador. Their experiences involved suspicious interactions between themselves and airport security- questions regarding their traveling, their professions, the validity of their research, and their intentions in the United States. It went so far as the guard having to call the Chilean embassy to see if qualitative research really existed in their country. My own story was much different. I performed a scene that took place in Oaxaca immigration office and how easy it was for me to live and work in Mexico without questions. How this is so contradictory to the immigrant experiences that take place here in the United States.

I was also in the audience of some great panel presentations on such topics as race, fathers, abuse, death, memory, protest, and urbanization.

I had the great opportunity to have some good conversations over beers with my new friends from Spain and my colleagues Hari, Ellen, Tim, and Dawn from UMASS as well.





Day 5

To sum up my time at the congress, I have been moved. I saw some powerful, funny, humbling, serious, intelligent, sweet, inspiring work by professors and students so ethereal they seem like movie stars, yet so human I could share a slice of watermelon at a Midwest style cookout with them.

My favorite moments—

A panel on fathers and sons
Ron Pelias
Meeting Bryant Keith Alexander
Dancing to Zydeco music
Cynthia Dillard
Beers with Laura and Oscar
Writing my FM3 experience in Denzin’s workshop
A panel on writing and relationships
Coffee and banana bread breakfasts at the Union café

I am excited to return to this congress again next year where I will definitely present a paper. I have a full year to work on it so I hope I can come up with something good.

Now I return to Chicago on a three-hour bus and continue on plane back to Boston. Long day awaits. Feeling I know more. Feeling I know nothing. Feeling pretty good about that.