Virtual Schedule

It Turns Out 8 is Enough: The Power of Small-Scale, Qualitative Research to Transform the Field

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings
Social science research continues to suffer from an “inferiority complex” that prompts it to attempt to replicate natural science in order to make a claim. This keynote address speaks to the ability to draw warrants from much smaller, more intensive studies that not only make scholarly claims, but may also change how we think about the nature of a problem.

Note that this keynote will be delivered in-person in Columbus, OH, as well as livestreamed to all AMI registrants. To learn more about the Patti Lather Distinguished Award and Lecture Series, click here.

Spirit-Informed Approaches to Qualitative Research: A Deep Look at Interiority of Experiences

Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya
Spirit-informed research can be easily dismissed as untrustworthy and without credibility. However in this conversation Dr. Bhattacharya highlights ways of integrating spirit-informed ontoepistemologies, theoretical and methodological guidelines, as well as strategies for ethical relationality and data representation. Of importance will be a contemplation on pathways for mitigating discomfort and establishing justifiable arguments for spirit-informed approaches to qualitative research.

Microethnographic Discourse Analysis (MEDA): A Humanizing Approach

Dr. Stephanie Power-Carter
This session will explore Microethnographic discourse analysis as an approach that centers language as a means to capture What is happening here? MEDA asks the researcher to consider “what people do with language” and “how they use language” as they act and interact with each other in various contexts. This session will use data to examine how MEDA can illuminate nuance and complexity and make visible issues of power and personhood that people navigate.

Co-constructing Social Change: Opportunities and Considerations in Community and Policy-based Research-Practice Partnerships

Drs. Mike Hoa Nguyen & OiYan Poon
Research scholars focused on education are often motivated by desires to produce impactful research (i.e., influences change to systems, policies, practices, and other norms that shape social outcomes). Past research has found that the uptake of research by broad stakeholders (e.g., educators, school leaders, community-based leaders, policymakers, etc.) relies on relationships and networks between researchers and education stakeholders. We are two higher education scholars rooted in the field of Asian American Studies who entered the academy with extensive experiences working directly with Asian American, pan-Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander, and multi-racial community-based, policy, political, and advocacy organizations. In this workshop, we will articulate key tenets of community and policy-based action research partnership methodology, centering cross-racial political solidarity for social change.

Digital Storytelling and Photovoice: Using Visual Media for Narrative-based Research

Dr. Theodore Chao
This session explores the powerful use of digital storytelling and photovoice as research methods to eliciting narratives often hidden or unspoken. Dr. Chao will share his experience using Digital Mathematics Storytelling as a tool to uncover the unique approaches families and communities take toward mathematics within communities of color. Furthermore, Dr. Chao will highlight the use of Photovoice, a method that allows participants to visually depict their stories rather than explicitly verbalizing them, opening up windows into participants’ worlds. Through digital storytelling and photovoice, researchers can study participants’ identities not through the stories they tell, but hear their stories (and counter-stories) as their identities (Sfard & Prusak, 2005; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).

Please use this time to attend to your holistic well-being! “Percolate” on the ideas shared during your last session (mind), spend a few minutes in tree pose or seated crescent moon pose (body), or join an informal roundtable discussion on the virtual conference platform to connect with others (soul). You can also use this time to visit our wonderful AMI vendors!

Centering Disabled Bodyminds in Qualitative Research Design

Drs. Holly Pearson, Emily Nusbaum, & Jessica Lester
In this workshop, we focus on how researchers might center disability and disability embodiment when designing and conducting critical qualitative research. This workshop is not focused on research about disability, but rather works with the assumption that disabled bodyminds and disability embodiment advance all forms of qualitative inquiry. In other words, in what ways can disability inform and challenge our thinking around qualitative inquiry? To make the practice of centering disability evident, we provide examples of scholarship that thinks with and centers disabled bodyminds and invite participants to engage in designing a critical qualitative study that both assumes the presence of and works to center disability. We also introduce a framework for designing and carrying out a critical qualitative study that centers disability and its intersections as sources of methodological and data collection advancement. Participants should bring an idea for a current or future critical qualitative inquiry project to think with and through disability.

Discursive Violence Analysis: An Epistemological and Methodological Shift in Education Policy

Dr. Rhodesia McMillian
This session introduces a new methodological approach, Discursive Violence Analysis (DVA). Discursive Violence Analysis is a qualitative methodology that is the conceptual convergence of Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Critical Legal Studies that operationalizes systemic oppression. This conceptual framework expands the existing repository of qualitative methodology that recalibrates how researchers identify, qualify, and interpret various disparate discursive social practices as evidence of racism. Discursive Violence Analysis frames how scholars interrogate racism and how racism is institutionalized and codified within education and networking social systems.

Relational Research Methods with Chosen Family: Centering Reciprocity, Mutuality, and Care

Dr. Tim San Pedro
Stories carry power; they carry wisdom. In this presentation, San Pedro discusses the tensions and beauty of entering into dialogic and synergistic storied spaces through relational research methods with chosen family, friends who have become family. Specifically, methods of Indigenous Storywork (Archibald, 2008) and Storying (Bishop, 1997; Kovach, 2019), Projects in Humanization (San Pedro & Kinloch, 2017), and Synergistic Conversation (San Pedro & Elliot, in press) offer opportunities to consider questions about relational research such as: When mutuality and care are centered, what opportunities and tensions present themselves in working so closely with family to share stories beyond ourselves? What does it look like and sound like to co-craft and co-author a project from beginning to beyond the end while engaging in reciprocal practices that continue and deepen relationships?

Real-time Collaboration with NVivo 14

Dr. Stacy Penna
Join this optional session for a walkthrough of the features offered by one of our AMI vendors, NVivo.

Theories in the Flesh and Qualitative Methodologies: Ontological-Epistemological-Axiological Provocations

Dr. Michelle Salazar Pérez
This session discusses theories in the flesh in relation with qualitative methodologies. Forty years ago, Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981) crafted the notion of theories in the flesh as “a politic born out of necessity” (p. 23). This has been reflected within a range of perspectives that center women of color ways of knowing and being, including Womanisms (Maparyan, 2012), Black feminisms (Collins, 2022), and Chicana feminism (Anzaldúa, 2009), among Others. Throughout the years, my colleague Cinthya Saavedra and I have written extensively about how theories in the flesh can transform early childhood studies (Pérez & Saavedra, 2017; Saavedra & Pérez, 2018), a field which, foundationally and contemporarily, has been deeply entrenched in white patriarchy. As an expansion of this and other collective work (Pérez et al., 2022), I offer ontological-epistemological-axiological provocations that consider how theories in the flesh can inform methodological praxis in qualitative inquiry.

Critical Approaches to Interviewing in Equity-Oriented Qualitative Research

Dr. Amy Stitch
This workshop-style session will provide practical tools for those interested in critical approaches to interviewing. During our time together, participants will engage in critical reflection and practice using tools and techniques for conducting qualitative interviews from critical orientations to qualitative research.

Frameworks, Strategies, and Resources for Conducting Equitable, Anti-racist, and Culturally Responsible Research

Dr. Donna Ford
Current and future researchers are often taught that research is a neutral endeavor, that researchers are neutral scholars whose biases (if any, they are told) do not influence their work. I beg to differ with these two assertions and myths. In this presentation/session, I discuss examples of biases that affect all aspects of research endeavors – regardless of the design, procedures, measures, etc. – and then share theories and paradigms that help all scholars to be anti-racist and culturally, competent research professionals. Resources are also provided.

Anti-Colonial Approaches to Place Inquiry in Educational Research

Dr. Fikile Nxumalo
This workshop aims to offer propositions for anti-colonial approaches to engaging place in education research. In orienting towards anti-colonial possibilities, we will collectively engage with several questions, including asking: What it might look like to notice, respond to and unsettle education research’s colonial and extractive inheritances? What might it look like to encounter place in education research in ways that undo these extractivist logics? How does place ask us difficult questions? What might it look like to to pay attention to encounters with place in ways that deromanticize nature, that pay attention to human-caused damage to the natural world while also considering the unevenness of human responsibility for and vulnerability to this ecological damage? What might emerge from paying attention to the ways in which the more-than-human actively ‘stories’ specific places? What are the anti-colonial potentials of restorying places; paying attention to marginalized stories of place? What might it look like to attend to affect in place-attuned research and how might this connect to an anti-colonial orientation? Participants will be invited to try out thinking alongside some of the propositions and related questions in relation to their own research interests.

Please use this time to attend to your holistic well-being! “Percolate” on the ideas shared during your last session (mind), spend a few minutes in supported upward dog pose or upward dog pose (body), or join an informal roundtable discussion on the virtual conference platform to connect with others (soul). You can also use this time to visit our wonderful AMI vendors!

Interrupting Epistemic Apartheid & Scientific Racism: The Possibilities of Daughtering and Black Women’s Narratives for Collective Epistemic Resistance

Dr. Venus Evans-Winters
In this session, we will discuss how epistemic apartheid and scientific racism erases Black women from the historical record and intellectual discourse. An overview will be provided of the concept of daughtering to demonstrate how Black girls’ and women’s organic relationships foster ways of knowing that are grounded in spiritual and/or intuitive ways of knowing. How do researchers unabashedly ritualize Black, Indigenous, and other women of color’s ways of knowing and navigating the world into our research pursuits? How might we document our storied lives and politicized bodies for collective healing and resistance to epistemic violence? The discussion will be of interest to researchers interested in understanding qualitative inquiry through a Black feminist and intersectional prism.

Decolonization and Community Engaged Research

Dr. Muhammad Khalifa
This session addresses ways that researchers can move their research while centering community needs above all other needs in the research process. After identifying extractive and corporate trends within qualitative research communities, we will theorize and share examples of decolonial goals, practices, and outcomes for qualitative researchers.

Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography

Fetaui Iosefo
Indigenous wayfinding is our methodology of knowing, being, fore-going, be-coming, be-going be-gotten and belonging. Within the heart of wayfinding we are guided by our ancestors to be in tune with the elements of the animate and in-aminate. In this work-shop, we will share about the va’ (relational-space) and it’s influence with Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography whilst troubling the western notion of auto.

Language Socialization Research and Social and Linguistic Justice

Drs. Leslie Moore, Jackie Ridley, Min-Seok Choi, & Grace Kim
Language socialization (LS) research examines how people become users of a language(s) in a developmental process that involves learning how to think, feel, act, and interact in social world. Since the LS research paradigm was formulated in the early 1980s, LS research has challenged theories of language development centered on middle-class families and the associated models of language deficit that have been used to explain the opportunity gap. LS researchers have done so through documenting and illuminating culturally diverse language learning ecologies and using this empirical base to deconstruct deficit ideologies and demonstrate people’s agency in multidirectional socialization processes. In this workshop, we start with a brief overview of language socialization as an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, education, and psychology and what that means for LS methodology. We will discuss the how’s and why’s of four features of LS research: longitudinal study design, field‐based collection and analysis of a substantial corpus of naturalistic audio or audio–video data, a holistic, theoretically informed ethnographic perspective, and attention to both micro and macro levels of analysis and to linkages between them. We will consider the on-going shift in the field toward being more directly and explicitly engaged with issues of social and linguistic justice, looking at recent LS work that takes a more critical approach to research design, dissemination, advocacy and activism. We will examine methodological tools from the LS work and explore ways to engage critically and creatively with LS research in our own scholarship.

Break

Connection Space: Early-career scholars

Come connect and mingle with fellow early-career scholars!

Connection Space: Mid-career scholars

Come connect and mingle with fellow mid-career scholars!

Connection Space: Senior scholars

Come connect and mingle with fellow senior scholars!

Connection Space: Scholars of Color

Come connect and mingle with fellow Scholars of Color!

Connection Space: Graduate Students

Come connect and mingle with fellow graduate students!

Krik? Krak!, Keti Koti Table, Groundings, Liming and Ole Talk: Understanding Caribbean Decolonial Research Methodologies

Dr. Saran Stewart
Taking up the work of what Mignolo (2007, 2009) terms geo- and body-politics of knowledge, I engage in epistemic disobedience and de-linking by centering the Caribbean onto-epistemology to ground this decolonial project. From Haiti to Suriname, to Trinidad to Jamaica, and Cuba, Caribbean Decolonial Research Methodologies have provided a decolonial shift to Western epistemologies and research methodologies. More importantly, it has become a form of understanding the subaltern as fully human, understanding Blackness and Afro-Caribbeans as human. Within the centering of the human, this presentation celebrates Caribbean decolonial scholars like Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in framing the discourse and grounding the understanding of the various forms of Caribbean Decolonial Research Methods. The workshop then provides insight into the data collection and analysis procedures of a select number of these research methods.

Creating Digital Research Workflows for Qualitative Inquiry

Drs. Jessica Lester & Trena Paulus
Now more than ever, technological innovations are shaping qualitative research methods and methodologies in complex ways. This workshop offers participants both theoretical grounding and practical guidance for developing a personalized digital workflow for qualitative research that leverages technological innovations in meaningful and reflexive ways.

Indigenous Mixed-Methodology

Dr. Amanda Tachine
Indigenous mixed-method research encompasses Indigenous quantitative and qualitative methodology. Snowshoe et al. (2015) and Walter and Andersen (2013) assert two underpinnings of Indigenous quantitative methodology: (1) the creation of quantitative data from an Indigenous lens privileging Indigenous voices, and rejecting dominant values while refusing deficit approaches; and (2) to challenge traditional quantitative practice within Indigenous Nations by exposing the values that uphold traditional quantitative research that systematically damages Indigenous communities. Sharing circles, an Indigenous qualitative approach, are an open- structured, conversational style methodology that respect story sharing within a Tribal cultural protocol context (Kovach, 2009; Tachine, et al., 2016). Sharing circles underscores the interconnected anchors of recognition, responsibility, and relationships in Tribal protocol practices by paying attention to cultural and ethical considerations when sharing stories with Indigenous communities (Tachine et al., 2016). Caution, care, and time are critically important in the relationship building, listening, and in the offering of stories’ shared and retold. We are exploring an Indigenous mixed-method approach to research, and share preliminary ideas on what this means for future research.

Creating a Soft Place to Land: Participatory Research with Youth at the Intersections

Dr. Shena Sanchez
In this session, we will discuss how critical participatory research methods have been used in work with communities and groups from historically marginalized backgrounds. We will then explore how intersectional feminist approaches, particularly those grounded in Black Feminist traditions of the kitchen table method and sister circles, create research sites that are soft places to land, especially for youth who are socially located at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression. These soft places to land invite youth to engage in the process as co-owners of the research, experts of their own lived experiences, and creators of knowledge and theory. These research sites also encourage youth to offer their critiques and analyses of the systemic and interpersonal injustices they and their communities face. Drawing from research alongside Girls of Color from Title I high schools across the country, Dr. Sanchez will demonstrate one way of doing intersectional participatory research with youth. She will share data, such as art renderings, creative writing, and diagramming reflections along with interviews as examples of how an array of data collection instruments can be utilized to capture unique and shared experiences. Dr. Sanchez will also discuss the integral role of reflexivity in the endeavor to create research sites that are soft places to land. The session will end with an invitation to 1) consider how critical participatory research can be conducted in other settings with different groups, 2) utilize intersectional frameworks and reflexivity to inform methodological decisions, and 3) expand the boundaries around whose voices and perspectives are counted as expertise in research.

Please use this time to attend to your holistic well-being! “Percolate” on the ideas shared during your last session (mind), spend a few minutes in a seated spinal twist pose (body), or join an informal roundtable discussion on the virtual conference platform to connect with others (soul). You can also use this time to visit our wonderful AMI vendors!

“BodyBlending:” Cultivating Collectivity in Auto/ethnography

Drs. Durell Callier & Dominique Hill
BodyBlending: Cultivating Collectivity in Auto/ethnography provides practical skills for writing, researching, and performing from collectivity. A methodological tool and alternative orientation to navigating the academy, collectivity transcends insularity and provides significant insights that emanate from and extend minoritized knowledges. Rooted in this practice, our work as Hill L. Waters (HLW) draws upon Black intellectual traditions, community and Black feminist auto/ethnography. As a research collective, HLW utilizes performance as a vehicle to analyze and animate the relationships of interpersonal and systemic forms of violence. Our research focuses specifically on the dynamics of race, gender, sexuality within Black communities and their historic and contemporary struggles towards justice, equity, freedom, and love.

Using Sista Circle Methodology to Remove the Veil of Whiteness in Qualitative Research

Dr. Dajanae Palmer
In this session we will begin our discussion with an overview of feminist research guiding principles. Additionally, I will present an example of how using culturally congruent methodologies, specifically sista circle methodology, mitigates the harm of whiteness rooted in qualitative research. I will present lessons learned from doing qualitative research centering the community practices of Black women doctoral students using sista circle methodology. The lessons learned present tangible ways to remove the veil of whiteness in research by shifting methods to align with participants and by conducting authentic member checking. We will conclude our discussion on how we can push our qualitative research practices to mitigate whiteness using feminist research.

Grief-as-Gateway: Imagining a Genealogical Approach to Ethnographic Practice

Dr. Z Nicolazzo
Ethnography has been rightly critiqued for the extractive logics and colonial roots upon which the methodological tradition was developed. And yet, possibilities exist for imagining what more liberatory ethnographic practices may look, sound, and feel like (e.g., critical collaborative ethnography; Bhattacharya, 2008). Especially in connection to ethnography alongside marginalized populations, it becomes imperative for researchers to be attentive to how power, (in)equity, and relationality, and affect flow across the scene of research. Specific for this presentation, I argue that grief both floods the scene of ethnographic research alongside marginalized populations and that by attending carefully, precisely, and with empathy to the (absent) presence of researcher ←→ interlocutor grief(s), ethnographers can envision more ethical and just modes of scholarly practice. In other words, I argue grief is a gateway to imagining what I pose as a genealogical approach to ethnographic practice, or a rethinking of notions like ‘the field’ ‘into’ and ‘out’ from which ethnographers move. In this sense, ethnographic attentiveness to grief-as-gateway invites more complex and nuanced understandings of the ethical dimensions through which one does research alongside marginalized populations.

Centering Reflection, Healing, and Freedom Dreaming: Conducting Black Community Activist Research in an Anti-Black World

Dr. Colette Cann, Dr. Whitneé L. Garrett-Walker, T. Gertrude Jenkins, Eghosa Obaizamomwan Hamilton, Daniel Mango, Freddy Martin & Heather Streets
Black Community Activist Research is rooted in and draws from the work of fierce scholars such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Bettina Love, David Stovall, Gloria Ladson-Billings. It builds on methodological approaches such as Black Emancipatory Action Research, Black Mother Autoethnography, Blackgirl Autoethnography, and CRiT Walking. It is inspired by public scholars such as Lauren Hill, Jamila Woods, Jill Scott, Nina Simone, The Clark Sisters, and Ta’Rhonda Jones. It is a methodological approach that centers Black communities and Black researchers, their brilliance, and their health within a world that is decidedly situated against their wellness. In this workshop, a group of Black researchers from the University of San Francisco will share how they reconceive the purposes, processes and outcomes of research as a vehicle of reflection, healing and freedom dreaming.

Vendor Highlight Session

with Mark Vagle, PhD, PIP Consulting
At PIP Consulting, we have created five principles for practical contemplation to help people become more aware of some of the thorny issues and concerns they face in their personal and professional lives – and through this heightened awareness can make change . Join us during this break to engage in this process; link can be found in AMI Attendee Hub.

Methodological Epistemologies of the People: Amalgamating the Researched, Their Lived Realities, and Expertise

Dr. Claudia García-Louis
The presenter argues that to answer research questions posed to serve the diverse needs of targeted populations, they must be involved in the research process rather than being positioned as mere subjects. She underscores the need to adopt data collection methods and approaches that work to validate the lived realities and histories of targeted individuals. Methodology should be dictated by participants’ comfort levels, epistemologies, and cultural influences. Notably, the process of data inquiry, collection, and analysis must be done as communal work in collaboration with participants. Their perspectives, lived experiences, histories of discrimination, and relationship with educational institutions must be central to research that seeks to understand their needs; only then can we really begin to serve them.

The Epistemology of Listening: Utilizing Hip-Hop Sensibilities to Develop Trust & Community Inside & Outside the Academy

Dr. View
Dr. View will engage participants in a collaborative process called the epistemology of listening, which is a sacred, communal and political act of trust that is developed between researcher and participants (co-researchers). Dr. View will incorporate his Hip-Hop Scholarship around The Space Program’s Curriculum of the Mind & Fire in Little Africa, both of which are breathing case studies inside and outside the academy, respectively. Participants will be guided through theoretical and methodological frameworks that were used to develop this scholarship, experience a listening session of recorded tracks from each project, as well as be provided with personal narratives of how to center co-researchers in the work that ultimately builds (or could break) trust and community.

Placing Ourselves in the WHERE of Educational Research for Freedom

Dr. Moira Ozias
Qualitative research often asks questions and seeks answers to questions of who, of how, and of when. The WHERE of research is just as essential. In this workshop, participants will think together about how the WHERE of research matters, why WHERE matters, and methods for attending to the WHERE of research that grow out of various critical geographic traditions. Our collective work will be guided by the question “How do qualitative researchers contend with effects of the long(ue) durée(s) of slavery, settler colonialism, and global conquest as we attend to the WHERE of research and education for freedom?” Work on spatial justice (Soja, 2010), critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2014), and decolonial geographies (McKittrick, 2006; King, 2019) will guide our hands-on, place-grounded process of imagining methods that move beyond, underneath, and between colonial place-taking research practice. We will together practice relational validity and ethics of answerability (Patel, 2016; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) as we work through the implications of place-based and critical spatial methods for “relations to land, to social context, and to future generations” (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 19), to Black livingness (McKittrick, 2006; 2020), and to Indigenous resurgence and survivance (Coulthard, 2014; Vizenor, 1999). As we think about our own research practices, we will extend Patel’s (2016) questions for answerability in educational research: Why me? Why this? Why now? Why here? With whom here? To what end?

Intersectional Approaches to Ethics & Care in Research

Drs. Charlotte Jacobs, Katie Clonan-Roy, Erynn Beaton, & Michael Moses
A panel of 4 esteemed QualLab Faculty Fellows will share their insights on the current state, and future, of qualitative research as it relates to the ethics and care of qualitative research.

Please use this time to attend to your holistic well-being! “Percolate” on the ideas shared during your last session (mind), spend a few minutes practicing cat/cow stretches or seated cat/cow stretches (body), or join an informal roundtable discussion on the virtual conference platform to connect with others (soul). You can also use this time to visit our wonderful AMI vendors!

Reflections on Innovations in Qualitative Inquiry – Methods and Methodologies for these Urgent Times

Dr. Tara Yosso
Dr. Tara Yosso’sending reflections invite attendees to consider how we might foster a critical historical perspective of the communities we aim to serve in our research. She will also offer insights about Advancing Methods for Innovation, Equity, and Justice in this historical moment by drawing on the ingenuity and courage of those who have come before us in the struggle for justice.