Keynote Speakers

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg

Keynote Abstract

Leaky architecture of qualitative inquiry (and drifting with post-intentional phenomenology)

Intentional and transcendental phenomenologies often offer descriptive, emphatic, and humanistic groundings and structures to situate human, experience, and knowing within inquiry and scholarship. However, in this presentation I take a different turn and drift with post-intentional phenomenology exploring some aspects and functions of leaky architecture of qualitative inquiry. I ‘allow’ inquiry and research processes to affect and be affected by instability, edge, relationality, movement, blurred genres, and leaky architecture. Research design, data, and knowing subjects can no longer be assumed to constitute one agentic and fixed entity but they multiply and shift constructing only evaporating, resonating, porous, accommodating, and temporary proxies, events, and forms of living. Qualitative inquiry as this calls for various re-conceptualizations including the role of human/subject (e.g., in post-humanism), philosophy (philosophy as a method), data (plural and theoretical), author (absent and collective), and potential absence of transparency and linear logic. More specifically I offer some considerations regarding (potentially) enabling constrains promoting and supporting instable forms of research design such as relationality and rhythm. Maybe through some unexpected ontological becomings, relational lines, epistemological escapes and instable middles of sensing in time/space qualitative researchers are able to inquiry and live beyond the anthropocentric core and more.

Biography 

Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (Ph.D., University of Helsinki) is a Professor of qualitative research at the Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates in the intersection of methodology, philosophy, and socio-cultural critique and her work aims to contribute to methodological knowledge, experimentation, and theoretical development across various traditions associated with qualitative research. She has published in various qualitative and educational journals and she is the author of Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology (2016) published by SAGE.

Johnny Saldaña

Keynote Abstract

“Researcher, Analyze Thyself”

In this keynote address, Johnny Saldaña attempts to answer, through observational and introspective reflection, “What does it mean to be a qualitative researcher?” These phenomenological musings explore the possible essences and essentials of the inquirer as he or she participates in all stages of the research endeavor. “Researcher, Analyze Thyself” is a call to understand not just what and how but why we do what we do.

Biography 

Johnny Saldaña is Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University’s (ASU) School of Film, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. He is the author of Longitudinal Qualitative Research: Analyzing Change through Time (AltaMira Press), The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers (3rd ed., Sage Publications; translated into Korean, Turkish, and Chinese-Simplified), Fundamentals of Qualitative Research (Oxford University Press), Ethnotheatre: Research from Page to Stage (Left Coast Press), Thinking Qualitatively: Methods of Mind (Sage Publications), co-author with the late Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman for Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook (3rd ed., Sage Publications), and the editor of Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre (AltaMira Press). His most recent book is Qualitative Research: Analyzing Life, a new methods textbook with co-author Matt Omasta (Sage Publications). Saldaña’s works have been cited and referenced in over 5,000 research studies conducted in over 125 countries, in disciplines such as K-12 and higher education, medicine and health care, technology and social media, business and economics, government and social services, the fine arts, the social sciences, human development, and communication.

Saldaña’s research in qualitative inquiry, data analysis, and performance ethnography has received awards from the American Alliance for Theatre & Education, the National Communication Association-Ethnography Division, the American Educational Research Association’s Qualitative Research Special Interest Group, New York University’s Program in Educational Theatre, and the ASU Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. He has published a wide range of research articles in journals such as Research in Drama Education, Multicultural Perspectives, Youth Theatre Journal, Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Teaching Theatre, Research Studies in Music Education, and Qualitative Inquiry, and has contributed several chapters to research methods handbooks.

Jonathan Smith

Keynote Abstract

Trying to make sense of lived experience: Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and the meaning of chronic pain

From an IPA perspective, participants and researchers are both engaged in the business of making sense of lived experience. Of course there are different emphases in how they do this and in how close they are to the experience at hand; but they are both, nonetheless, trying to make sense of the thing under scrutiny. In this talk, I will describe how IPA envisages this business of sense-making and I will draw on examples from my research to illustrate what this looks like in practice. I have been involved in a series of studies on the personal experience of chronic pain and this is the corpus I will look to here. I hope the talk will illustrate both how IPA works and how it can help illuminate what it is to be in pain.

Biography

Jonathan A Smith is Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck University of London, UK where he leads the interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) research group comprising faculty, postdocs and a large cohort of Phd students. He developed IPA and has applied it to a wide range of areas in psychology for example the transition to motherhood, clinical genetics, pain. IPA is concerned with the detailed examination of how particular individuals are making sense of major personal experiences in their lives. Jonathan has published many journal papers presenting IPA studies and is first author on the major text on the approach: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Theory, Method, Research (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009, Sage). He is also editor of a number of books on qualitative research more generally.

Ronald Chenail

Keynote Abstract

An Introduction to Qualitative Meta-Synthesis

Systematic reviews of published qualitative research have emerged as an important set of methods to aggregate, summarize, analyze, and synthesize qualitative data from a variety of study designs. These approaches include meta-study, meta-summary, grounded formal theory, meta-ethnography, and qualitative meta-synthesis. In this workshop, we will focus on qualitative meta-synthesis by presenting a six-step approach for conducting this type of systematic review and sharing our procedures and results from our own studies.

Biography

Ronald J. Chenail, Ph.D., is Associate Provost for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, Professor of Family Therapy, and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research Program at Nova Southeastern University (NSU). Since 1990, he has been part of 16 grants and contracts totally over $6,506,300, published over 130 publications including seven books, and given over 190 formal academic presentations at conferences and meetings. He founded The Qualitative Report (TQR; http://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/), the world’s first online, open-access trans-disciplinary qualitative research journal in 1990, and remains the journal’s editor-in-chief. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage (Taylor & Francis; http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/wjdr20/current). Previously, he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (JMFT), the flagship research journal of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT), for two terms. In addition he is an editorial board member of Qualitative Research in Psychology; American Journal of Family Therapy, Contemporary Family Therapy, Qualitative Social Work; Counselling, Psychotherapy, and Health; JMFT; and Sistemas Familiares; as well as a founding editorial board member of Qualitative Inquiry.

Kamilah B. Thomas-Purcell

Keynote Abstract

An Introduction to Qualitative Meta-Synthesis

Systematic reviews of published qualitative research have emerged as an important set of methods to aggregate, summarize, analyze, and synthesize qualitative data from a variety of study designs. These approaches include meta-study, meta-summary, grounded formal theory, meta-ethnography, and qualitative meta-synthesis. In this workshop, we will focus on qualitative meta-synthesis by presenting a six-step approach for conducting this type of systematic review and sharing our procedures and results from our own studies.

Biography

Dr. Kamilah B. Thomas-Purcell is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and a Master Certified Health Education Specialist at Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine. In her capacity as an Assistant Professor, she lectures Master of Public Health courses in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Health Disparities and Health Literacy, Foundations of Public Health, Social and Behavioral Foundations of Public Health, Principles of Health Education, and Interprofessional Leadership. Research in health disparities and disease prevention incorporating qualitative methods are a central focus of her scholarship and she has published multiple manuscripts in that area. Her most recent research on the quality and availability of services for breast and cervical cancer patients in the Caribbean was published in Cancer Causes and Control (2017). Dr. Thomas-Purcell has conducted research with distinguished organizations including the National Institutes of Health, the Caribbean Public Health Association the United Nations Population Fund, amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, Moffitt Comprehensive Cancer Center and Research Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.