International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry

The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry is a conference and associated workshop series hosted by the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The center and congress director is Norman Denzin. The congress is one implementation of the center vision that includes the goal “to facilitate the development of qualitative research methods across a wide variety of academic disciplines.”

The first congress was held May 5–7, 2005, on the theme “Qualitative Inquiry in a Time of Global Uncertainty” and included the launch of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry. More than 650 papers were presented by delegates from more than 45 nations. The keynote speakers were Janice Morse (University of Utah) on “The Politics of Evidence” and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (University of Auckland, New Zealand) on “On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty.” Eleven preconference workshops were held, including “Feminist Qualitative Research in the New Century,” “Autoethnography,” and “Interpreting, Writing Up, and Evaluating Qualitative Materials.”

The second congress was held May 4–6, 2006, on the theme “Ethics, Politics, and Human Subject Research in the New Millennium.” This congress attracted even more papers than the first—more than 900—from an even wider constituency of more than 55 nations. The keynote speakers were Marie Battiste (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) on “The Global Challenge: Research Ethics for Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage” and Michelle Fine (National Academies of Science) on “DoYou Believe in Geneva? Participatory Action Research, Critical Methods, and Indigenous Knowledges.” Sixteen preconference workshops were held, including “Case Study With Distant Inhabitants,” “Heartbeats: Writing Performance Texts,” and “New Experimental Writing Forms.”

The third congress was held May 2–5, 2007, on the theme “Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Evidence.” The keynote speakers were D. Soyini (University of North Carolina) on “Dangerous Ethnography and Utopian Performative” and Julianne Cheek (University of South Australia) on “A Fine Line: Positioning Qualitative Inquiry in the Wake of the Politics of Evidence.” Sixteen preconference workshops were held, including “Doing Situational Maps,” “Evidence-Based Social Work,” and “Writing Lives and Writing Deaths.”

The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry website includes a call for papers, details of past conferences, a conference paper archive, a facility to join an announcement listserv and view its archive, and a qualitative inquiry community blog.