Emotionally demanding research (EDR) is a type of research that requires significant mental, emotional, and/or physical resources, which in turn can negatively impact a researcher's holistic well-being. While some recommendations have been made to assist researchers conducting EDR (e.g., managing time between interviews), self-compassion has yet to be thoroughly explored as a strategy for researchers conducting EDR. In this study, we examined researchers’ understanding and use of self-compassion within EDR. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 qualitative researchers who had conducted or were conducting EDR. Data was analyzed using codebook thematic analysis. Findings showed individuals struggled to use self-compassion when conducting EDR. Many could not define self-compassion and demonstrated a limited understanding of self-compassion’s core components: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Moreover, most were uncertain about the impact of self-compassion in EDR. Theoretical implications and practical applications are discussed.
Participatory research methods are increasingly prioritised, including by researchers at the start of their doctoral journeys. This article builds upon a project in a UK Russell Group university that focused on the experiences of doctoral/postgraduate researchers (PGRs) doing participatory research. Building upon collaborative workshops with 20 PGRs, we reflect upon the creative processes that gathered insights into the hopes, hiccups and aspirations of PGRs doing participatory research. Our findings indicate that while doctoral research remains positioned as an individual endeavour, PGRs are committed to participatory research but need time, space, resources and dialogue to enable them to pursue more equitable and inclusive research methodologies. We conclude with a call to action that enables PGRs to showcase the power of their participatory work. Our article contributes to understandings of doctoral researchers’ experiences by utilising our own creative and participatory agendas and provides novel approaches via our diverse, creative and lively methodologies.
This paper explores amaha’s experience as a co-organizer of a community-driven process from which the Gem City Market—a community/worker-owned cooperative grocery store in Dayton, Ohio—emerged. Using a simple action research (AR) explanatory model co-developed by Alfredo, we show how by getting people involved in addressing issues that affect their everyday lives, participatory methods can help increase community ownership, hope, and power. This is a story of a community beginning to realize its power through participatory knowing and action and also a reminder that the outcome is just another starting point to leverage for continued community mobilization and change. Our purposes in doing so are to honor the community-driven process behind the Gem City story, and, now that people believe change is possible, to learn from that process so that we may continue to develop local agriculture, increase housing accessibility, and build a local just economy shaped by the community and resilient to the ups and downs of the broader economy. Note to the reader : To center the Gem City Market story as experienced by amaha, we have written the paper primarily in his first-person voice. Alfredo’s contributions have been to help weave that experience together with participatory action research ideas and practices that the two have engaged in together since late 2021. Building on Steve Kroeger’s storyboarding processes (see Kroeger et al., this special issue), we have also provided a cartoon version of the story at the beginning of the paper to provide an overview of the overall story.
Inspired by the seven courageous and unique women who participated in my doctoral study, Understanding the Lived Experiences of Women Motorcycle Circuit Racers , I pay my respect to them for maintaining their tough motorcycle racing identities after enduring many setbacks. I do this by way of poetic inquiry, utilising the short form englyn style of Welsh poetry which is used in celebration to tell stories of emotional reflection in a humorous heroic tradition. Using poetic inquiry, I represent the unique identities of these women motorcycle racers as embodiments of their lived experiences within their chosen high risk sporting context. This expresses the reflexive qualitative nature of my research which aims to enhance audience engagement with women’s experiences of motorcycle racing and salute the feminist phenomenologically-inspired methodology that brings creative embodied practices to the fore.
As a collective of critical, minoritized, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars who hold multiple identities simultaneously, this manuscript advances an argument for methodological inclusion grounded in axio-onto-epistemological responsibility. Writing in a dangerous sociopolitical moment marked by intensified attacks on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, the authors refuse epistemic neutrality and instead approach qualitative inquiry through decolonial and reparative orientations that center lived realities as sites of legitimate knowledge production. Rather than seeking permission to exist within dominant methodological paradigms, the scholars engage research unapologetically from their situated perspectives, affirming that integrity, accountability, and relationality are foundational—not ancillary—to rigorous inquiry. The manuscript is organized as a dialogic essay composed of five interrelated dialogues, which may be read consecutively or non-linearly, reflecting the authors’ commitment to methodological openness and epistemic plurality. Ultimately, this work offers conceptual provocations and mentoring insights for emerging and established qualitative researchers alike, inviting the field to reimagine what counts as data, rigor, and responsibility. In doing so, the manuscript contributes to ongoing efforts to cultivate qualitative inquiry that is responsive, accountable, and generative of more just possibilities in these dangerous times.
We are excited to introduce 19 original articles that present a compelling argument for incorporating the values, theories, and practices of participatory action research and critical qualitative research into our shared commitment to create positive change in times of crisis. In this collection, you will find diverse stakeholders engaging in community-engaged education and research, pushing and broadening epistemological boundaries of what is considered “valid” research, enabling us to see knowledge that is not available through traditional means, and leveraging that knowledge to address power imbalances in deeply inequitable realities. You will also find these authors using arts-based reflective practices to turn the gaze upon themselves to increase their critical awareness on the roles they play in the changes they seek for others. We situate this contribution in the hospitality that has always been a hallmark of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, with deep gratitude to Norman Denzin and Susan Noffke. We see this work as a continuation of conversations we have had with many of you over the years at ICQI and hope we can all gather to continue to offer hospitality to one another as we work together to create a more equitable, sustainable, and life-affirming world for all.
This paper reflects on how one interdisciplinary research team restructured a simulation-based study involving actor-portrayed counselling sessions with social work students and practitioners in response to the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the needs of participants and team members to repair fractured connections to themselves and others. We read our experiences alongside Harmut Rosa’s work on Resonance and the concept of Slow Scholarship to explore how our team balanced the pressures of academia in the pandemic and the needs of participants and researchers. Conducted in the context of social work education, the study involved transitioning from in-person to online methods while centering care, containment, and collaboration among team members and participants. We detail three core practices—dedicated containment of research tasks, paid time for relationship-building, and paid reflexive debriefing—that allowed us to attend to the human dimensions of the research process. Using a collaborative feminist reflexivity approach, we argue that ethical and rigorous research must include compensation for the unseen labor of trust-building and critical analysis, particularly during periods of social crisis. This reflection contributes to broader calls for research as a form of relational repair, offering a model for resonant engagement within the neoliberal academy.
People experiencing homelessness are commonly required to recount their life stories when accessing services. These biographies, often replete with trauma, disruption and the pains of survival, can be difficult to recount in linear narratives, which can engender feelings of epistemic injustice and self-stigmatisation, with assumptions of disbelief stemming from both the ‘unbelievability’ of the trauma and they ways in which the stories are told. This paper analyses the research interviews of 23 people who have experienced homelessness, not for the events recounted, but for the ways in which storytelling devices may illuminate meaning. Four storytelling devices – described as evental, cyclical, metaphorical and ‘messy’ storytelling were identified. We argue that, while these devices and tropes may complexify understanding, the fractured and idiosyncratic ways in which the stories are told hold as much potential to understand the participants as the lived experiences they share. Fractured narratives and sense checking in stories of trauma reflect and illuminate the meaning and ongoing impacts of trauma itself. Conceptualising fractured narratives as rhizomatic biographies allows for new ways of listening that may facilitate deeper understandings of trauma in people who have experienced homelessness.
The performative essay, constructed through a method of collaborative spirit-writing, teases through three textual encounters: Trump’s public statement that the 1960 Civil Rights Act led to white people being very badly treated ; the experience of two Black subjects at airport security that become analogous to the surveillance of national borders, and the politics of race and the materiality of bodies in the United States. All making an argument for performative resistance against the current U.S. political climate towards better collective and collaborative futures.
In recent years, both the international development sector, and the participatory action research (PAR) community have explored challenging questions around power dynamics. As a privileged White male working in both spaces, reflections on power and positionality have played a major role in both my individual practice and my research with others. Between 2021 and 2023, I co-convened two virtual PAR groups engaging 34 colleagues from 15 countries. With each group, we adapted and used the Gender at Work Analytical Framework as a tool for eliciting reflections and catalyzing discussions around power dynamics. This participatory approach to power analysis helped render dynamics of power and privilege more visible, even as some aspects remained hidden. My paper shows how engaging with power dynamics early in a PAR cycle can help to open up difficult discussions and stimulate conditions for change.
The text is an autoethnographic, experimental, and contemplative inquiry into a problem related to the felt compulsion to write. The text is written in a mode of continuous questioning. The author poses questions such as: Why can he not stop writing? What compelled him to do so? To explore this, he also examines academic culture and mobilizes other voices that address writing as inquiry and as a way of being.
Academic career interruption is often analysed through frameworks of penalty, attrition and productivity loss. This article reframes interruption as a condition of suspended institutional recognition rather than epistemic absence. Mobilising radical reflexivity as an analytic stance, it examines how academic identity persists as habitus and intellectual disposition while becoming temporarily illegible outside institutional contexts. Drawing on auto-socio-biographical writing as a mode of inquiry, the analysis explores domestic reflexive events, intergenerational class memory and survival entrepreneurship as sites where legibility and misrecognition are reconfigured. Rather than treating interruption as a temporal gap between periods of productivity, the article conceptualises suspension as an epistemic condition that reshapes how academic work is recognised, valued and rendered visible. Conceptually, it advances interruption as a condition of knowledge production, challenging dominant evaluative metrics of continuity, visibility and academic worth, and contributing to methodological debates in qualitative inquiry on reflexivity, embodiment and institutional power.
This article serves as the introduction to the special issue “Risky Business, Uncertain Futures, and ... the Work Continues.” The special issue emerged from the preconference of the Autoethnography Special Interest Group of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry meeting in 2025. The article presents autoethnography as inherently risky and as a methodology that can sustain us through uncertain times and events that call us to reflection, advocacy, imagination, and world(re)making. Collectively, we address the question: how do we autoethnographers continue our work in the context of risk and uncertain futures? The answers gesture to resources already inherent in our methodology: the ability to step across borders and boundaries of identity, affect, and subjectivity; the power of imagination and creativity to perceive possibilities that reach beyond the stuck-ness of now ; the courage to turn reflexively upon ourselves, to reveal our vulnerability and brokenness as both self-sacrifice and self-compassion; and writing , always writing, as an assertion of community and communitas, an invitation, and an outstretched hand.
This paper explores an episode from a post-qualitative doctoral study on university students’ interest in and commitment to allyship. Using Maggie MacLure’s ideas around ‘Glow’ – those unanticipated, compelling, affective moments in research that open up research enquiry – it explores a moment of discomfort and the insights that arose from it. This emerged when the same group of student allies expressed their ideas about allyship in sharply contrasting ways in individual ‘moving’ interviews and in a workshop. This contrast was puzzling and unsettling, more like an icy, spiky ‘glitter’ than a warm glow. The paper uses the metaphor of the snow globe to describe the meandering pathways opened up by this event, as an illustration of attending to affective moments that disrupt and go beyond traditional practices of research. This article, as a whole, responds to the challenge that post-qualitative inquiry can act as a filter that divides who is ‘in the know’ in research communities and offers a novice researcher’s reflections on the trials and possibilities of attempting such an inquiry.
This article engages critical autoethnography and prose poetic inquiry to chronicle my crossing of geographical and educational borders in Singapore, Shanghai and Melbourne. By poeticizing key events in my academic career, such as completing my creative practice PhD and moving overseas to teach English, I adopt a qualitative poetic method of writing on the borders, in the in-between, as a caring and ethical writing practice of making connections between diverse things, to close the gap between Us and Them. This is autoethnography as world making in the transcultural in-between. It is a poetic inquiry of border crossing and world making as transcultural superpower.
How might we sustain engagement in critical qualitative research in times of heightened risk and uncertainty? How do we remain connected to the communities we serve? What processes sustain ourselves and each other as we work? This collaborative autoethnography explores three ways we respond to these questions: First, through sustaining caring dialogue that invites us to feel part of – and invested in – each other’s everyday entanglements in ways that we previously had not; second, through participation in supportive autoethnography communities that offer a quality of response, engagement, and relationship that we have found to be rare in academic culture; and third, by engaging in multimedia arts-based forms of inquiry which offer an emotional uplift alongside critical work. For us, aesthetic forms open channels for joy and pleasure, alongside activism and critique. Humour co-exists with sorrow, safety alongside threat.
This piece stages an encounter between myth and metaphor, positioning Black poetics as an intervention on the Human project and a practice of rewriting the world. Centering poiesis , the creative act of bringing into existence that which otherwise did not exist, the work unfolds through rhythm, memory, and aesthetic experimentation as modes of worldmaking. Drawing on Black feminist auto/ethnography, the piece engages the body and self as sites of critical emergence, relationality, and possibility. Through this methodological grounding, lived experience becomes both raw material and analytic terrain, where the poetic indexes and interrupts the constraints of the present while gesturing toward otherwise futures. Refusing disciplinary coherence, the piece pulls the poetic and analytic into orbit through engagement with Black feminist and Black diasporic thinkers and artists. In doing so, the piece advances Black poetics not simply as representation, but as an epistemological and aesthetic practice for imagining and inhabiting otherwise worlds.
In his later works, and in his calls for the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Norman K. Denzin repeatedly called on qualitative scholars to use their work to advance activism and social justice in the midst of almost constant global crises—war, famine, upheaval, revolution, climate change, political division, strife of all stripes. In this autoethnographic essay, I search for ways to respond to the current troubled, turbulent moment in our collective history. Can autoethnography work as counterforce to the rise of totalitarianism? Can we write into and through the crisis we are engulfed in?
The respondent to the 2025 Autoethnography Special Interest Group (SIG) session at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), offers brief commentary on the potency of the panel. At the same time, he signals the reader to a more extended response/reaction to the panel published in the International Review of Qualitative Inquiry immediately after the performance panel. The author uses the constructs of “activist affect” and “activist effects” as meaningful tools to reinforce the importance of the panel (and panelist) to inspire critical response through qualitative inquiry as activism.
