Call for Proposals: AERA 2019 Qualitative Research SIG

For those readers who conduct qualitative research in the field of education, the following conference may be of interest. The American Educational Research Association sponsors many Special Interest Groups (SIG), one of which is the Qualitative Research SIG. In 2019, the annual AERA meeting will be in Toronto, Canada. See the call for proposals below.

AERA 2019 Qualitative Research SIG Call for Proposals
April 5-9, 2019
Toronto, Canada

Conference Theme:
Leveraging Education Research in a “Post-Truth” Era: Multimodal Narratives to Democratize Evidence
Submission Deadline: July 23, 2018 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time

Call Details:

AERA’s 2019 theme urges us to rethink the purpose, practice, and value of educational research in an era of “post-truth.” We are called on to consider:

…how, in a so-called “post-truth” political era when evidence is shunted and emotion is exploited, can we make our research matter to lessen inequality and increase educational opportunities? How do we have an impact when our most conscientious methodology—measuring, understanding, and communicating material and experiential “realities”—is increasingly discredited by those who construct alternate truths to serve their agendas? Furthermore, how can our findings speak to and of emotionssuch as fear and anxiety, which are regularly scapegoated onto the most marginalized individuals rather than attributed to their economic and social causes?

The conference call advocates multi-modal, interdisciplinary, and cross-boundary scholarship in which scholars work across “divides to learn from each other and bring comprehensive, systematic evidence to bear on critical issues in educational policy and practice” to address sub-themes such as:

1. The relationship between a “post-truth” politics and the exacerbation of racial, class, and gender inequality in education policy and practice from pre-K through higher education.
2. Strategies to address the marginalization of the empirical research and knowledge of our field to ensure that it informs the development of professionals and their practice.
3. The relationship between the measures used to evaluate students, educators, schools, universities and workforce development in a standardized-test-driven system and the evidence on developmental psychology, culturally relevant ways of knowing, and the racial hierarchy that too often defines our field.

Given the theme and sub-themes, we welcome submissions that consider the possibilities of and for qualitative research in a post-truth era. Particularly, we invite creative, multi-modal (e.g., video, audio, text, speech, performance) submissions that work against and across disciplinary and epistemological divides to, in the words of the AERA call, “reimagine education research, given our ‘post-truth’ context, as the sum of our parts…” and “to empower a populist movement of a new kind—one that demands a caring, supportive, and challenging education from early childhood through adulthood as a basic human right.”

Specifically, the Qualitative Research SIG invites papers that foreground discussions of qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research includes a wide range of methodological, theoretical, and analytic approaches to education research, including but not limited to interpretive, critical, post-structural, and posthumanist frameworks and the multitude of approaches produced from working at these intersections.

The Qualitative Research SIG strongly encourages submissions that emphasize methodologically innovative approaches, which re-imagine and expand how qualitative inquiry might serve to produce scholarship and function (at the level of methodology) in the “post-truth” era, to imagine an educational research we do not yet know.

Submissions might consider: What is the role of qualitative research in a “post-truth” era? How can qualitative research shed light on the emergence, power, and politics of “post-truth” and right-wing populist movements? How can qualitative research witness, document, and speak to the experiences of marginalized communities and knowledges in a “post-truth” era? How can qualitative research “lessen inequality and increase educational opportunities?” What can qualitative research reveal about the possible trajectories of resistance to the oppressions of “post-truth” and right-wing populist movements? How might qualitative research imagine the possibilities of and for “truth” and what a “post-truth” era might enable? How might qualitative researchers respond to the call for “cross-boundary,” “interdisciplinary,” “reality-based” educational research? What is “evidence” in qualitative research and how can qualitative research inform critical issues in educational policy and practice? How might qualitative research take-up, explore, address, historicize, document, and/or theorize pervasive “post-truth” emotions such as fear and anxiety? What methodologies might be (re)envisioned in a “post-truth” era? We also encourage submissions that challenge methodological orthodoxy and help us transgress and push the boundaries of qualitative inquiry. While proposals that address the yearly theme are encouraged, high quality proposals on all topics that make contributions to qualitative inquiry are welcomed.

We invite scholars from all divisions and SIGs to submit proposals. The AERA online submission system is now open, and details about the formal call for proposals and the July 23, 2018 (11:59 PM Pacific Time) deadline can be found at

http://www.aera.net/EventsMeetings/tabid/10063/Default.aspx.

Proposals for papers, posters, roundtables, and symposia/sessions are invited, and innovative session designs are encouraged. In order to accommodate flexibility in program decisions, please select all of the formats in which you would be willing to present your work. Every year there are far more spots available for poster presentations and roundtable papers than individual papers and symposia. Please also note that ‘working group roundtables’ and ‘structured poster sessions’ count as symposia (even though they are named to suggest otherwise), and thus compete against numerous other proposed sessions for a small number of slots. Both paper and symposia/session submissions must not identify the author(s) and/or discussant(s) in any way.

Please share this call for proposals with all who may be interested. The number of proposals and the size of our active membership determine the number of sessions allocated to each SIG. Please consider our SIG as a place to share your work and renew your SIG membership when you submit your proposals. Encourage
students and colleagues to join our SIG, too. All information about the annual meeting can be found at

http://www.aera.net.

Candace R. Kuby & Jennifer R. Wolgemuth
AERA Qualitative Research SIG Program Co-Chairs