ICQI Dancing

For most of this past week I was out of town at the University of Illinois. This was very exciting to me! I drove on roads that I have never driven on, in parts of a state I know very little about. Champaign Urbana, where UI is, is about a 4.5 hour drive from Lansing, and on the way down my friends and I took a little detour to get some candy. Really, there was some construction on 94 and so we went a little different way and just happened to hit a chocolate factory. In addition to the chocolate factory, I realized that instead of playing the alphabet game while on a road trip, because of our detour I could play the "how many tractors cross our path" game (total = 5).

Getting candy. Yes.

The reason I was at UI was because they host a conference every year called the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, ICQI. I was presenting at the conference and was really excited to share the work that I've done with my writing partner Meg. The other two who were part of our panel presentation are in my cohort in HALE, Rob and Aliya. We all presented on using a method called autoethnography to address challenges in higher education. I won't go into detail about our presentation, but I will say that ICQI is a place where many types of research get presented. I joked with my friends that I wanted to make sure I got some ethnographic dancing in while we were there. Despite what folks might think of this conference, it is a great way to learn about methods, and research, and be challenged by new things. (I learned about agential realism. It's, uh, interesting.) And it is a super chill atmosphere to talk about ideas and have a lot of meaningful conversation about interests and passions. Moreover, it's a wonderful place to feel supported and ask questions, particularly for a doc student as myself.