Initiative for the Cooperation Across the Social Sciences and Humanities
May 20-23, 2015
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Constructing a New Critical Qualitative Inquiry”
The International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) is a large conference of qualitative scholars in the social sciences. We’re inviting humanities scholars with research interests that foster social justice to submit any work that prominently features theorists who haven’t yet had mainstream influence in social science disciplines.
We’re especially interested in the theories of philosophers working in or alongside the continental tradition, philosophers including, but not limited to: Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Lacan, Malabou, Mouffe, Nancy, Nussbaum, Rancière, and Žižek. We aren’t requiring that submissions be explicitly focused on issues taken up by the social sciences.
In the academy, the struggle for social justice can be lonely work. This is all the more daunting when we find ourselves up against entities making use of cooperative efficiency. Namely, we often find ourselves to be lone scholars challenging neoliberal governments aligned with multinational corporations. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Cooperative efficiency is instrumentally valuable. It doesn’t entail that the expertise necessary to achieve an end be located in the single individual. We know that when experts of different crafts work together, their cooperation is able to produce the state of the art in a given technology: No one person, for instance, invents a smartphone. So why, then, must we in the academy insist upon the lone, interdisciplinary expert of all techniques?
We in the social sciences and the humanities have different areas of expertise, and we often find that we’re aimed toward the same goal of social justice. Still, working alone, social science scholars who have influence over policy often encounter theoretical impasses. Humanities scholars, also working by themselves, may have thought beyond such impasses, but they have little influence over policy. Working together, then, makes sense.
To submit an abstract, please click on the link below. Be sure to select the “Humanities Initiative” in the “Submission Track” section.
http://www.icqi.org/home/submission/
For questions, please contact James Salvo at salvo@pitt.edu
