16th Annual Conference on Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies

Keynote Speakers

Locally Deep and Globally Wide? Theorizing Participation Research Across sites for Struggle and Possibility: Researching with Youth in Schools, Prisons, and on the Streets
Michelle Fine
Michelle Fine is Professor of Social/Personality Psychology at the City University of New York. Professor Fine teaches and has written extensively on qualitative methods. She has continuously been involved in deep reflective dialogues on the nature of combining qualitative and quantitative evidence in her research, research always centered on social justice. In her deep engagement in participatory research, especially with youth, Michelle Fine combines a strong commitment to not only her scholarship but to writing for policy and to activism as well. Fine engages in innovative research to find ethical ways of involving and representing participants and has continued to push the discussions regarding the power, obligations, and responsibilities of social science research.

Learning to Speak Out in a Sex Education Group: Working Across the Borders of Race and Class in an Urban Magnet School
Lois Weis
Lois Weis is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Professor Weis invites us into the site of an abstinence-based sex education group situated in an urban magnet school. Working across the borders of race and social class, urban youth struggle to make sense of and at the same time contest the suffocating depiction of urban youth in the society at large. In this year-long ethnographic study, Weis troubles her own role in the project. Issues such as who speaks for whom, what it means to write stories, and what do we do when "others" are so negatively portrayed in our data will be addressed. Working within and against contact zones, Lois argues that qualitatively based advocacy research unleashes its own set of dilemmas.

From Frederick Douglass to Tupac: "Fugitive Literacy" and its Insights for Inquiry and Academic Identity
Shuaib Meacham
Shuaib Meacham is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Instruction in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. His research aims to develop and apply insights from diverse cultural knowledge domains and literacy traditions in particular to address educational challenges broadly conceived. Most recently, his research has carefully documented African American community based literacy practices forming thematic continuum from the slave narratives to hip hop. Shuaib is also a "spoken word" poet who uses hip hop and other popular cultural forms to help teachers make connections between their instruction and the informal knowledge competencies of their students. He presently lives in Wilmington Delaware with his wife Karen, and his daughters Aisha (13) and Karis (2).

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