As we begin a new academic year, I want to extend a warm welcome back to the CQ community—and a special welcome to those joining us for the first time.
Many people first come to the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research (CQ) seeking guidance on a particular study, methodology, or research question. What they often encounter is a broader conversation about how to think with theory and make sense of how the conditions in which we live and work shape the questions we ask, the knowledges we produce, and who benefits from them.
Over the past year, I have developed a deeper appreciation for the diverse intellectual commitments that animate CQ’s courses, seminars, mentorship, and programs of research. Learners across different life and career stages, educators, and research collaborators bring different ways of knowing into conversation, with a concern for how knowledge might contribute to well-being, meaningful change, and sustaining life in its many forms. These commitments can be difficult to sustain amid pressures for ever greater academic productivity, declining public investment in higher education, and growing political polarization, including the rise of authoritarian and fascist politics globally as well as close to home. These conditions make spaces where we can remain curious, ask difficult questions, learn across differences, and continue thinking together all the more important.
I hope to explore some of these ideas at my Eakin-Hoffmann Chair Lecture on September 17, “What Questions Are Possible? Challenging Epistemic Ignorance Through Critical Qualitative Inquiry.” Drawing on my current research on border(ing) practices in child protection, I consider how forms of “not knowing,” often rooted in colonial histories, can become embedded in institutional practices and perpetuate systemic racism without accountability. Forms of everyday bordering, for example, can frame some parents and caregivers with precarious immigration status as unsuitable to care for their children, even when there are no documented child protection concerns. This work has led me to think more broadly about how the questions we ask—including what constitutes child abuse—are shaped by what we know, what we do not know, and what we have learned to consider relevant to our work.
As we begin the year, I invite you to take part in CQ’s classes, workshops, and seminars as spaces that foster curiosity and dialogue, where we can learn across differences and ask questions that may lie just beyond what we currently imagine to be possible. For me, critical qualitative inquiry can be part of this work: questioning what has come to be taken for granted, bringing different ways of knowing into dialogue, and imagining other ways of relating and sustaining life. As Denise Ferreira da Silva has emphasized, however, “we cannot stay in the work of critique, but we must go through critique to get to the work” (cited in la paperson, 2017, p. 43). In this sense, I see critical qualitative inquiry as a practice of world-making—not only critiquing the worlds and ways of knowing we inhabit, but asking what other worlds and ways of being in relationship we might make possible together.
I look forward to the conversations ahead.
Rupaleem Bhuyan, PhD
Director, Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research
Eakin-Hoffmann Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research
Further reading
- la paperson. (2017). A Third University Is Possible. University of Minnesota Press.
- Ferreira da Silva, D. (2018). Hacking the subject: Black feminism and refusal beyond the limits of critique. philoSOPHIA, 8(1), 19–41. https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2018.0001
