Critical Beginnings: Reflections and Refractions Through Seven Years of ICQI

These three scholars met during the First International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (QI) in 2005 when they were put on a panel together for autoethnography. They understand QI as a space of compassionate scholarship. In their text, they allude to Norman Denzin’s performance of compassion and his intellectual dream that, accurately, has generated not only the beginning but, more importantly, the continuation and development of such a space. The authors understand their work at QI as personally and politically transformational, allowing a continual critical engagement of how meaning is made in contexts with others. Using their own journeys at QI as the theorizing tool, they conceptualize QI as a radicalizing space of pedagogy and scholarship.