Date:

February 14th, 2025 (GMT)

Organizer:

Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University

Background:

Reflexivity aids relationships between partners, communities and individuals who are part of the research process by identifying the spaces that may be difficult to navigate because of the ‘absences, silences and invisibilities’, but likewise its ‘implications for the research’ that is being conducted (Smith, 2021, x). Similarly, reflexive positionality serves to aid the researcher’s relationship with the people and places they are conducting the research through their reflection of who they are, and how they are seen during the research process.

This symopsium argues for the importance of becoming reflexive researchers and how we share the experiences, practices and negotiations of those we serve to give a voice to - as we as researchers are not separate to the research process. But likewise, we do this to tackle issues of race, discrimination and bias where our positions locate us as researchers of colour, conducting research that is essentially embedded in Western othering.

Goal / Rationale:

This notion of ‘othering’ is what the symopsium would like to address and how reflexivity needs to be reconceptualized to more than just the identification of our intersections. For example, lifelong reflex¬ive positions taken by researchers over the course of their academic career which serve to inform and locate different and varying intersectional posi¬tions and relationships with people, places and their own situated identi¬ties across their own life’s course can influence the lens in which they conduct the research, but likewise their interactions with participants. Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that ‘writing is a part of theorizing and writ¬ing is a part of history’ (Smith, 2021, 30). Therefore, locating our histori¬cal selves and intersectional identities - as researchers - can serve to shed light on the lens we shine on participants and the way in which we inter¬pret and understand their life experiences, but this needs to be more than an add on approach.

The appeal of feminist reflexivity, then, is that it aims to deconstruct power relationships between academics, researchers and participants - those with whom we conduct the research with and the ones conducting the research.

Scope and Information for Participants:

From the vantage point of the social sciences, and historical research methods and approaches, the combination of both history and social science research can be highly useful in locating authority and dismantling hierarchy during the research process through the cultural and historical contexts of everyday experiences - highlighting ‘the world of ordinary experience’, but experiences that can demonstrate how behaviour and values in one society may be dismissed or taken for granted in another.

Topics

Submission

All submitted papers should report original and unpublished work, experimental or theoretical, and are not under consideration for publications elsewhere. All papers should be no less than 4 pages in length and must strictly follow the format of the symposium template. All papers are subject to reviews and edits. Prospective authors are kindly invited to submit full text papers that includes title, abstract, introduction, tables/figures and references. Other styles of papers are not accepted. Please submit your papers in both .doc/.docx AND .pdf formats as attachments via email to sympo_newcastle@icsphs.org by the given deadline. It is unnecessary to submit an abstract in advance.

Paper Template

Dates & Fees

Submission Deadline	February 7, 2025
Symposium Date	February 14, 2025
Notification of Acceptance	7-20 workdays
Registration Fee	USD 450 (cover 6 pages)
Additional Page	USD 40/extra page

Publication

Accepted papers of the symposium will be published in Lecture Notes in Education Psychology and Public Media (Print ISSN 2753-7048), and will be submitted to Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI), Crossref, CNKI, Portico, Google Scholar and other databases for indexing. The situation may be affected by factors among databases like processing time, workflow, policy, etc.

Publication info

This symposium is organized by ICSPHS 2025 and it will independently proceed the submission and publication process

Venue:

Sutherland Building, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne NE1 8ST, Northumbria University, UK

Visa:

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