In an era marked by ecological fragility, erosion of democratic institutions, algorithmic governance, social fragmentation, we need to build a qualitative inquiry that confronts the epistemic dogmatism serving dominant hegemonies of knowledge and science. In this context, qualitative inquiry emerges as a vital space for ethical reflection and transformative care based on vulnerability and interdependence in research. Research practices and ethics of care function as forms of world-making, in which ontology, epistemology, and ethics intertwine and intra-act.

This congress proposes a reimagining of research practices through the lens of postfoundational philosophy that does not deny other approaches, but integrates them in an expanded response to contemporary challenges. We trouble extractive, de-localized, and identity-fixed models of inquiry. We propose, instead, exploring the potentials for ethics, care, and research as relational, future-forming, and deeply political practices that affect and are affected by the inseparable making of knowledge and reality. Furthermore, this congress also addresses the need to translate ethical and relational inquiry into socio-political practices and policy-relevant knowledge that challenge systemic inequalities and reshape institutional practices.

1. Postfoundational Methods: Exploring participatory and interdisciplinary approaches that prioritize relationality and empathy in research, over boundaries and borders of methods, theories, and representational desires.
2. Care as a Framework for Social Justice Research: Examining how care ethics can counter systemic inequalities, xenophobia, and technocapitalism.
3. Qualitative Inquiry for Social and Systemic Change: Examining how research and ethics of care can inform activist research and policy-making to counter systemic inequalities, xenophobia, and technocapitalism.
4. Speculative Futures: Imagining alternative political and social structures rooted in relational ontologies and ethics of care, rather than anthropocentric re-searches for identities.