Introduction

The theme for that very first Congress qualitative inquiry and the conservative challenge was positioned as a response to the political and methodological conservatism of the new millennium. The open-ended nature of the qualitative research project leads to a perpetual resistance against attempts to impose a single, umbrella-like paradigm over the entire project. Quantitative and qualitative methods became compatible and researchers could use both in their empirical inquiries. The traditional concepts of narrative, meaning, voice, presence, and representation have also been put under erasure, regarded as pernicious leftovers from the twin ruins of post-positivism and humanistic qualitative inquiry. Materialist feminist ontologies have inspired a new analytics of data analysis, including defractive readings of data. Post-methodologists, post-humanist, post-empirical, and post-qualitative frameworks call for new models of science, second empiricisms, reimagined social sciences, capacious sciences, sciences of diffrance, a science defined by becoming a double science.