Incomplete Research and Unfinished Dr Pepper

New life, again

At the end of May 2014, I traveled to the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, which in my niche of academia was like a six-year old going to Disney World. Instead of Mickey Mouse and princesses, I met the authors of my graduate school textbooks. Instead of thrill rides, I attended generative panel discussions on auto-ethnographic inquiry.

I’d hoped to be presenting research of my own, completed with the help of my undergraduate research assistant. Unfortunately, we scrapped our project after my trip to the emergency room crashed our focus groups and threw off our data collection schedule. The grant committee still thought our travel to the conference, hosted every year by The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was an acceptable use of the funds I’d been awarded.

Like the retreat I’d attended in February, I came away from keynote and breakout sessions with ideas about taking a qualitative inquiry approach to my family’s history. If I looked at the black and white photographs, letters exchanged by three generations of pioneers and soldiers, and turn of the century textbooks, cookbooks, and sewing patterns, what themes would emerge? What might I learn about myself? A creative project was taking shape.