How do we make sense of the worlds we study? How do we move from experiences, conversations and artefacts to interpretations, understandings and insights?

Various notable scholarships have offered distinct answers to these questions in response to what they perceived to be the analytic shortcomings of the time.

For some, this was a matter of thinking differently. Marx countered idealism by historically, socially and materially situating ideas, with a focus on the contradictory relations that shaped them. Through genealogy, Foucault dismissed distinctions between the discursive and non-discursive by reconstructing alternative histories of the present social order.

Others have offered more practical recommendations. Advocating a grounded theory, Glaser and Strauss sought to counter armchair theorising by centring iterative first-hand experience in the generation of qualitative knowledge, untainted by the preconceptions of existing literatures and concepts.

Critiquing the “anything goes” nature of qualitative interpretation, Braun and Clarke attempted to demarcate a thematic analysis recipe so that researchers could clearly specify their steps and assumptions. These scholars and many more have proposed distinct solutions to the challenge of understanding our worlds.

Qualitative research is, at its heart, an endeavour of meaning-making. Through many different forms of qualitative engagement, from archival research to performance-based methods, we seek to understand how people give meaning to their worlds. As researchers, we are continuously making those worlds newly meaningful through our processes of interpretation, selection, connection, imagination and judgement.

This meaning-making is rarely straightforward. Qualitative researchers work with complexity, contradiction and uncertainty. We interpret accounts that may themselves be interpretations, we encounter meanings that shift across contexts and relationships, and we make analytical decisions that are inextricable from our own experiences, assumptions and positions. This raises important questions about what counts as understanding, how our interpretations come into existence, mutate, solidify or fall apart, and how the resulting meanings might be made to matter differently.

The 2027 Qualitative Research Symposium invites researchers from all disciplines and methodological traditions to explore how qualitative researchers make meaning.

We welcome contributions that critically and creatively consider the processes through which qualitative researchers interpret, understand and represent the social world. We are particularly interested in work that challenges assumptions about what qualitative analysis should look like, or that explores the possibilities and limits of meaning-making in qualitative research.

Conference information

QRS 2027 is for anyone interested in qualitative research and scholarship. It is a friendly environment for qualitative experts, novices and everyone in-between with an enthusiasm for qualitative research methods. We aim to present the cutting-edge of qualitative methods, alongside friendly workshops run by our affiliates.

The conference will be held in-person only.

Registration will open in December.

Registration rates:

1-day: £40.00

2-day: £65.00 - 75.00 (concession rates for University of Bath staff and PhD students)

Registration includes coffee, tea and cake, as well as two catered lunches.

Key dates

Submission deadline: Friday 20 November 2026
Author notification: Friday 27 November 2026
Registration opens: December 2026

Themes

We encourage contributors to reflect on and consider their past, current, or future work in relation to the following overarching theme of making meaning.

Contributions across all academic disciplines are welcome, as are theoretically inspired, methodologically oriented, and empirically grounded inquiries that link to these overlapping themes:

Exploring how qualitative researchers do, could and should make meaning.

Exploring how qualitative researchers move from data, experiences and encounters towards interpretation and understanding.
Examining the role of creativity, intuition, imagination and reflexivity in qualitative analysis.
Exploring different ways of interpreting qualitative materials, including textual, visual, sensory, embodied and digital forms of data.

Asking critical questions about qualitative interpretation and understanding.

Questioning what counts as a convincing, rigorous or legitimate qualitative interpretation.
Exploring ambiguity, uncertainty, contradiction and complexity in qualitative meaning-making.
Considering how researchers’ positionalities, relationships and commitments shape what (and whose) meanings become visible.
Interrogating the politics and ethics of interpretation: who gets to make meaning, whose interpretations count and what happens when meanings conflict?

Using empirical examples to explore approaches to qualitative meaning-making.

Sharing a case study of how you developed, adapted or experimented with an approach to qualitative interpretation.
Discussing a challenge, failure or unexpected discovery in the process of making sense of qualitative material, and what it taught you.
Sharing creative approaches to qualitative analysis, representation or communication, including experimental, participatory, artistic or digital methods.
Exploring how we can teach, learn and develop the creative and interpretive capacities involved in qualitative research.

Submission formats

Traditional talk

15-minute talk followed by 5 minutes for questions.

Symposium

Symposia should consist of 3-4 presentations (each lasting no more than 15/20 minutes) aligned under a common theme. Each symposium should also include a Q&A or discussion at the end. Proposals should indicate who will be chairing the session.

Lightning presentations

Lightning presentations will last no more than 5 minutes and will be grouped with other submissions of a common theme. They are an opportunity to showcase new research, methods or perspectives. Each lightning presentation will be followed by a 5-minute Q&A.

Submission guidelines

Please submit your abstract via this form.

All submissions need to include the following:

Single-presenter submission (either a 15-minute or 5-minute talk)

Paper title
Presentation format (either 15-minute traditional talk or 5-minute lightning talk)
Author(s) and affiliated university or employer, and contact information
Symposium theme(s) to which paper relates
Abstract of no more than 250 words