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This one-day workshop explores critical, creative and practice-based approaches to archiving and sharing qualitative data.
This one-day workshop, Critical Approaches to Open Qualitative Data: Archiving, Practices and Possibilities, explores critical, creative, and practice-based approaches to archiving and sharing qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences.
Bringing together speakers working across qualitative, feminist, community, and experimental archival practices, the workshop focuses on archives, datasets, repositories, and collections developed through research projects. The event will include informal “show and tell” reflections on archives, datasets, and emerging approaches to data sharing, and collaborative discussion.
Themes and Questions
Throughout the day, participants will explore questions such as:
- What motivates the creation of qualitative archives or datasets?
- How are these projects being built in practice? What decisions shape whether to work within existing infrastructures or to seek alternatives?
- How are ethical questions negotiated in practice, including the kinds of ‘care-full’ risks involved in sharing, withholding, or curating data?
- Whose labour sustains these projects, and (how) is it recognised?
- What challenges arise in the creation and maintenance of collections of qualitative data?
- What infrastructures, platforms, and tools are being assembled, and what kinds of support or networks are needed for this work?
- How do these projects rework or challenge dominant models of open data?
- What conceptual resources are helping to make these projects possible, and do they emerge within or beyond disciplinary frameworks?
- In what ways do these practices unsettle or rework usual research practices?
Aims
The workshop aims to:
- foster exchange between researchers experimenting with alternative data practices
- develop critical perspectives on “openness” in qualitative research
- highlight under-recognised forms of archival labour and infrastructure
- build connections for future collaborations, networks, and events
By reframing data sharing as a site of critical intervention and theoretical innovation, we seek to imagine more just, reflexive, and accountable forms of data stewardship.
The workshop is open to researchers, archivists, librarians, and practitioners interested in qualitative data, archival practice, and critical approaches to openness.