Close
“Exploring progress: qualitative health research through crisis, disruption and emergence”.
Than you to everyone who presented, attended, sponsored, and organised the 2024 conference that took place on the 28th and 29th February 2024. This was a virtual conference with a pre-conference in-person workshop day held at University College London a few weeks before (16th of February).
Conference theme
The QHRN organises biennial international conferences to allow emerging and experienced researchers from within and outside the UCL community to present, experiment with, and learn about qualitative theory, methods, and writing.
For our sixth conference, we turned our attention to what we have learned through crisis and continued disruption, and how this has the potential to aid understanding and inform progress in the field of qualitative health research. This conference embraced the learnings that have arisen in response to ongoing significant political, social and societal disruptions and their impact on human relationships, healthcare services, as well as political and ethical based values.
By focusing on emergence as a lens to understand the challenges and uncertainty we are facing in our work, the conference theme was designed to address questions on how we creatively proceed, and how the variety of responses might align on a spectrum between success and failure. In this way we built a platform for critical reflection and discussion on the complexities that impact us as a global research community.
We had just under 200 people register from the conference who came from across 19 countries! See the map below for all the countries where attendees were based.
Conference keynote speakers
We hosted four brilliant keynote speakers including:
- Professor Jennie Popay (Lancaster University) who presented the talk "Critical Qualitative (Public) Health Equity Research: reviewing the present, re-imagining the future".
- Dr Laura Sheard (University of York) who discussed "Telling a story or reporting the facts: Why is descriptive analysis often favoured over interpretative analysis in health research?"
- Dr Sohail Jannesari (Kings College London and Brighton & Sussex Medical School) spoke on "Imaginative Roots: Cultivating Decolonial Methods"
- Dr Alison Thomas (Queen Mary University of London) will discussed "Navigating the tensions of researching patient experience in participatory healthcare design"
Oral presentations
Accepted abstracts were published by BMJ Open. These can be viewed via this link: UCL’s Qualitative Health Research Network Conference Abstracts 2024.
Conference programme
Pre-conference workshops
Our pre-conference workshops was held in-person at University College London on Friday 16th February 2024!
A huge thank you to everyone who organised, hosted, and attended the workshop day! It was a wonderful oppotunity to network, discuss and critically reflect on some of the key elements of qualitative health research, and get involved interactive sessions on innovative approaches.
