By IASSIST Professional Development Committee | March 5, 2026
The Qualitative Social Science and Humanities Data Interest Group (QSSHDIG) is pleased to announce the return of our speaker series on the practice of qualitative data analysis.
This semester we’re pleased to welcome presenters who will share their experiences and insight into doing qualitative work with a variety of data types and methods. The series aims to bring together qualitative researchers across disciplines to see the variety of approaches to working with qualitative data, a process that is often invisible to the reader of published researchers and a challenge for new researchers to learn.
All presentations are offered online and will be recorded for the IASSIST YouTube channel. If you have any questions about the presentation series, please contact Jess Hagman jhagman ( at )illinois.edu.
The series is offered in collaboration with the IASSIST Professional Development Committee.
The following workshops are offered this spring:
Visual Methods for Multimodal Analysis: Expanding Critical Approaches to Qualitative Research
Angela Wiseman, North Carolina State University
Marva Cappello, San Diego State University
Jennifer D. Turner, University of Maryland
- Monday, March 23, 2026
- 12:00pm-1:30pm CST
- See time in your time zone
- Register
Building on frameworks and approaches from our book, Critical Visual Methods to Advance Racial Justice in Educational Research, this session examines the various ways scholars can use visual methods to understand multimodal artifacts. We focus on how various analytical approaches open new possibilities for interpreting the complex, layered texts that contemporary researchers encounter. Specifically, we will take a single data set from a trauma-informed art and writing program with refugee youth and analyze it through three critical visual methodologies. The program created space for adolescents to explore their racial, cultural, and social identities through multimodal expression at a community organization serving refugee youth. By applying three different analytical approaches to the same youth-created artifacts, that include writing, art, and oral description, we will reveal how methodological choices influence research findings and interpretations. Showcasing multiple approaches offers researchers practical insight into the affordances and constraints of various critical visual methods, helping them make informed decisions about which approaches best serve their research questions and the communities they work with. Our goal is to demystify critical visual analysis and provide a transparent, accessible model for conducting rigorous multimodal research with minoritized youth.
Thanking the World
Manika Lamba, University of Oklahoma
- Monday, April 13, 2026
- 9:00-10:30am CST
- See time in your time zone
- Register
Since the 1990s, research on acknowledgment sections in scientific papers has gained momentum, yet a major hurdle remains—data availability. This challenge is even greater for theses and dissertations, where large-scale analysis has been historically difficult. In this talk, I will share my ongoing research into these often-overlooked texts, revealing what they tell us about academic collaboration and support networks. I will also discuss my efforts to build a human-annotated dataset, enriching metadata using large language models for dissertation data, and finally sharing my progress and introducing a “new” open-source tool for quantitative coding.
Qualitative Wayfinding: Dissertation Reflections on Poststructural Analysis of Academic Library Value Discourse
Nicole Pagowsky, University of Arizona
- Thursday, April 23, 2026
- 10:00-11:00am CST
- See time in your time zone
- Register
Qualitative research is flexible and allows the researcher to deeply engage with the context and nuance of their data. However, for many qualitative methodologies and methods, there is little guidance and the researcher can feel lost. The presenter for this session has used the qualitative methodology of poststructural discourse analysis for her dissertation research on “library value” discourse in academic libraries. Foucault (1972) essentially states that the work of poststructural discourse analysis is uncomfortable, and the researcher will not get reassurance or confirmation of success. In this session, the presenter will affirmatively attest to this experience and will share her journey of wayfinding through a confusing and exciting foray into poststructural methodologies. Using Taguette, Zotero, and Google docs in combination for data analysis, the presenter will also reflect on how our QDA technology can structure our thinking and how to consider these limitations. Additionally, she will share her thought process on using pseudonyms and what considerations should be wrapped up within insider expertise for studying marginalized professional fields.