FEATURED SPEAKERS

Jean M. Bartunek (Boston College)

Professor Bartunek is known throughout the United States for her innovative contributions to problems of organizational change and her novel forms of research, including insider / outsider approaches and knowledge transfer between academics and practitioners.

She is associate editor of Advances in Qualitative Organizational Research, as well as a member of the editorial boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and Field Methods.

Her most recent book is "Organizational and educational change: The life and role of a change agent group" (Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 2003), in which she analyzes the story of a group of teachers that created change in a Network of Independent Schools. The group's focus was on empowerment and professional development for teachers in the network.

Elizabeth St. Pierre (University of Georgia)

Elizabeth St. Pierre is Associate Professor at the University of Georgia in the Department of Language Education. Her research brings critical, feminist, and post-structural theories to bear on a range of interests: reading/writing/language theories of secondary English education; the reading practices of adult expert readers; literacy practices in alternative sites, especially adult women’s book clubs; the construction of subjectivity; and qualitative research methodology. She has published in journals such as Qualitative Inquiry, Educational Researcher, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. She co-edited a book, Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education (2000, Routledge) and has a chapter in the forthcoming Handbook on Qualitative Research, 3^rd Ed.

Gary Shank (Duquesne University)

Gary Shank has been active in qualitative research and semiotic theory in education for over 25 years. He is the author of Qualitative Research: A Personal Skills Approach (2002) from Prentice Hall, as well as the forthcoming Mastering Educational Research Literacy: From Consumer to Critic. He has written over 50 articles and given over 100 presentations at national and international conferences. He was an NIH Fellow at the University of Toronto and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Surrey. Currently, his research concentrates on expanding modes, opportunities, and methods for doing qualitative research, and he also studies learning in informal settings. At the Albany conference he will talk about: "What's the Big Idea? or How Qualitative Research Expands the Art of Empirical Inquiry."