Dear SQIP attendees,

We are delighted to welcome you to Duquesne University for the 2026 Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology annual conference. Since its founding in the mid-1960’s, the Duquesne University Department of Psychology has been a fruitful and generative home for qualitative methods in psychology. Internationally recognized as a center for phenomenological psychology, our department foregrounds the articulation of psychology as a distinctly human science. Our faculty and students, including the graduate students in our APA-accredited Ph.D. program in clinical psychology, bring together insights and approaches from across the social sciences and humanities while developing new approaches to the study of psychological life in the context of our lived worlds. We’re glad to have you join us in these endeavors! The city of Pittsburgh is a vibrant place with a long and interesting history, and we very much hope you will enjoy your time here with us.  If you have any questions – about the campus, about our department, about the city, or anything else – please feel free to reach out to anyone on our conference committee. We also have a number of volunteers – you’ll know them by the ribbons on their badges – who are helping out with the conference, and you can always come to them with questions as well. We’ve also put a lot of information up on the conference website, so that is another good place to look for answers.

            Across the program, you’ll see work that pushes qualitative psychology forward by staying close to lived experience — from phenomenology and narrative inquiry to arts‑based and community‑rooted methods. We’ve tried to bring together sessions that create space for reflection on the conditions under which qualitative work is done today including the tensions, possibilities, and responsibilities of our work. Our hope is that the mix of keynotes, symposia, papers, and roundtables gives you room to think and connect in ways that feel true to the spirit of SQIP and to the long Duquesne tradition of qualitative inquiry. We are honored and happy to be hosting the 2026 SQIP conference, and to be continuing the long history of lively conversations about qualitative methods in psychology that is always unfolding here. We hope you have a wonderful time!

Sincerely,

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SQIP Conference Committee

Lori Koelsch - Local Committee Chair

Elizabeth Nickrenz - Local Committee Associate Chair

Séamus Power - Program Committee Chair

Local Committee Members: Will Adams, Sonakshi Bidyadhar, Mackenzie Farbo, Manisha Nagpal, Liz Peinkos, Sophia Shieh, Jayani Velsamy, Kris Wu

Program Committee Members: Kim Nguyen-Nalpas, Jeanne Mareck, Leo Kiralla, Edward Scott, Jr., Rashelle Litchmore, Sophia Shieh.