Planting Seeds: A Year of Qualitative Inquiry, Growth, and Transformation
Closing the Year, Rising through Belonging, Identity, Hope, and Resilience
“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.” — Epictetus
Dear qualitative Inquisitors:
There can be no perfect way to conclude the year. This has been a year of endurance, resilience, belonging, inquiry, and being present with difficult questions. While we always hope for more output, more certainty, or cleaner, sharper endings, I close this year with critical reflexivity, humility in positionality, and sincere gratitude for what was sustained.
Thank you so much for being here. I didn’t want to leave that until the end. I want to express my sincere gratitude to you all for connecting, reading, reflecting, engaging, and allowing this space to remain one of careful thought rather than rushed conclusions.
Because The Qualitative Inquisition has operated as a monthly edition since its inception in 2024, I wanted to share a brief retrospective of the 2025 posts, listed in reverse chronological order:
The Politics of Visibility: Reflections on a Memorable Academic Pilgrimage
On the Road to Rising: From Self-Empowerment to Community Empowerment
Rise Beyond the Margins: A Call for Community, Solidarity, and Inclusive Scholarship
Reflections on Palestine: Addressing Silence in Academic Spaces
Fieldnotes from a Sacred Journey: Practicing Qualitative Reflection in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Beyond the Lens: How Our Identities Drive Qualitative Inquiry
I want to highlight one post I am especially proud of: Reflections on Palestine: Addressing Silence in Academic Spaces. This piece grapples with the challenge of maintaining integrity, courage, dignity, and a commitment to human rights when advocating for Indigenous and oppressed populations, and the responsibilities we have as intellectuals. It contributes to the ongoing conversation I intend to engage more deeply with, going forward.
If you would like to know more about how to support Palestine, Justice 4 Palestine is a fantastic resource provided by a new paid subscriber. (Thank you, shout out to Aliyah!).
In parallel, several Medium essays this year directly intersected with my academic journey and the intellectual commitments of Qi, including reflections on belonging, mental health in academia, gendered visibility, and voice. These longer pieces allowed me to explore ideas that sit alongside — and sometimes spill beyond — the boundaries of a newsletter format.
It is why I will continue to write on Medium as well, and share the relevant pieces here on Substack. There are some delayed and pending, especially those relevant to the PhD, academic journey, and qualitative methods, which I look forward to sharing soon! Here is a list of some honorable mentions from this past year:
Reclaiming “Belonging” in “DEI”: Presenting at APSA TLC 2024 — Beyond Tokenism and Toward Radical Change in Academia.
Surviving Academia, Sustaining Hope: A World Mental Health Day Reflection
Rising Beyond the Margins: Fighting for Belonging & Inclusion in Academia
I want to once again thank everyone who supported RISE BEYOND MARGINS: Empowering Inclusive Scholarship, my community-powered crowdfunding campaign. That support made it possible to continue showing up — intellectually, creatively, and professionally — during a demanding and prolonged post-PhD transition.
Please feel free to learn more about the ongoing campaign HERE.
On YouTube, I shared my reflections from the Political Networks Conference at Harvard University and expressed gratitude to contributors.
I plan to update this post with my APSA 2025 Video Reflections in a few days (still working on the edits), so feel free to return for that link update!
These reflections are added to my PhD Journey Series on my YouTube Channel. I look forward to sharing more videos and connecting with Qi more through my growing YouTube experience in the near future. Feel free to subscribe there as well!
“The willingness to show up changes us. It makes us a little braver each time.” - Dr. Brene Brown
Looking Ahead in 2026
One of the highlights of this year was launching the Qi Fieldnotes Series. While I had hoped to complete it before the year’s end, the combined effort of the academic and job markets demanded a slower pace. A pace which I hope to speed up in 2026. I’m looking forward to completing the series before or throughout the month of Ramadan in the coming year (February-March), marking one year since that critical formative journey.
In 2026, I also hope to continue building resources for subscribers, including workshops and webinars, and to advance my book project connected to qualitative methods and fieldwork — a long-term extension of the ethical and methodological questions this newsletter proposes, and within the context of Pakistan.
This year began with my first campus interview and teaching demonstration, where I stood at the board — expo marker in hand — discussing the complexities of foreign aid. It felt natural. The belonging. That sense of authentic belonging took me through conference presentations at teaching and learning events, fieldwork reflections, a memorable pilgrimage during Ramadan to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to the Academic pilgrimage in Vancouver, Canada, continued writing and publishing, and sustained engagement with the academic job market.
Even as traditional doors remained slow to open, I kept building — crossing milestones in writing, presenting at PolNet and APSA, submitting work for peer review, and continuing to show up for scholarship, advocacy, and community.
The post-PhD transition is still unfolding. But this year became another season of planting seeds in a long game that values depth over speed. If this resonates with you, please feel free to leave a comment!
Reflection Prompts
This year asked many of us to continue showing up even when recognition was imbalanced or nearly absent.
Where did you continue your work, learning, or care for others despite uncertainty, invisibility, or delayed validation?
What sustained you in those moments, the moments when differences were apparent, and what did you learn about yourself by continuing anyway?
Belonging is often discussed as an outcome, but this year, it was emphasized as a necessary, daily, intentional practice.
In what ways did you choose authenticity over accommodation this year, even when it involved a risk?
How did that choice reshape your understanding of belonging…to a discipline, a community, or yourself?
I hope these types of reflections challenge us to think critically beyond our own worldviews here in the Qi Community. As we move into the new year, I invite you to sit with these questions. This is not to overwhelm or confuse us, or to feel a need to resolve them, but to notice what additional questions and issues they bring to the surface.
"Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another." - Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Thank you to the Qi Community
Thank you to all paid and unpaid subscribers for being part of this space. I look forward to continuing this journey with you, and I am very excited about all the content to be shared with you in 2026.
I’m also grateful to those who have joined me in my creative newsletter, Sword Dispatch: The WKQ Letters. You can check out my curated list of other types of articles from the past year in Sword Dispatch, from today’s edition, “On the Rise: A Year of Transformation,” HERE.
As a subscriber to one newsletter, you can also have access to any of the free content I share from the other. Together, with Sword Dispatch, the Qi community reached 100 subscribers this month, including new paid supporters who joined around Giving Tuesday. For a brief moment, I was “Rising in Education” at #81.
This means something, especially considering my last post discussing the challenge of Invisibility, particularly as scholars from marginalized communities who discuss critical issues connected to our positionality.
These two spaces reflect different registers of the same commitment to inquiry, reflection, and voice. And it demonstrates the importance of “wholeness” in academic and professional spaces. Starting Sword Dispatch as a home for my creative work this year made my presence on Substack complete. I continue to advocate for owning our stories and walking into our work and communities as whole selves rather than in fragments, a critical and underexamined part of the DEI and Belonging conversation.
I’m deeply grateful for that trust and for the willingness to sustain slow, thoughtful work in a fast, highly saturated, and extractive environment. And I would love any feedback you wish to share along the way!
As the year ends, I move forward with gratitude and resolve, aware that some seasons are for harvest and others for tending what has been gradually taking root. This past year reaffirmed why spaces like The Qualitative Inquisition are so important as places for careful analysis, critical thinking, accountability, and sustained reflection.
The questions presented here about identity, belonging, authentic and indigenous being, power, voice, and responsibility — remain unfinished. They will move with us into the year ahead, where I aim to continue ethical inquiry and to honor the labor and heart this work requires.
Thank you so much, and I hope you stay and continue the journey of qualitative inquiry with me.
Have a very happy New Year!
In Solidarity & Peace,
Dr. Elsa
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Book Recommendation
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire
This final month of 2025’s book recommendation is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a foundational text that reminds us of the ongoing barriers within education. Freire challenges us to see learning as a practice of freedom — one that demands critical consciousness, dialogue, and ethical responsibility from both teachers and learners.
My copy arrived in the mail the day before Christmas Eve. It was a small end-of-year holiday gift to myself, tied to my ongoing reflections on Belonging in Academia.
This book should be a mandatory read for every educator and for anyone working in education in America, especially at a time when education is being stripped of its moral and political courage.
A few months ago, I presented at the APSA Teaching & Learning Conference on mental health in academia as foundational to diversity, equity, inclusion, & belonging. I proposed integrating a trauma-informed lens & arts-based pedagogy, building on methods I presented earlier this year.
I plan to implement these approaches in the classroom, with poetry and painting as core tools, especially in courses on conflict & fragility, where care, empathy, and critical reflexivity become vital in the learning process. I look forward to continue experimenting with these methods here in the Qi Community in the new year!
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Thank you for reading and engaging!
You can learn more about all my work HERE.
Feel free to subscribe to my academic newsletter, The Qualitative Inquisition (Qi), for insights on all things qualitative in the social sciences.
You can also subscribe to my new creative atomic newsletter, Sword Dispatch: The WkQ Letters, for insights on intersectionality, mental health, identity and social justice issues.
Here is my GoFundMe to support my community-powered educational campaign: HERE.
You can donate specifically for my paintings HERE. (I will update with more on this soon!)
If you find value in my writing and want to support independent scholars, writers, and artists, you can do so HERE.
Your support helps me continue writing, reflecting, painting, and resisting!
Thank you, I wish you well on your academic, writing, and artistic journey!