This edited collection is an eclectic and provocative volume taken from presentations that reflect the scholarship of the inaugural AQR/ DPR Down Under conference that was held in Cairns in 2011 in Australia. This was a ground-breaking conference that brought together scholars, researchers and practitioners from across Australia, UK, Japan, Italy, Finland, New Zealand, Luxembourg, South Africa, Vietnam, Malaysia, Tanzania and Mexico.The theme of the conference represented at the conference and in this volume was that of: Politicizing Qualitative Research. Delegates presented papers that sought to challenge research practices that too often can delegitimize Other ways of knowing.Confronting, disrupting and resisting the epistemological 'common sense' way of doing research within the academy can be a risky business and is often a fraught and contested endeavor. However, as the papers in this volume illustrate, contestation promises opportunities for re-perceiving, re-interpreting, and productively disrupting the orthodoxies of disciplinarity. 'Many thanks to Ignacio Rojas whose patient assistance and expertise as an artist in designing the cover proved invaluable in bringing this book to print.'

Resisting and re/counting the power of number: The one in the many and the many in the one; The research assistant: Invisible and silenced, exploited and disposable; Conveying the role of evidence in the development, conduct and applications of qualitative research; Developing and enacting an ethical framework and method for cross-cultural research; Gay and Queer coming out into Europe (Part 1): Fragmentary Tales of crossing national/cultural borders; Gay and Queer coming out into Europe (Part 2): Fragmentary Tales of crossing national/cultural borders; Rhizomatics and the arts: Challenging conceptions of rural teaching; Writing 'race' into absence? Post-race theory, global consciousness and reflexivity; How the 'I' sees it: The maker, the researcher and the subject at thejuncture of memory and history; Qualitative inquiry as transformation and agency: The black sheep and workplace mobbing; Ethnography as the (occasional) act of refusing correct knowledge and secure understanding: Three tales from three fields; Managed universities: Vietnam and the West; Presumptuous methodology: Troubling success, failure and research design; The role of artful practice as research to trace teacher epiphanies; The 'conscientious scholar': Balancing the roles of researcher, playwright and daughter; Problematizing racism in education: A comparative analysis of critical race theory and postcolonial theories using autoethnography.