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Reflecting on Autoethnographic and Phenomenological Experiences: A Caregiver's Journeyis a unique critical qualitative inquiry study that uses the author's experience as a caregiver to his wife suffering from dementia as the basis of a critical autoethnography. It explores components of positive caregiving that may be not only melancholic and empirical, but also emotionally painful. The book employs multiple approaches that include critical narrative, phenomenology, autoethnography and experiential writing. Through a phenomenological lens of an insider that includes self- and other-hood, marriage, career, fatherhood, suicide, despair, triple grief, loss, caregiving, cooking, housekeeping, advocating mind reading, and encouraging, a narrative illustrating self-reflection on particular experiences is constructed. These culminating experiences result in first-hand and didactical understandings by the caregiver. Individual, personal, and subjective interpretation of relational happenings are explored. Reflective journaling and observations of the seasons of marital life seek to understand if and how shared experiences transcend multiple contexts and help the reader understand experiences of dementia. Reflecting on Autoethnographic and Phenomenological Experiences: A Caregiver's Journey is a volume that will be invaluable to qualitative inquiry researchers, autoethnographers, and those readers interested in the research of caregiving.

Conditions that could lead to a planetary apocalypse are developing in many categories that are seen by experts from many disciplines as requiring urgent improvement Population growth is outpacing planetary resources, affecting global health and stability. Governance of many countries has failed, resulting in civil unrest, the desperate migrations of many populations, and brush-fire wars. Environmental damage caused by the appetites not only of the U.S. and developed nations but by emerging giants such as China and India will have a global impact on air, water, basic sanitation, food security, and desertification. The current world population of 6.75 billion is predicted to grow to between 9 and 10 billion by the year 2050. As population density grows, the failure of governments to bring decent living conditions to the massively increased populations of many areas contributes to anger and unrest. The possibility also grows daily of a human apocalypse initiated by nuclear bombs in the hands of dangerously aberrant forces. Adapted from the source document.

The debate over the ongoing explosion of population in the developing countries of the world has become more muted since the 1960s, but the author claims that population pressure is a major cause of the contemporary problems that plague so much of the Third World. He also argues that the widely disparate birthrates around the world threaten the peace of the world, and advocates the diversion of greater resources toward the provision of contraceptives to those countries that are too poor to provide them to their own people. Many impoverished Third World countries are currently doubling their population every twenty to twenty five years, and funds spent on ameliorating the demographic problem would not only reduce much of the misery afflicting these countries but would result in far greater savings in other areas. Adapted from the source document.

Critical Theory is generative for the advancement of subsequent types of progressive theories that seek justice across multiple spectrums of philosophies. Its origin manifested at the Frankfurt School, among a group of privileged White men seeking to eradicate social ills in Germany during World War II while lacking sufficient global experience and understanding to apply the theory to macro injustices. While critical theory did not redress the limitations of the intellectualized vision, the theory was reconceptualized as more encompassing with its forced relocation to the United States, though still limited in its application to the social ills of woman's suffrage and the civil rights movement of Blacks in the United States. In flux, the revised critical theory became propagative. Despite its limitations illustrated here in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Critical Theory gave rise to scholarships that highlight injustices across areas it did not foresee that include race, ethnicity, disability, gender, and anticolonialism. As a result of Critical Theory across modernities, some silenced voices can be heard, despite what some have labeled an exclusionary canon.

This special issue was initiated using ideas and content from the 2023 all-day discussion at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) relating critical qualitative inquiry (CQI) and contemporary issues of social, environmental, and other forms of justice. Definitions and multiple possibilities for CQI were explored. What is CQI? What does it mean for qualitative research? Critique? (Re)Conceptualization? To provide the reader with a feel for the complexity of issues and content discussed along with research initiated through these discussions, the remainder of this introductory article provides (1) a brief history of critical qualitative work, (2) an overview of the critical content introduced in the 2023 all-day session, and (3) a description of the new critical work recently conducted by participants who joined the discussions.