Norman Denzin tributes

Introduction

^* I thank Jim Scheurich for the invitation to contribute these thoughts to QSE.

[email protected]

Norman Denzin, friend, colleague, and mentor to many, many individuals, died on August 6.

Norman did more to validate and support qualitative research, across all academic disciplines, than anyone in the last few decades. In addition, he was a generous friend and mentor to so, so many people. He did his own impressive intellectual work. And he provided several journal and handbook venues for the publication of qualitative research, especially that work that was social justice-oriented.

Rather than have one, longer tribute to Norman, we at QSE decided to ask several of those who worked closely with him. Those who wrote tributes are Michael D. Giardina, James Salvo, Joseph A Naytowhow, Cynthia Dillard, Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, Robert E. Rinehart, Patti Lather, and Liora Bresler.

As I read the eight tributes, there were some obvious themes. First, everyone said he was a kind, considerate person, avoiding the superstar status that he could have claimed. Second, many discuss his mentoring of individuals from literally all over the world. Third, his work with journals and handbooks was highly lauded, as this provided many venues for publishing qualitative work. Fourth, he did his own impressive intellectual work.

Norman, wherever you are or are not, there is absolutely no question that you will be seriously missed by many, many individuals.

The service of Norman K. [email protected]

In the Spring of 2000, while a graduate student at the University of Illinois, myself and four other students undertook a group-style Directed Independent Study (DIS) project led by Norman Denzin. As the sands of time have fallen through the cracks, I recall only that Mary Weems – who would go on to become an award-winning author and playwright—was one of the other students in our group.¹ Each Wednesday during that term, the five of us would meet in Norman’s secondary office in Gregory Hall to discuss that week’s readings, share our writing (performance texts, mainly), and try to get the VCR in the room to play whatever documentary or film clips we might have been watching that day.² Norman would occasionally pop his head in, drop off illegibly scribbled notes on our papers, and leave us with one of his favorite invocations: onward!

Colloquially, we called our DIS project “Wednesdays with Norman”, a play on the title of the book Tuesdays with Morrie, which was on the New York Times bestseller list, and which had been recently made into a made-for-television movie starring Academy Award-winning actor Jack Lemmon. Written by sportswriter Mitch Albom, the book chronicled Albom’s interactions with his former sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”). Stylistically, the chapters in Albom’s book took the form of a series of “lessons” from each of his sixteen Tuesday visits with Schwartz (e.g. “lessons” on family, marriage, fear of aging, death, etc.). And although the comparisons between our DIS and Albom’s book ended with the play-on-words title of that project, well…here we are.

At the end of the term our group disbanded and scattered to the four winds of academia far from Illinois, but I sort of…didn’t. At least, not right away. I completed my PhD in 2005, then spent another four years as a faculty member in the same College of Media as Norman, before moving to Florida State University where I have been ever since. In those intervening 23 years, Norman and I forged a productive scholarly relationship—and an even better friendship.³ But this reflection is not about our scholarship, or even our conversations over cups of chili at the Potbelly’s in Champaign. Rather, and in what remains of this short reflection, I want to borrow from Albom’s trope of “lessons” and touch on the following one⁴: It’s more than just a manuscript.

Norman’s primary office in Gregory Hall was in an oblong space at the end of a hallway on the third floor. The entrance to the Institute of Communications Research’s suite of administrative and some faculty offices was located just before and to the right. Across the hall was a space used as a graduate student lounge. Norman’s office wasn’t so much a faculty office in the traditional sense as it was a space for the management of his various journals (even though it was his primary office, it was often simply referred to as “the journal office”). If you walked in the door, there was a chair tucked directly around the corner to the right for visitors to sit and chat. Straight ahead was Norman’s chair and workspace, facing the wall (i.e. his back would be to the door if he was working). On his desk was an iMac computer; a wide array of manuscripts, papers, books, folders, and so forth was spread out and piled high; just to his left sat an old typewriter, one that was also usually buried under stacks of papers. And jazz music; jazz music was almost always playing from the small CD player located somewhere amidst the organized clutter.

But that wasn’t all

The rest of the office space had two more workstations lining one wall, and an additional one (or two?) on the opposite wall. Bookshelves four ranks high lined three of the four walls above the workstations, reaching up toward the high ceiling and filled with a library’s worth of knowledge on research methods, sociological theory, film criticism, writings on cultural studies, and dissertations bound in hardcover. Filing cabinets at knee level contained journal manuscripts and other miscellany. Over the years, a cast of characters (and I use that term lovingly) worked as graduate assistants in that office, helping to keep the journal enterprise running, including Jack Bratich, Grant Kien, Ted Gournelos, Himika Bhattacharya, Koeli Goel, Chamee Chang, and, of course, James Salvo—a steady presence there throughout the years.

Whilst many books could be written over the conversations that occurred in that office, in this moment of reflection I am drawn to a small, fraying placard (or was it a laminated piece of paper? hard to say now) affixed via thumbtack to the corkboard on the wall of Norman’s workstation. It read, simply: “It’s more than just a manuscript.” For all of his academic accomplishments and accolades—and there are many—Norman’s service over the years as a journal editor (or community builder by another name) is especially important to acknowledge.⁵ Not for the achievement itself of sitting in the proverbial editor’s chair, but for the result of his so doing: the community of scholars he fostered, mentored, sponsored, and published over the years.

It’s more than just a manuscript

But what is a manuscript? In academic parlance, some might consider it a collection of about 8000 words, formatted in APA or MLA style, reporting on findings or results of an empirical study, or perhaps situated as a philosophical disquisition about a particular topic. Others might view it as a potential scholarly product, perhaps unfinished or rough around the edges, awaiting (hopefully positive) review from anonymous peers. Others still might view it bibliometrically, as another potential line item to be placed on a curriculum vitae in the accumulation of academic capital. Definitionally, all of these examples can be technically accurate.

It is safe to say that Norman rejected this cold, detached view of the manuscript. For him, each manuscript contained within it the possibility for intervening into the world—of having transformative potential. It also represented things like: the valuable time interview participants contributed to a study (especially if they were from a vulnerable or oppressed population); the meaning it might have to a scholarly community that was marginalized in the academy (as with Indigenous scholars or researchers from the Global South); the long nights a researcher had put in trying to get the wording just right or the analysis just so; or the impact it might have on a field of study—for it might unsettle, upend, or disrupt an orthodox view, hold potential within it to rethink a particular research question, method of inquiry, or representational practice. Put differently, there were real people with real concerns doing (or at least trying to do) research that mattered behind those manuscripts—behind those filing notations scribbled on the top of manila folders in his office (and, later, the notations used in the ScholarOne database management system; e.g. QI-09-216, meaning the 216^th manuscript submitted to Qualitative Inquiry in 2009). And each one of them deserved to be treated with the same degree of care and attention, regardless of who the author was and regardless of whether or not Norman personally agreed with their particular philosophical orientation.⁶

What resulted from this mandate was a platform from which competing acts of qualitative research methodologies, philosophies, and positions collided (and continue to collide) in the pages of those journals. Scholars who pushed the envelope and were shut out of or rejected from other journals for being too disruptive or for being “ahead of their time” were given seats at the table—their work validated in a way similar to how a comedian’s talent or promise was validated by Johnny Carson inviting him or her over to sit on the couch following their stand-up set on The Tonight Show in the 1970s and 1980s. A new lingua franca for qualitative research created and set against the changing conditions of the politics of research and the politics of evidence.

I guess where I am going with all this is here: Across the decades, Norman’s scholarship—from his first major work, The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods (Denzin, 1970), to his mid-career masterpiece Interpretive Ethnography: Ethnographic Practices for the 21^st Century (Denzin, 1997) to his last large-scale project, the sixth edition of landmark The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin et al., 2023)—stand as significant if not transformative contributions to the field, ones that resulted in him becoming one of the most frequently cited social scientists of the last 100 years. But we should not overlook his service to the field as editor and the community he built through these efforts, for just as he was giving of himself as a person, so, too, was he giving of himself in professional service to his scholarly community.

He set a standard to which all editors should aspire.

He showed us the way.

• In short, he was the GOAT.⁷

Please don’t destroy: a constitutive rule of methodological [email protected]

In elementary school, countless hours were laid waste by me in my attempt to perfectly balance my ruler, like a see-saw, upon a crayon. The task is a difficult one. The number of positions of balance are far outnumbered by positions of imbalance. All this is perhaps the same for finding justice through peace. I find myself recalling this when I reflect upon a passage written by Norman Denzin, one holographically containing what seems to occupy much of our efforts as scholars who work toward justice. That passage is this:

I call for a paradigm dialog, not a new war. We must find ways to cooperate. (Denzin, 2008, p. 315)

This passage is many things, but foremost, it is a statement of target. It is also a call, one indicating that we probably ought to continue working together to supplement this statement of target with methodological statements of aim.

If not a war, then a dialogue. But a dialogue toward what? I presume that this would be a dialogue toward peace. Peace, like balance, is difficult to achieve. How so? The sustained occasion of peace seems to have constitutive rules that cannot be violated if peace as a concept is to cohere, yet peace is something that goes beyond its own rules. Inasmuch as any rule can be formally reduced to the form of a prohibition, if peace were only a type of constitutional justice, then a certain set of fair and enforceable prohibitions might be the path toward achieving it. However, those for whom peace is sought are also beings having free will, at least it is reasonable to presume so. In the totality of wills, there are not always only compatibilities, and it is not the case that prohibiting these incompatibilities is always fairly enforceable. Thus, it can be the case that peace be in a state of deferral should otherwise just incompatibilities of will exist, when otherwise reasonable and ethical people find themselves in disagreement about what they would like to do in terms of how they would like to be. This deferral is not a necessary state, but one that obtains when those in disagreement are restrained from their willed state of being.

Microcosmically, in polemics both subtle and unsubtle, we often see otherwise reasonable and ethical people finding themselves in disagreement when we read broadly in our academic disciplines, especially in the methodological discourses. Should finding a unary consensus be the aim of such discourses? Not necessarily, for even though one may believe that there is one truth regarding what fairness is conceptually, one can still imagine how—like a balanced ruler upon a crayon—there can be multiple ways to even a purportedly singular truth, perhaps a small multiple, but not a necessarily singular way nevertheless. So if peace is the target and consensus is not the aim we need to be working toward, then what?

Perhaps it is the case that while not needing consensus, peace can be achieved through cooperativity—as Denzin writes—a cooperativity that can persist even through the incompatibilities of just wills. If a place to start finding the contours of what such a cooperativity is can be found by articulating what it is not, then perhaps we can turn to what seem to be the constitutive rules of a coherent conceptualization of peace itself. While I do not promise to exhaust those rules in what I write next here, the following rule of peace does seem to be uncontroversially constitutive, for it is but tautological: Peace cannot sustain itself through anything that itself threatens peace.

If we are not to violate the tautological and constitutive rule of peace above, then that suggests treating our methodological discourses not as destructive competitions, and if not destructive competitions, then perhaps well-reasoned attempts at persuasion. If we imagine even our potential allies as but enemies at the gate, how are we to hope to collectively partake in an inclusive flourishing of peace wherein retaining our free will is a necessary condition of that flourishing? Destructiveness is divisive, something that is, too, definitionally, non-cooperative. Destructiveness may be more facile, but it is not, by definition, peaceful. Still, who said peace was easy? And again, this is not to say that there are no incompatibilities of wills that are just, but only to suggest that rhetorically speaking, if we only ever focus on the incompatibilities, then that would seem to be in service of but a rhetorical foreclosure of the possibility of useful dialogue.

It is but a microcosmic request—one with the pay-off of being better situated to address incompatibilities—and still, it is a big ask nonetheless: May we please work together to find where our methods agree, at least as a place to start? Norman Denzin seems to have, on some level—a profound one at that—requested that we do this.

Norman Denzin [email protected]

One day I heard about a great scholar and leader of young minds. I wondered if I’d get an opportunity to meet this inspiring human being. Over the years young minds from all four corners of the world applied to study and to be in the presence of this great teacher.

One day a fellow colleague who was a long time mentee and friend of this great teacher invited me to attend a prestigious and world renowned gathering of young and senior scholars and researchers. In anticipation, I began preparing. I wondered if I would get to meet my colleague’s teacher. Excited and curious, I packed my bags and the day finally arrived to go to the gathering.

Would I meet this great teacher? It’s not every day that one has the opportunity to be in the presence of greatness. I knew that such a great teacher has a way to ignite his learners and I wanted to know what that feels like. My fellow colleague who’d invited me had briefly expressed how this man who’d been his mentor was humble, but ultimately the founder and inspiration for this profound gathering of educators. My colleague mentioned a few of the accolades his great teacher had earned throughout his lifetime; volumes of research detailing ground breaking paths forward in education - astounding achievements!

Arriving finally at the gathering, to this great teacher’s hall of leaning I carried on with my day, setting aside any expectations. My essential role was to give whatever teachings I’d been given from the numerous indigenous elders I was fortunate enough to have met over the years. As the Indigenous Circle of scholars gathered outdoors, I began our ceremony. An occasional scholar from some far off country would wander into our Circle feeling the energy of friendliness and/or just out of curiosity. In our custom, we openly welcome strangers and fellow humans making them feel welcome. The circle is for everyone. Well into our ceremony, I noticed a gentleman with snow white hair off to the side behind the Circle. He sat respectfully and remained silent throughout the ceremony. Upon completion, I asked my fellow colleague who had invited me if that was the great teacher. He nodded his head up and down with a smile.

Thank you, Patrick Lewis, for introducing me to Norman Denzin. Over these past eight years I’ve happily attended the International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. I’ve seen and felt the tremendous respect and support Norman has shown to our Indigenous Circle. It’s been a silent engagement; an approach Norman activated through his leadership each year ensuring greater inclusion within the overall agenda of the ICQI. I didn’t have to sit in consultation and negotiation with Mr. Denzin to experience the power of friendship, kindness and scholarship engagement. With each passing year I saw the wings of the eagle fanning over the congress our circle, nurturing becoming more engagement amongst the researchers and scholars from many countries. It’s been truly an honour to have met such a great man in such a brief time.

metoni ninanaskomon metoni kihtchi oma pimatisiwin ka nakiskahtohk

(immensely gratified, immensely blessed is this life in this brief, yet dynamic, collective crossing of paths).

kitatamiskatinawaw kahkiyaw niwahkomakan Greetings to all my relations.

Tribute to Norman [email protected]

All that you touch,

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

is Change.

God

Is Change.

-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

When I heard that Norm Denzin had transitioned, there was a simultaneous whisper to my heart: All that you touch, you change. I immediately reached for Octavia Butler’s wisdom, the kind of holy wisdom you need in moments like these, when words are insufficient to describe the ways that my life and work has been changed by Norm. While many are left unspoken here because of space and time, here are three distinct moments where that truth of that change is overwhelmingly clear in my life as an endarkened/Black feminist scholar. These short (re)memberings I offer as a tribute to my friend, Norm Denzin.

My first (re)membering was as a doctoral student at Washington State University. This was in the early 1980s, at a time when I was learning about the production and pursuit of knowledge through research and engaging the explosion of new Black feminist writers and knowledge makers. Along with the entire fields of education, I was, for the first time encountering new ways to inquire into the nature of things as a Black woman and ways of proceeding in that pursuit called qualitative research. Qualitative research provided an alternative to assumptions of “objectivity.” It provided a way of being with participants vs. standing apart from them. It opened a way to imagine being both Black and feminist AND refusing to continue to pathologize communities I cared deeply about. Yvonna Lincoln, Egon Guba and Norm Denzin became my nourishment and in tandem with Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Patricia Bell-Scott and others, I ate EVERY word! I learned skills and ways of being a qualitative researcher that would be my foundation. But never did I think that I would eventually meet and be so deeply touched by Norm Denzin. I entered the field as an assistant professor, true to my preparation as a newly minted qualitative researcher. Norm Denzin’s bold ideas about an ethical and culturally responsive way of engaging inquiry literally changed my life and my work. “All that You touch, You change.”

My second (re)membering is wrapped up in the process of going up for tenure at The Ohio State University. By then, I’d had the opportunity to really focus my scholarship in (re)presentation and in practice on Black and endarkened feminisms and Norm was one of my biggest cheerleaders. I would arrive at ICQI and he would seek me out to have discussions about an article or piece I’d written that he’d just read – and I relished those conversations with someone who had so deeply shaped my work. This giant of a human once even sent me an email to say that he “was teaching on of my articles that evening” and wanted me to know! When it was time for me to submit my list of external reviewers, I (rather timidly) put his name on my list, never imagining that such an influential scholar would say yes to me. But he did. This was a rare gift, especially as a Black woman scholar. I believe he knew that lending his name, stature in the field and attendant privileges to my academic work would matter deeply. So I bear tribute and witness to this all-too-rare-gift that Norm seemed to share so freely: “All that you Change Changes you.”

My last (re)membering was when Norm asked me to give the Egon Guba Lecture at the ICQI Conference in 2010. I reflected on that invitation with a feeling of both tremendous honor and tremendous fear. I’d watched 9 brilliant lectures to that point, including from Gloria Ladson Billings, Antjie Krog, Michelle Fine, D. Soyini Madison and others– and now it was my turn to join them, focused on the topic of Qualitative Inquiry For a Global Community in Crisis. Spending time for nearly a year in deep preparation, I focused on how cultural memory and (re)membering was fundamental to responding to the challenges of our global community, informed by my educational and cultural work in Ghana and the ways those pursuits had changed my entire life. To say that this opportunity provided by Norm’s invitation transformed everything in my life and work would be an understatement: The reverberations continue today in my leadership work as Dean of Education. As Octavia Butler says: “The only lasting truth is Change.”

Norm Denzin was a rare human being, one who opened a way for so many to be our best and most full selves, especially as scholars of color. And while I will miss him dearly, I also understand this truth put forward by the Buddhist thinker, Daisaku Ikeda in a lecture in 1993. He says that “death is more than the absence of life: Death, together with an active life, is necessary to the formation of a larger more essential whole.” Thank you, Norm, for your active life and for the invitation to be a part of that more essential whole that is the worldwide qualitative research community. I am forever grateful and forever changed by knowing you. Rest in peace and power.

I felt Norman’s qualitative research structure was loose, inclusive, generous, available for transformation, open to the new and [email protected]

I first met Norman Denzin in the literature. I began my doctoral studies at Ohio State in 1991, and his 1989 book, Interpretive Interactionism, was one of the first “qualitative” books I studied. I took courses with Patti Later in education and Laurel Richardson in sociology, and both scholars often referred to Norman as a colleague and friend. Qualitative research methodology was being invented at that time, and one of its challenges was validity—the perennial epistemological question of truth. How could this new approach to inquiry be true and good if researchers cannot be objective, if they acknowledge they have values, beliefs, histories, attachments—in other words, if they are people, human beings deeply embedded in the world? How can knowledge be true if it cannot be objective and generalizable?

Early on, qualitative research was rejected—and still is—because it is just descriptive, just stories and so can never be science. I think Norman Denzin’s impact on research in the social sciences centered on the legitimation of qualitative research through the creation of a structure in which it—whatever it is—could flourish and become something and then something else again. It may seem strange for someone like me who thinks and lives with poststructuralism to value a structure, but, as Derrida understood, we always live in structures, some looser than others. I felt Norman’s qualitative research structure was loose, inclusive, generous, available for transformation, open to the new and different.

Norman established journals like Qualitative Inquiry and Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, the Handbook of Qualitative Research—first published in 1994—and even a conference, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, which first met in 2005 and spun off a European counterpart, the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry which holds its sixth conference this year and is an example of his focus on international relations.

By 2005, qualitative research was under assault again by the federal government and other powerful organizations as the blatant positivism of “scientifically-based research” was imposed to control knowledge and truth. I remember that first ICQI conference with like-minded colleagues as a refuge, a place to talk and think and breathe. We went to that conference every year not just to see each other but also to see Norman, to stop him for a moment as he attended to an emergency or dashed off to the next session and thank him for his support, whether it was publishing a paper “too way out there” for other journals to publish or writing an external letter to support the awarding of tenure.

So I met Norman in 1991 when I read his book as a first-year doctoral student and from then on he was part of my life as an academic. I had no idea, of course, how lucky I was. I had no comprehension of the difficulties, the labor, and the politics of creating and maintaining that open structure in which I was able to do my own work for several decades. Norman was always there, and I could count on him.

When my students complain about not getting a paper published or a conference proposal accepted or about something else that limits them in disciplines that truly are paradigms behind, I always say you have to do the work to open things up—establish a new journal, organize a conference, edit a special issue of a journal or a handbook. Create a structure that is not afraid of difference. Do the work. Be like Norman Denzin.

The Legac(ies) of [email protected]

It’s unbelievable, really. You thought he would always be there, a gentle giant of a man, a brother, an all-encompassing father figure, a rock you knew as a constant backing you up, supporting your projects, no matter how far-fetched or avante-garde or impractical they seemed, who would, with a few well-placed and prescient words, clarify your thinking so that you left his presence energized, joyful, hopeful, and certain that your place in the world was both valued and assured. Of course, that was a generous part of his own project. He accepted you. He gave you license to try stuff out. He giggled with the joy of your discovery, with the light, you had to assume, that he saw reflected in your eyes.

He railed (“manifesto,” “The death of data”) against—no, say that again: he actually railed for better ways of living in the world. He was a “feminist communitarian,” a –-, and a –-. He stood for so much that is good and just and civil and democratic, and you just knew that he would greet you, after a year’s absence, with a hug and a smile, and that you would feel welcome the instant your eyes met.

He was a “rock star.” He was a down-home, folksy, accessible intellectual genius. He rode a bicycle, sitting up high, everywhere: in Champaign and Urbana, in Raglan, Aotearoa. He delighted in an adobe mud oven, just as he reveled in catching fingerlings from a dock. You got to see him greet people from Turkey and China, from Chile and Spain, Brasil and Australia, Japan and Denmark. You saw him exchange respect with elders from the Miami, the Potawatomi, the Peoria and the Kickapoo in Illinois, with Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato, Tainui, Ngāi Tūhoe, Ngāti Haka/Patu Heuheu, Tama Kai Moana (Maungapōhatu), Ngāti Raka (Te Waimana), Ngāti Rongo (Ruātoki) in Aotearoa/New Zealand, First Nations’ Plains/Woodland Cree (Nehiyaw), Inuit, and Nuu-chah-nulth in Canada. Among so many others. You saw that his circle opened wide for inclusion, the circle was “always open but never broken.” His scope, his inclusion, was one of the signifiers that meant his welcoming kindness was genuinely given, generously offered. You knew his positions were anti-colonialism, pro-collaborative, always with a sensitive eye to awareness of the present moment, the shifting landscape, the tireless effort towards progressive change. Always insisting upon living in the moment.

You felt this welcoming, but you could not simplistically afford it to Mid-Western hospitality, to a life fully lived, to experiences good and bad, to a sensitivity for others and a personal insistence on performing empathy. His open arms were because of, and due to, and part and parcel of, all of these things, but you also felt a magic exuding from the man, a charismatic presence, a grinning, “ain’t this just gravy?” kind of exuberance that was infectious in such a civil, kind, generosity that itself knew how full his cornucopia was, and that its spirit and wealth and consideration would only grow through sharing with others.

He shared both his gifts and his genius with all sorts of people: he crossed disciplinary divides when it was rarely done, he embraced the reality of affective, lived experience when social scientists were replacing humans with integers, variables, predictability. He went against the mainstream, following his heart, weaving his love of literature and philosophy with his fascination with sociological method, ideas, questions and answers.

Oh, yes, he had a vast vision for how things might emerge into a more utopian world. Born in the middle of World War II, he grew up in a time of Cold War, Sputnik, JFK's and Martin’s and Malcolm X’ and RFK’s assassinations, the CIA’s illegal and immoral incursions—Cold War versions of colonizing behaviours themselves—and, as most of us did, attempted to make sense of the clamour of the present moment. His project was inclusionary. His project was, and is, radical and hopeful. It is radical in the sense that it demands confrontation with the forces of authoritarianism, environmental degradation, and personal and public iterations of regressive systems. It is hopeful because, really, there is no other choice. Human beings, we know from our being touched by this wonderful, amazing human being, have the abilities to exert agency, the make a difference, to fulfil change, and to join and become active within the circle.

I—we—the Universal Singular—will miss him.

Norm Denzin: so big you can’t see [email protected] Ohio State University

My title refers to the contributions, nay founding, of the qualitative research field across the social sciences by Norm Denzin. His many efforts over oh so many years, from editorships to his own scholarship to conference organizing to very personal interactions and mentoring: he is such a giant in field formation that we are almost unthinkable without him.

So big at conferences you might easily overlook him in his cargo shorts and aw-shucks demeanor, he stood out among the suits and jockeying for his very happy willingness to not be the center of attention. Yet there he was: soliciting junior and senior folks alike for articles for his many journals, writing so many letters of recommendation one wondered how he had time for anything else, giving papers that were, even to my off-center ears, pushing at the borders of mainstream methodology.

And the conferences he organized drew qualitative folks from around the world, planting global seeds and giving succor to oft-marginalized researchers who drew such strength from what he put on offer. Usually on the side-lines, putting a crackerjack team together that decentered himself, he was everywhere and nowhere making things happen.

What would we be without the many editions of The Handbook of Qualitative Research with Yvonna? How many of us would not have gotten tenure and promotion without publications across his many journals? Where are we to go in May if not to Illinois to be fed in body and spirit at the ICQI conference?

My own experience with Norm began with the 1993 publication of “Fertile Obsession: Validity After Poststructuralism” in Sociological Quarterly (34/4) and a 1994 Symbolic Interaction Annual Symposium that Laurel Richardson encouraged me to attend. There I met Adele Clarke who invited me to give a keynote at a University of California conference, Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Feminist, Cultural and Technoscience Studies Perspectives. That talk, “Naked Methodology: Researching the Lives of Women With HIV/AIDS,” led to an invitation to a residential sabbatical workshop on feminist methodology that changed my life. Norm was the sparkplug for all of this and his continuing support helped branch out my career beyond education into sociology where my edgier methodological moves were more acceptable. And such stories of inter-disciplinary support and networking are legion across the many places he created for the field to grow and prosper.

I can only hope that the field-defining journals and edited collections and the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) go into the future strongly as the best possible tribute to his founding and sustaining efforts.

Rest in Power, Norm, with the deep admiration and affection of a global qualitative family you had no small part in bringing into being.

Norman Denzin, a force of [email protected]

Norman Denzin had an extraordinarily large presence. His pioneering research and scholarship have been foundational to qualitative methodologies, opening numerous disciplines to expanded ways of conceptualizing and doing research. His entrepreneurial projects – the journals he established at a time where there were few venues dedicated to qualitative inquiry, the many handbooks he edited, and the annual ICQI encouraged and hosted innovative inquiry, highlighting exploration and experimentation. A prime example of an academic intellectual entrepreneur (Bresler, 2009), Norman embodied vision, artistry and a model on how to animate projects.

I first heard about Denzin when I started to teach qualitative methods at the College of Education in the University of Illinois in 1990. Curious about other qualitative offerings, I asked my students about qualitative courses that they had taken in the Urbana-Champaign campus. Denzin’s name invariably came up as “a course that changed my life.”. In my role as member, then chair of the Qualitative research specialization in the College of Education, I alerted doctoral students (including my own doctoral advisees, most of whom took that course) that this course may indeed transform their life. Many came back to report that it did, with details of class experiences. While I have always wanted to take this class, (by the time I was able to do so, Norman had stopped offering it) I benefitted from it as an eavesdropper.

When Eunice Boardman, Eve Harwood and I created the first qualitative research in music education conference in 1994, and I was looking for keynoters whose messages would be compelling, Norman was an immediate choice. At the time, music education was mostly quantitative, with qualitative research rarely conducted and even more rarely published, lagging a couple of decades behind general and art education. Norman’s talk was as powerful as they come (Denzin, 1994). In a field operating under positivist (and often behavioristic) paradigm, his claim that “The story telling self that is presented is always one attached to an interpretive perspective” was radical and refreshing. The paradigms he outlined – positivist, postpositivist, constructivist and critical – and the feminist, ethnic, and cultural perspectives he highlighted, helped open new horizons. The idea that “writers write their particular storied and self-versions of a feminist, gay-lesbian, Afro-American, Hispanic, grounded theory or interactionist text” (Denzin, 1994, 22–23) was revolutionary and hugely needed in a field that was highly conservative. The volume containing this talk, along with other persuasive keynotes by Bob Stake, Fred Erickson, Buddy Peshkin, Magne Espeland and Keith Swanwick was a substantial foundation to qualitative research.

That same year, in my role as chair of AERA’s Arts and Learning SIG with only a single slot for presentation, I invited Norman, along with Philip Jackson, Madeleine Grumet, Sue Stinson, Bob Stake, Fred Erickson, and Elliot Eisner to address the arts, knowledge, and educational research. The hall was filled to capacity (400 people) with many more in the corridors trying to get glimpses of the event. Norman, wearing his customary shorts and Birkenstocks, discussed qualitative research text as a cultural form; the sounds and meanings of voice; and text as experiential cinema (Denzin, 1994).¹

ICQI became a mecca for qualitative researchers across the globe, creating a festive, communal plaza for qualitative researchers, that was unprecedented in the academic culture. When Norman asked me in 2013 to organize and chair the Day of the arts Section 1 was delighted to do that, together with Kimber Andrews (Bresler & Andrews, 2014). The Day of the arts reflected the diversity and spirit of the conference, with colleagues from across the globe. Norman gave me carte blanche to organize it as playfully and creatively as I wanted, responding promptly with “Yes!” to my suggestions. On the one occasion that he didn’t respond (regarding my question about the rejection of papers), I came to understand that it was a No. We eventually found a modus vivendi, learning to work with our different principles and communication style – my very direct one and his less so.

In the last 35 years, Norman and I sat on a number of AERA panels and on a large number of doctoral committees on campus. In those very diverse settings, his vibrant presence and generosity, his ability to create and when needed, to hold his convictions, were deeply educational. He welcomed when I pushed my own boundaries exploring the experience of unknowing in scholarship and life, and the interplay of unknowing in qualitative research, contemplative traditions, and the arts (Bresler, 2019). I miss Norman’s animated and animating presence, and am profoundly grateful for having his intellectual and personal force in my life.

Notes

1 I thank Mary for reminding me of this DIS in an email I received from her shortly after Norman’s passing.

2 James Salvo reminded me that this particular office had been communication scholar James Carey’s office at one time before Norman moved into it. Carey left the University of Illinois for Columbia University around 1988; it is likely the VCR had been in the office since at least that time, considering how well it worked (or didn’t). Given the glacial pace at which Gregory Hall has been updated and renovated over the years, there is a non-zero chance it is still located somewhere in the building.

3 During that time, we co-edited more than 20 books together on qualitative research, organized the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry for much of 2005 to the present, and eventually co-edited several SAGE journals together, including Qualitative Inquiry.

4 There are many others. I am not ready to write about them yet.

5 Primarily, I am referring to the following, in which he was editor-in-chief: Qualitative Inquiry (1995–2023); Cultural StudiesCritical Methodologies (2000–2023); International Review of Qualitative Research (2007–2023); The Sociological Quarterly (1992–2000); Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Annual (1978–2023); Cultural Studies: A Research Annual (1993–2000). Put differently, this represents a total of 128 collective editorial years of service as a journal editor. It is not hyperbole to suggest that he has likely been the editor of more scholarly journal volumes than anyone else over the last 50 years if not longer, at least in the social sciences.

6 A second note, reading “Principles before personalities”, reinforced this belief; it, too, was tacked to the corkboard.

7 In sporting terms, GOAT means greatest of all time. I am not the first person to use this term in reference to Norman (see Pierce, 2023).

1 The papers in this panel were published as a special issue in the Educational Theory.