Search results

This performative chapter offers three movements that celebrate aspects of Norman Denzin's prolific and influential career: an ode to an aging cowboy that signal's Denzin's work on the West and Native Americans, a corresponding piece that signals Denzin's commitments to performance studies and autoethnography, and a litany of his scholarship as a bibliography of worship with his commitment to critical and creative forms of writing.

In the Introduction to this Festschrift honoring Norman K. Denzin, the author chronicles Denzin's contributions to the academy over the last 55 years. In so doing, he provides personal reflections on numerous interactions with Denzin, particularly as it relates to mentorship and the forging of community within qualitative inquiry. Also included are brief overviews of all of the articles that comprise the Festschrift.

This chapter is a tribute to GOAT (Greatest of All Time) scholar/teacher/mentor, Norman K. Denzin. Honoring Denzin's use of song lyrics (2018a, 2015, 2011, 2008), I use a fishing theme. Why fishing? When asked to write a Festschrift, I immediately remembered Denzin's essay, Searching for Yellowstone (2003a). Though Denzin mentions fishing in an earlier work (1999a, p. 153), I identified with his story of his grandfather's love of fishing (p. 307). Later, I came to understand, through his stories and life experiences how something that was once unpleasant – fishing – became a sport that he loves. Denzin often employs song lyrics to show how theory and the site of memory influence poststructural, qualitative inquiry. His exceptional use of critical cultural and social theories, and exemplary performative autoethnographic teaching, writing and mentorship has influenced students and scholars since 1966 – the year I was born. Reflecting on Norman K. Denzin's body of work – emphasizing teaching and mentorship from 1998 to present – through fishing, seems fitting.

This chapter focuses on Norman K. Denzin's vast and enduring contributions to sociology and the study of research methods and methodology, particularly with respect to “us[ing] the tools of the critical sociological imagination” (Denzin, 1989) as we conduct our research. Through revisiting and extending lessons and principles from his book The Research Act (1989) – especially the need for “triangulation” – in relation to C. Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination (1959), this chapter explores how cultivated critical sociological imaginations can help researchers best meet our “obligations to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference” (Denzin, 1989) throughout all phases of the research act.

This interpretive biography of Norman K. Denzin traces some of the important turns and moments of his intellectual development and prodigious publication. One focus includes his editorial role for the first 52 volumes of Studies in Symbolic Interaction (1978–2020), and how his vision for an inclusive community of qualitative researchers and interpretive scholars emerged and changed.

Like the hero of the 1946 Capra movie It's a Wonderful Life, Norman Denzin has been a builder of his local community. While much attention has been paid to his intellectual contributions on methods and in several substantive areas, possibly his greatest accomplishments have been in the area of building and fostering a robust, international, multidisciplinary qualitative research community. This chapter explores some of these contributions, focusing on Denzin's leadership in creating the Handbook of Qualitative Research, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and eight different journals or book series for which he serves as editor or coeditor. Through these channels, he has fostered the work of younger scholars, of marginalized groups, and of qualitative communities throughout the world, and supported innovative directions in qualitative theory and practice.

In this chapter, I return to a conference I organized with Michael Flaherty in 1990 and transcribe an exchange I had there with Norman Denzin about lived experience and emotions. I develop this conversation as a starting point for honoring Norman's many contributions to my life and career and to the interpretive community in general. This discussion provides a view into the concerns of symbolic interactionists and scholars of emotions, as well as a glimpse of Norman in action and my coming into my own, during the 1990s. I interpret this dialogue as an epiphany in the development of my relationship with Norman, in my self-confidence as a scholar, and in evocative autoethnography as an appreciated qualitative perspective and approach.

In this performance autoethnography, through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author offers visceral knowledge of his encounters with Professor Denzin the person, as well as his scholarly work. How the author leaned from Denzin the possibilities to try to advance decolonizing discourses that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. It is a personal narrative full of hope and love, where the author tries to demonstrate, from his arrival at the University of Illinois in August of 1999 to the present day, his deepest gratitude to his advisor, his muse. The blessing of having Denzin in his life.