Festschrift in Honor of Norman K. Denzin: Volume 55

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 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.

I was a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, from 1977 until 1982, and Norman K. Denzin was my mentor. In this essay, I review what I learned from him in two graduate seminars as well as his own research during this period. His theoretical framework drew from the writings of Simmel, Mead, Blumer, Schutz, Goffman, and Garfinkel, but, for Denzin, theory was never divorced from empirical inquiry. The logic of naturalistic inquiry, his fundamental approach to methodology, provided the procedural framework for the formulation and assessment of theory. In addition, Denzin made important contributions to the study of self, socialization, social interaction, emotions, and deviance (especially criminogenic processes in the alcohol industry and the dynamics of domestic violence).

While distinguishing himself as a vanguard of postmodern symbolic interaction, Norm Denzin remained loyal to his roots as an empiricist and theorist of the self. He displayed such loyalty to the examination of social relationships, involving the complex process of self-lodging, and significantly, the examination and analysis of alcoholics. This focus on lodging and the alcoholic introduced a paradoxical agency in which one's choices to act create obdurate constraints that limit choices. His particular focus on the recovering alcoholic not only involved comprehensive observations of recovery in situ (e.g., in Alcoholics Anonymous Meetings) but also in cinematic representations. Denzin also merged his ethnographic observations and cinematic readings while merging the perspectives associated with pragmatism, interactionism, and dramaturgy. In effect, by engaging in the worlds of alcoholics, alcoholics in recovery, and their images and portrayals in films, Denzin emphasized the importance of talking about the self (via internal conversations and relationships with external others). In doing so, he provided a theory of the self while straddling the symbolic line between a postmodernist imagination and a modernist commitment to realism.

The chapter reports the author's early reading of Norman Denzin's work in symbolic interactionism, and Denzin's impact on research training in social science in the United Kingdom. The chapter reflects on Denzin's impact on the field of educational research in particular. The chapter then reflects on working with Denzin and particularly Denzin's leadership of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and its role in energizing and organizing the international qualitative inquiry community – the creation of Denzin's “bigger tent.”

In this story, I provide a personal history of Norman Denzin's profound influence on the development of interpretive qualitative inquiry, and on me, over the past 30 years. Norman saw the need to move qualitative inquiry from the field to the text to the reader in order to meet the needs of a new and broadening global generation of qualitative researchers, writers, and performance artists who did not want merely to describe the world but rather to interpret, critique, and change it. Through new journals, handbooks, and international/cross-disciplinary conferences, Norman provided the leadership and kindness that inspired the development of a new global community of qualitative researchers committed to social justice and to showing how to feel the sufferings of others.

After presenting an “origin story” for qualitative poststructuralism and arts-based research, I write of Norman Denzin's unique contributions to those endeavors. These include his charisma, organizational skills, generous spirit, and commitment to social justice. I briefly review the contributions of his writing, editorships, sponsorship of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and focus on First Nations.

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.

This chapter celebrates just some of Norman Denzin's many research contributions, outlets and gatherings, and encouragement and support of individuals over the course of his career. I suggest that these contributions can be described as a sustained effort to make and foster a capacious – expansive – inquiry.

We know that the lifespan of a human being is but a dot on eternity. Despite this fact, there are some lives who, by their very existence, have generated a better world, a curiosity that is gentle and nonobtrusive, welcoming, and generous. As Walter Pater (1873) wrote, “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (p. 1326). These lives, coming into being, may, through their relationship with others, with the physical world, with the world of ideas, create pathways on which others following may flourish. Such a hard, gemlike life, I posit respectfully, is the life of Norman Denzin. As an invited offering for this Festschrift in celebration of the intellectual genius, the caring impact, the kind and generous humanity of NKD, this piece draws upon the effect(s) his career and example have had upon my immediate circle of scholars as well as upon academia writ large. As an aspect of his unfailing curiosity and humility, Norman has shown us – characteristically, not told, but shown – what it means to celebrate life when, after all, as Raymond Carver so famously put it, it's “all gravy” (1989, p. 118).

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.

Writing about Norman Denzin's work, highlighting all his scientific contributions on qualitative inquiry is not possible. Therefore, I decided to write from a personal point of view, explaining how Norman has influenced my academic career from the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, as well as, of so many people. I am going to use Bob Dylan as the backbone of the story, first because his stories delve into such profound questions of life as the contributions Norman has made for qualitative inquiry; second because Dylan is special to Norman in many ways, and Norman for me.

Norman Denzin has written and edited many important books, but perhaps the most precious and ephemeral gift he has given us is each other. In anthologies and then most stupendously through the annual wonder of ICQI, Norman has made space for me and others to find our academic tribes. Like any good host, he always has room for one more. The community that he has cultivated allows us to support and strengthen each other and his commitment to building a better world emboldens passionate, practical, purposeful scholarship in every corner of the globe. I believe the academy can be a beautiful, brave, and loving place because in Norman's neighborhood it already is.

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.

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.

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.

In the following, the author remembers an early meeting between Norman and herself that changed the course of her career. In the years that followed, Norman would oversee a creative and sociologically inventive revisioning of methodology with brilliant effect, affecting so many scholars and intellectuals like the author herself.

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.