Driven by Contraries

There’s a story behind the stories. Of course. How could we compile a special issue of essays to reflect the legacy of Bud Goodall’s influence on qualitative inquiry that would not itself somehow become a story?

This is where Bud would move everything in front of him to the side, push himself back a bit from the table or desk at which he sat, look at the manuscript in his right hand for a second, glance at us (with a smile), and after a dramatic pause and a satisfied inhale, begin to read to us. If you ever got to experience this, you know that the thrill of a written narrative, to H. L. “Bud” Goodall Jr., was not complete until the narrative was shared—in print, in his hands, and read in his cool, smooth voice. Getting this special issue of Qualitative Inquiry (QI) to that stage has not been as smooth.

The world of qualitative inquiry and narrative ethnography in the academy lost Bud in September 2012, a few months over a year after he’d first learned that he had Stage IV pancreatic cancer. He prepared us collectively for his departure, as we would expect, with his written words in a blog that shared tales from what he called Cancerland. But that, Erving Goffman (1956) would tell us, was front stage. Backstage, there was a lot of work going on to prepare for the difficult, but inevitable, public departure of our beloved colleague and teacher. Bob Krizek, Nick Trujillo, and I edited a collection of essays, a festschrift (De la Garza, Krizek, & Trujillo, 2012) that he would be able to read before leaving us, and the authors wrote rapidly to help make this happen. When he passed away on a rainy September morning, we were joined by Sarah J. Tracy and Christopher Poulos, to coordinate efforts to raise funds to create an award in his honor, as well as to organize a commemorative panel at the 2013 International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), and ultimately, this special issue of QI. Sarah and I worked on the fund-raising, I set up the administrative structure for the group and took care of publishing and selling the festschrift, Chris agreed to head the award logistics, Bob would organize the ICQI panel, and Nick would edit the special issue. Things were going smoothly, as much as one can grieve “smoothly.” All of us had known Bud for many years, some of us had worked with him, and Chris had been his student. It was giving us purpose, and we were “giving back.”

But this was not a strategic narrative. It was the real experience of life and death. And the narratives of life and death that are the most difficult to tell, to write, and to read are built on the reality of the stories of love and loss we’ve actually experienced, without scripting. And this narrative would be especially hard to tell, because the story, as with many of Bud’s stories from his own life, was soon to become agonizingly harsh and without sense or strategy. Less than 2 months after Bud died, our beloved friend, colleague, and fellow ethnographer, Nick Trujillo, was found in his home after failing to appear for classes for 2 days. He had died suddenly, and the loss struck us speechless.

In many ways, we found the capacity to deal with this loss through the very arts of sensemaking and narrative that Nick and Bud had championed throughout their careers. We honored both of them through the “It’s a Way of Life” award, as we chose to name it. The ICQI panel became a double panel, and we commemorated them both. As Bob and I had shared especially close relationships with Nick, we participated in not only this memorial, but also others. And as Nick had originally been the intended editor for this special issue of QI, we agreed to share the role.

But losing our loved ones is not an easy task to be checked off of a list, and as we learned with great difficulty, neither is the symbolic commemoration of one friend, while doing so in the place of another. So this special issue is a little “late.” And it forced a struggle to determine what it was that was unique to the legacy of narrative inquiry left to us by Bud Goodall.

If there was anything that Bud Goodall did successfully, it was to wake up those who read his work, or heard him speak, or took a class with him. He woke them to their potential to write about the realities and truths that they experienced, studied, and knew at more levels than the simply academic. Bud confided in me about 10 years ago that he’d never taken any courses in ethnography, and he’d never conducted fieldwork in any methodological fashion. This caused him some trouble when he was asked to teach qualitative research methods to students who wanted to learn from him. But he was a writer, a trained rhetorician, and an observer of the world around him who knew that creative storytelling and narrative had the power to evoke and teach. When he discovered the community of organizational ethnographers in his field of human communication in the mid-1980s, he had found his niche. And he transformed the ways in which many scholars chose to write after hearing him speak or reading one of his books.

The last conversation I had with Bud in his university office at Arizona State University was a difficult one—not because we discussed his cancer, or his approaching departure, but because his grant-funded work to develop strategic narratives for military use in the war on terrorism had changed his opinion on graduate education. At the time, I’d thought we’d disagreed, but as with all things, with the passing of time, the meaning of our conversation became much more clear to me.

“Our students need to learn what it’s really like out there. If they don’t like it, then they don’t belong in grad school,” Bud told me. And we shouldn’t be teaching them implicitly to believe that the world they would work in is unrelated to the bigger, more difficult, and unpalatable world that the ivory tower so often shelters us from. At the time, Bud saw that the research that was funded told us about what was really going on around us. And if we aren’t engaged in difficult interaction with those realities, he felt that we “don’t belong in the classroom, teaching grad students.” While not all our research must be funded to establish our connection to the “real world,” we must be aware of what is driving the push to change the way we engage in higher education.

The essays in this special issue range from highly personal commemorations to works inspired by his call to write the personal, teach to inspire, and ultimately, heed the signs of what is “really happening” around us. For Bud, it wasn’t about the method of traditional qualitative inquiry, but about the method of determining what we paid attention to, and whether or not we had the courage to write about it (and not just talk about it). I find that what I am learning to call a new pedagogy of qualitative inquiry is challenged by what Bud called the “new ethnography” (Goodall, 2000). It is precisely in the lack of “fit” and ambiguity, and perhaps its renegade spirit, that we might actually learn, “driven by contraries,” as Gregory Bateson (1973) might have called it when referring to what he called Level III learning. Can we choose to find new sets of alternatives for the solutions we seek, and not merely rely on what has worked or become habit? I hope that some of this might become apparent in the unanswered spaces and dynamics of tension reading these essays might invite. Each of the authors presents a sincere face of the “contraries” that drive us to do what we do, writing narrative ethnography, and seeking to do so as authentically as possible.

For this, we thank you, Bud.