In May 2006, the three of us took Carolyn Ellis’s Advanced Qualitative Methods graduate course at the University of South Florida (USF). The course had 11 students. We were divided into three groups depending on our research interests. Andrew’s group focused on intergenerational interpretations of qualitative research, Tony’s group explored the idea of “truth” in qualitative research, and Sara’s group studied arts-based and performance methods. Each group was tasked to conduct multiple in-person interviews with prominent qualitative scholars about their specified interest at the second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI).
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Andrew arranged to interview Norman.
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Tony and Sara
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also wanted to interview Norman and invited themselves to the interview.
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To complete the course, each group had to use the interviews to write a paper about their specified interest. Tony and his group included a small part of this interview in their final paper. Their paper was eventually published as “truth Troubles” (Tullis Owen et al., 2009). Andrew and his group published the article, “Ragged Edges in the Fractured Future: A Co-authored Organizational Autoethnography” (Herrmann et al., 2013). He also used two quotes from this interview in “Criteria Against Ourselves” (Herrmann, 2012).
In August 2023, when Norman passed away, Andrew reminded Tony and Sara about the interview. “It was so good,” he said. “But we only ever published a few parts of it. We should share the rest.” Tony and Sara agreed. Norman offered some brilliant insights about his work, coming to qualitative research, and ICQI. In particular, he described working with Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), challenging harmful academic orthodoxy, and representing lived experience. We include the transcript of the interview here. We only made minor edits for readability (e.g., removing “uhs” and “ums” from the conversation).
Andrew: So far, much of the ICQI has been focused on IRBs. When I was a master’s student at Saint Louis University, I tried to do cyber ethnography like Annette Markham does and like Laurie Kendall has done, but I had so many problems. I was doing cyber ethnography work and another student was working with prisoners. I had so many problems with the IRB that my advisor, Bob Krizek, joined the IRB to get a qualitative person on the board. In fact, Bob’s presenting here, at this very moment. His paper is called “Infiltrating the IRB” (Krizek and Turner, 2006).
Norman: I remember the abstract!
Andrew: What was your epiphanic moment in research? What led you to do the kind of research you wanted to do?
Norman: My epiphanic moment, I suspect, would have been in graduate school, reading at the University of Iowa, and I had learned about symbolic interaction. This was the 1950s and 1960s. Manford Kuhn was there and I read George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley and Henry James and John Dewey. Kuhn represented a particular force in social psychology—he valued pragmatism and symbolic interaction. I was exposed to that work and also the Chicago School of ethnography. C. Wright Mills was doing work at the time, Erving Goffman was doing his ethnography, Anselm Strauss was researching masks and psychiatric ideologies in institutions, Herbert Blumer had appeared. These were all qualitative scholars in the 1960s advancing the symbolic interactionist project. And my department didn’t teach us how to do the qualitative research we read about. So the literature was significant. My dissertation turned out to be part of a larger endeavor with mental hospitals and psychiatrists and patients and we were using Goffman’s career model. But my project was probably an interview-based project that I wasn’t really happy about. [Laughter.]
Tony: You weren’t happy doing interviews?
Norman: They were alright but I did a lot of the interviewing myself. I interviewed psychiatrists and patients. This was before IRBs. I would interview patients at their homes. We had addresses and we showed up at the front door. You couldn’t do that research today. It was clear that we were in these incredible spaces. That was Fall 1965. This all began to crystallize when I came to the University of Illinois the next year as an assistant professor. I had decided that insofar as I was going to be a researcher, I was going to teach myself about qualitative research.
Andrew: Where did you start? Where did you decide to start investigating qualitative research?
Norman: I read the Chicago works. I was starting a family. And this was pre-IRB. I started studying how my daughters learned language, and I watched them interact during play. I went to daycare centers and preschools and started hanging out with the children and their teachers, taking fieldnotes. I had meetings with Anselm Strauss and Howard Becker and they offered me feedback. That’s how I started in qualitative research.
Andrew: I’m trying to imagine what that kind of research would’ve been like. You couldn’t research like that now. You’d have to go through numerous formal processes.
Norman: You couldn’t do it now. I was using Cooley as a model and he had studied his own daughter, how she acquired language, used pronouns, and played. That was the format, the protocol I followed. I started writing papers about children playing games and using language and using tenses of self in childhood. I did this work for 2 to 3 years.
Andrew: As you know, we work with Carolyn Ellis so we obviously do a lot of personal narrative work. One thing that I find interesting about ICQI is the extensive talk about the personal and the political and the local and the global. Does—and how does—the personal connect with the global?
Norman: Definitely! That’s what Marie Battiste and Michelle Fine talked about last night in their keynote addresses.
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Concretizing the global in the local and using the local to reflect on and articulate the relationship to larger transnational issues and coalitions.
Andrew: How can we build these coalitions? Michelle described how the students, participants, and respondents didn’t want to go to Geneva. How do we, as academics, build bridges without perpetuating hierarchy? Is there a way?
Norman: I think we must. Like in my workshop yesterday, on Performance Ethnography, when we talked about the personal and the political in our own lives.
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That’s how we make the connections. . .
Andrew: I missed the workshop.
[Laughter.]
Sara: It was great. A lot of fun.
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Norman: Where our lives intersect with the political and the personal is the place where we do the interrogation and the articulation of the connection. And so in our text or in our performances, we enact, write, inscribe, represent our intersections with that conjunction.
Andrew: It’s interesting that you say that—I was originally going to present a family narrative that I wrote here at ICQI, but I am concerned about ethics. I’m not sure I’ll actually present that paper. Even though my family each wrote their own part of the particular story, the way I framed their stories revoices them. And I hadn’t thought about that until a few months ago after I had already submitted it for presentation. “What am I going to do?” I thought. I’m going to talk about that now. One of the big things here, at ICQI, is ethics . . . and not solely IRB ethics. . .
Norman: No. Relational ethics.
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Politics.
Andrew: I know there have been a number of different movements in qualitative research. Where do you think we are now? Are we going to be more political?
Norman: One of the ways we could go as an association [International Institute for Qualitative Inquiry] is to adopt our own research protocols and our own code of ethics and take these protocols and code back to our local campuses and our local IRBs. We can say the 2nd ICQI and the International Institute for Qualitative Inquiry (IIQI) have adopted these guidelines for qualitative research and these are the guidelines I want to be implemented on this campus.
Sara: Are you thinking about these guidelines in addition to the guidelines that already exist, or would they be a replacement for those guidelines. . .
Norman: A replacement for those guidelines.
Sara: Okay.
Norman: On my campus here [University of Illinois], I self-nominated myself as my college’s IRB officer. If you read the federal guidelines, decisions about research are very local. Departments, colleges, and units can have their own IRB officers as well as a campus office. We have a campus office which has some reasonable people, but we’ve had trouble over the years with recent directors. In certain colleges, there are specific guidelines. The College of Education is very strict. It is very hard to get research through, so people in education tend to bypass the College and use the campus IRB office. In my college, we have three units: the Institute of Communications Research where we do all sorts of interdisciplinary performance narratives and oral histories. There are people who do quantitative experimental work in advertising. And then there’s the Journalism department, and the journalists, of course, claim that they are outside of IRBs altogether. The First Amendment gives them the right to report what they want given the mandates of their profession–adhere to the norms of malfeasance, do no harm, maintain confidentiality or the identity of the respondent, and use multiple sources to authenticate their arguments. They have a rigorous tool kit they use for their work which is wholly appropriate.
For our college, I claimed the oral history exemption because that had just come through in 2004. Oral historians got a federal exclusion on the grounds that they were not doing “research” as defined by federal guidelines. They were doing interpretive work with personal narrative and they were developing long-term relationships whose narratives couldn’t be hidden if they were public officials, or they were forming long-term relationships when the identity wasn’t known. They claimed they weren’t doing scientific research: they weren’t generalizing to a population, they weren’t randomly selecting subjects, they weren’t randomly testing hypotheses, they weren’t using quantitative measurements. They were doing something else. And what they were doing, then, was regulated by the ethics of history and oral history societies. And oral historians got the exclusion. So that’s the exclusion I claim for my colleagues. We have everybody come through my office now. We, IIQI, can claim the oral history exemption and, as an international organization, we can have our own code of ethics. And then our code merges with the National Communication Association, your discipline. I’m in sociology, and as a member of that discipline, there are codes that my profession asks that I adhere to. Of course, I will do so, insofar as I see those as codes as appropriate. But I won’t use codes that espouse a biomedical ethical model of inquiry. That’s not appropriate for what I do, or for my college, or my department. A long answer to your question. . .
Andrew: Though a good answer!
Norman: That’s where we are.
Andrew: I have another question, probably the simplest question you may get this entire weekend. How do you write so much? I walked into the book exhibit and there’s your handbook and another handbook and then your self-authored works and multiple chapters and all those journals . . . I just want to know, how do you write so much?
Norman: Every morning.
Andrew: How long?
Norman: 4-5 hours. If you do that 5 days a week, the writing will add up. [Laughter] You just have to free up the time. I stay at home. Nobody bothers you, you have nobody interrupting you. I try to stay focused for a few hours and then do other things the rest of the day.
Sara: You write a lot and I’ve noticed recently that you’ve written a lot about performance. Do you envision yourself actually embodying any of your writing, like doing the performances, and, if so, when, where, what would get you out there doing performance?
Tony: Is that important?
Sara: Maybe it’s important . . . but it’s my question.
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Tony: It may not be important. . .
Andrew: This is why I didn’t want you two to come! [Laughter]
Norman: If I go to a conference to give a paper, I do it as a performance and I try to create a performance text. I’m walking away from old fashioned papers. I don’t write them anymore. Well, that’s not completely true, but I’m trying to perform more of the time or write something that could be performed by myself or others.
Andrew: That’s a distinct change from your past work.
Norman: Yeah, it has been a trajectory. Look at my book Performance Ethnography (Denzin, 2003).
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The first half articulated a case for performance ethnography. The second half is a set of performance pieces or first-person narratives that are the foundation for the first half of the book. While writing those narratives, you write some and then go back and do the theoretical justification for them. I was in both spaces at the same time.
Andrew: It sounds like a hard way to write . . .
Norman: You’ll both work with me and the journal, or you will be working with me as an editor. I don’t like a lot of theory, I don’t like a lot of propping up of a narrative. I like movement–move into the narrative as quickly as possible. I think that is what Carolyn and Art are teaching in your program at USF. They embed the theory in the performance. It’s there. Anybody who reads your work knows where you come from.
Andrew: Very true. Carolyn and Art have distinct ways of writing which, I think, is beautiful and complementary. Art tends to not like a lot of theory in the writing—at first. Stick to the narrative, then theorize. Carolyn interweaves her narratives with theory. They get to the same place, but from different directions.
Norman: That’s right. . .
Sara: Tony and I have a few questions. . .Tony, you go first. I already asked one question even though you derailed it.
Tony: I didn’t derail it. You asked a loaded question.
Sara: Whatever.
Andrew: The two of you! Your interaction is going to make for some great commentary!
Tony: What does truth look like in personal narrative and life writing? What is “truth”?
Norman: I think there is truth to experience. The writing invokes, resonates with experience. The text has to create that connection, and that’s the challenge. That’s one kind of truth.
Tony: How do notions of truth differ from the writer who wants to write close to the experience, or for the reader who you hope to evoke with the experience? Are they different?
Norman: They should be different. The reader should be who you’re writing for.
If you’re writing for yourself, do what works for you. You don’t think about the reader. So the truth of the text is truth to the experience. That is the link from the writer to the text to the reader. Constructing and mediating. And so truth is the construction by the writer and that would be the direction. It’s always contested. It’s always partial. It’s always incomplete and always in motion. Every time you return to truth, it is different. To speak of certain truths. . . You can only engage the meaning in relationship to a particular intersection, the formation that you are writing about. I’m doing some writing for the session on Goodall.
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I’m trying to write this scene I remember living from 1958 or 1959. It’s a dance scene set in my family’s dining room. It’s a scene from a party my parents had. I hear Pete Fountain playing the clarinet. I see people dressed in 1950s outfits, women with Mimi Eisenhower bangs, and men wearing dark pleated trousers. I’m trying to write a scene that embodies this moment I remember.”
Tony: But since you’re writing it from today. . ..
Norman: Yes! So what’s the truth of that scene? I try to be true to the experience, but of course it’s my experience.
Tony: You’re trying to write the scene through the lens of a kid. . .
Norman: Yes! I was 17. We write in this type of space. We all do it.
Andrew: That reminds me about writing about my dad.
Norman: Yeah?
Andrew: I was trying to remember what it was like to be 10 years old when he left us. As an almost forty-year old now, I have to translate feelings from 1976 and how I felt then to how I feel now. It is harder than I thought.
Sara: My question has to do with what you talked about yesterday at your workshop. I was really excited about it. I come from American Studies and I did nature theory. So Yellowstone and the Thomas Moran painting–you talk about all of these ways of investigating the alternatives through performance. How? That’s what I want to know. Do you plan on doing that through your writing or actually staging some type of interesting interactive dynamic?
Norman: That’s why I’m writing it as a play, to be staged.
Sara: That’s exciting!
Norman: Yeah, the whole chapter is built to the moment that Thomas Moran exhibits the painting itself for $10,000.
Sara: Would you be Thomas Moran?
[Laughter]
Norman: I don’t know. . . That’s a good question. I move around in the text a lot. Art historian, historian of Yellowstone, contemporary writer, trying to figure out what Moran thought he was doing when he painted that, how he did it, and the whole time the painting’s paid for by J. Cook, the multi-billionaire who made his money on the Civil War selling junk bonds to the states to finance the war. [Laughter.] So he’s kind of a major crook! [Laughter.]
Andrew: So you’re adding playwright to your vita. . .
Tony: I see a distinction. . . Writing as performance–the text–and writing to be performed. . .
Norman: Exactly! And that’s what I think you’re being taught at USF. To write performatively and to have those works be read, performed. I’m learning from you all . . .
Andrew: We do a lot of reading aloud down there. We’re always reading aloud in our classes, embodying what we’ve read. . .
Norman: That’s critical. . .
Andrew: Sometimes we learn more from doing that . . . You experience the text differently from writing and reading it.
We have fond memories of listening to Norman in this meeting and in our continued contact and work with him. Though we were graduate students when we conducted this interview, Norman treated us like esteemed peers, colleagues, and collaborators. He was always generous with his time and knowledge. This interview was a formative moment for us as researchers, and we are grateful for Norman’s wise advice and mentorship as well as his steadfast care for us—and so many other qualitative researchers.
Toward the end of his Performance Ethnography workshop, the day before this interview, Norman spoke about historicization: “We must insert ourselves into our historical moments.” He physicalized the personal–social–political nexus by slamming his two index fingers together perpendicularly. “We must be critical of these intersections, these sites between the personal and the political.” Inserting oneself into the historical moment is an actionary activist move toward praxis, toward what Norman referred to as a “new imaginary.” “Your being there has made that place different.” Passionately, Norman stated, “I want people to say Denzin was there.” He repeated the statement several times, increasing in volume and conviction. “Transgression requires changing the site, place, space.” We hope Norman rests well knowing he profoundly changed the landscape of qualitative inquiry. Indeed, Denzin was there.
