Denzin’s Lighthouse

“You must take Norman Denzin’s grad seminar in the Fall,” Jim said turning to me. I had been telling Jim about my frustration with the rigid approach to paradigms and ways of knowing in my graduate program:

“He grounds much of his course on a book by C. Wright Mills called The Sociological Imagination, which asks scholars to examine the connections between the self and society, biography and history, personal troubles and public issues, and to do so with intent to promote liberation from oppressive social orders. Taking his class has changed the way I think about competitive running and the way I want to do my dissertation. I think you might find the ways of knowing you are looking for with him too,” he said.

I am forever grateful to Jim for that suggestion. Taking Denzin’s graduate seminar in the Fall of 1992 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign changed my life. I have been very lucky to have thoughtful, kind, and brilliant parents, teachers, professors, and mentors in my life. But Norman Denzin showed me horizons and possibilities of thinking about the human experience that I hadn’t learned from anyone else. I had just turned 25 years of age when I first sat in Denzin’s graduate seminar. He walked into the classroom of about 40 or so students wearing his typical short sleeve buttoned-up shirt, loose shorts, and sandals. He sat at the traditional teaching desk on an elevated stage, looked around the packed classroom, nodded and smiled at us, pulled out a few loose pages with notes from his front shirt pocket, welcomed us with his booming voice, and immediately launched into a very eloquent introduction to the “complicated, messy, rapidly shifting field of qualitative inquiry.” The official title of the course was Social Theory, but the course was about ways of knowing, paradigms, epistemology, and qualitative research in that particular historical moment of theoretical, representational, interpretive, and ethical upheaval in social sciences in the English-speaking world and academia. The crisis of representation started in the 1970s and, intensified by the theoretical blurring of genres of the 1980s, had forced deeper and broader questioning and debate about paradigms, the dominance of logical-positivism in the English-language social sciences, Truth, positionality, the self in knowledge production, (de)colonization, feminism beyond White privilege, indigeneity, Global South liberation movements (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Conquergood, 1991; Geertz, 1973). Postmodernism had jumped from the arts to social science, and the response, and push back, was energetic.

Norman Denzin addressed all these issues, and more, in that first seminar, in his papers and books. I was so inspired by him that I went to the library to check out The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959) and the recent books Denzin (1989, 1991, 1992) had written at that point right after walking out of that first class with him. What I learned in his classes and read in his papers helped me name and make sense of things that had been out of my intellectual reach. I sat in Denzin’s Fall seminar every year after that first time until the semester I defended my dissertation, in the Fall of 1997. Every Fall he brought new ideas, authors, angles, horizons, epistemological standpoints. I never stopped learning, never stopped being ontologically and epistemologically curious because he showed us how he continued to seek out knowledge and liberatory ways of knowing, being, and teaching. He was tireless in searching and imagining ways in which qualitative inquiry can critique, resist, challenge, and dethrone ideologies of domination. He was the embodiment of Paulo Freire’s (1995/2004) central tenet that hope is an ontological need, especially when one does not feel individually hopeful. Denzin showed, to so many of us, students, colleagues, scholars across the globe, how to see the struggle for kinder and more just societies as a legitimate and imperative tenet of scholarship of, by, and about the human experience. He insisted in calling his “retirement” a “permanent sabbatical.” And he was as productive, inspiring, inquisitive, supportive, and strategic in his 12 years of “permanent sabbatical” as in the previous decades of his prolific and inspiring academic career.

Norman, thank you! Thank you for showing us how to bring scholarship down from the ivory tower to the street corners, to the ordinary stages where ideologies of domination are enacted and performed in vivid ways. Thank you for showing us how to be both critical and kind in scholarship that challenges and attempts to transform the status quo. Thank you for being so generous and kind to me these past 30 years. Thank you for showing me how to write from epiphanies that always connect the dots between the person with the political systems shaping and informing lived experience. Thank you for opening intellectual gates for those who have been historically kept as subjects but not makers of knowledge. Thanks for creating the academic infrastructure, through handbooks, journals, and the mighty International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, that has made possible for so many outsiders to have productive and creative careers across so many different disciplines, languages, and geographies. Your voice, your fire, your unwillingness to conform and simply sit back basking in your academic laureates kept me going during the most difficult times, when the inspiration was gone or when I struggled in maintaining my ontological hope that qualitative inquiry can help us reach for the utopia of a world more just for more people. Thanks for showing us how to make the academic “tent bigger” while also striving for excellence.

I am sad beyond words that we are no longer sharing the space and time on this little blue planet. I have always carried you in my heart and mind, and always will. I will do all I can to honor you and all that you have done for academia and humanity.

Onward!