Critical Qualitative Inquiry Foundations and Futur... - (Section I Foundations of Critical Qualitative Inquiry)

1.
What Is Critical
Qualitative Inquiry?
Norman K. Denzin
We each have a responsibility for conducting ethical research

that makes a difference in the lives of those whose life
opportunities, health, safety, and well-being are diminished
by conditions of poverty. (Bloom, 2009, p. 253)
W hat is the role of critical qualitative research in a historical pres-

ent when the need for social justice has never been greater?
This is a historical present that cries out for emancipatory visions,
for visions that inspire transformative inquiries, and for inquiries
that can provide the moral authority to move people to struggle and
resist oppression. The pursuit of social justice within a transformative
Copyright © 2015. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.
paradigm challenges prevailing forms of inequality, poverty, human

oppression, and injustice. This paradigm is firmly rooted in a human
rights agenda. It requires an ethical framework that is rights and
social justice based. It requires an awareness of “the need to redress
inequalities by giving precedence … to the voices of the least advan-
taged groups in society” (Mertens, Holmes & Harris, 2009, p. 89). It
Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures, Gaile S. Cannella, Michelle Salazar Pérez,
and Penny A. Pasque, editors, 31–50. © 2015 Left Coast Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Cannella, G. S., Pérez, M. S., & Pasque, P. A. (Eds.). (2015). Critical qualitative inquiry : Foundations and futures. Taylor & Francis Group.
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32 Norman K. Denzin
encourages the use of qualitative research for social justice purposes,

including making such research accessible for public education, social
policy-making, and community transformation.
This is a vision that is open to myriad ways of doing social
justice work: social workers handling individual clients compas-
sionately; graduate students serving as language translators for
non-English-speaking migrant workers and their children; health
researchers collaborating with communities to improve health care
delivery systems; qualitative researchers engaging their students in
public interest visions of society; indigenous scholars being trained
to work for their own nations using their own values; teachers
fostering the ethical practices of qualitative research through pub-
lications, presentations, and teaching in both traditional classroom
and professional development settings, internationally and nation-
ally (Bloom, 2009).
Critical qualitative inquiry scholars are united in the
commitment to expose and critique the forms of inequality and dis-
crimination that operate in daily life (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008).
Together, they seek morally informed disciplines and interventions
that will help people transcend and overcome the psychological
despair fostered by wars, economic disaster, and divisive sexual and
cultural politics. As global citizens, we are no longer called to just
interpret the world, which was the mandate of traditional qualitative
inquiry. Today, we are called to change the world and to change it in
ways that resist injustice while celebrating freedom and full, inclu-
sive, participatory democracy.
This challenge mobilizes members of the interpretive commu-

nity in two ways. It offers an answer to those who express doubt and
reservations about qualitative research, people who say “It’s only a
qualitative study!” The answer is this is NOT JUST a qualitative
study. This is ethically responsible activist research. The avowed
social justice commitment focuses inquiry on research that makes a
difference in the lives of socially oppressed persons.
The desire is to create an ethically responsible agenda that
would have these goals:
1. What Is Critical Qualitative Inquiry? 33
1. Place the voices of the oppressed at the center of inquiry;

2. Use inquiry to reveal sites for change and activism;
3. Use inquiry and activism to help people;
4. Affect social policy by getting critiques heard and acted on by
policy makers;
5. Affect change in the inquirer’s life, thereby serving as a model
of change for others. (Bloom & Sawin, 2009, pp. 338, 340–342,
344)
We live in a numbers dominated world. We know after a decade
of critique in the health, welfare, and educational fields that the
evidence-based measures of quality and excellence rely on narrow
models of objectivity and impact. Researcher reputation, citation,
and impact scores are not acceptable indicators of quality. They
should not be the criteria we use to judge our work, or one another.
They should not be allowed to shape what we do.
To these ends we must create our own standards of evalua-
tion, our own measures of quality, influence, excellence, and social
justice impact. These are moral criteria. They celebrate resistance,
experimentation, and empowerment. They honor sound partisan
work that offers knowledge-based critiques of social settings, and
institutions. They promote human dignity, human rights, and just
societies around the globe. These discourses will always be about
the local, about human justice in lives lived under neoliberalism.
The focus will be on human beings as universal singulars, individu-
als and groups universalizing in their singularity the transformative
life experiences of their historical moment.

This is what globalizing critical qualitative research in an inter-
national context should be all about. I seek a writing form that is
performative, dialogical, pedagogical—that tells by showing. Not all
qualitative researchers will endorse the performance and communi-
ty-based collaborative approach I advocate. It should only be used
when the researcher wants to examine the relationship between per-
sonal and community troubles, and the public policies and public
institutions that have been created to address those issues.
34 Norman K. Denzin
History
Vidich and Lyman (1994) remind us that the history of qualitative
methods has been deeply embedded in the study of race and the
politics of colonialism. From its origins in the nineteenth century,
ethnography’s mission was to discover, study, and record the way
of life of the dark-skinned primitive other (p. 25). As nineteenth
century colonial anthropology gave way to twentieth century
urban sociology and anthropology, the focus shifted to studies
of assimilation, ethnographies of the American Indian, the indig-
enous other, the civic other, racial minorities living in the urban
ghetto, and the social problems they caused for the schooling, wel-
fare, and healthcare systems.
Throughout its history, the users of qualitative research have
displayed commitments to a small set of beliefs, including objectiv-
ism, and a willingness to theoretically interpret the behaviors and
experiences of those studied. These beliefs supplement the positivist
tradition of complicity with colonialism and the global politics of
white, patriarchal capitalism. The positivist apparatus could study,
but not make the problems and politics of racial and social justice
and white privilege go away.
On this, extending W. E. B. Du Bois (1978), “it is certain that a
continuing problem of the twenty-first century will be … the color
line.… Modern democracy cannot succeed unless peoples of dif-
ferent races and religions are also integrated into the democratic
whole” (Du Bois, 1978, pp. 281, 288).
The International Qualitative Inquiry Community

The qualitative research community consists of groups of globally
dispersed persons who are attempting to implement a critical inter-
pretive approach that will help them (and others) make sense of the
terrifying conditions that define daily life at the first few decades of
this new century. These individuals employ participatory, construc-
tivist, critical, feminist, queer, and critical race theory and cultural
studies models of interpretation. They locate themselves on the epis-
temological border between postpositivism and poststructuralism.
They work at the centers and the margins of intersecting disciplines,

from communications, to race, ethnic, religious and women’s stud-
ies, from sociology, history, anthropology, literary criticism, political
science, and economics, to social work, health care, and education.
They use multiple research strategies, from case study, to ethnog-
raphy, phenomenology, grounded theory, biographical, historical,
participatory, and clinical inquiry. As writers and interpreters, these
individuals wrestle with positivist, postpositivist, poststructural,
and postmodern criteria for evaluating their written work.
Of course much of the field still works within frameworks
defined by earlier historical moments. This is how it should be.
There is no one way to do interpretive, qualitative inquiry. We are all
interpretive bricoleurs stuck in the present working against the past
as we move into a politically charged and challenging future.
The open-ended nature of the qualitative research project
leads to a perpetual resistance against attempts to impose a single,
umbrella-like paradigm over the entire project. There are multiple
interpretive projects, including: the decolonizing methodological
project of Indigenous scholars, Marxist theories of critical pedagogy;
performance [auto] ethnographies; standpoint epistemologies, criti-
cal race theory; critical, public, poetic, queer, materialist, feminist,
reflexive ethnographies; projects connected to the British cultural
studies and Frankfurt schools; grounded theorists of several vari-
eties; multiple strands of ethnomethodology; and transnational
cultural studies projects. The generic focus of each of these versions
of qualitative research involves a politics of the local and a utopian
politics of possibility (Madison, 1998) that redresses social injustices

and imagines a radical democracy that is not yet (Weems, 2002, p. 3).
This is a world where qualitative inquiry texts circulate like oth-
er commodities in an electronic world economy. Global and local
legal processes have erased the personal and institutional distance
between the ethnographer and those about whom he or she writes.
We do not “own” the field notes we make about those we study. We
do not have an undisputed warrant to study anyone or anything.
Subjects now challenge how they have been written about, and more
than one ethnographer has been taken to court.
36 Norman K. Denzin
Ours is a gendered project. Feminist, post-colonial, and queer

theorists question the traditional logic of the heterosexual, narrative
ethnographic text that reflexively positions the ethnographer’s gen-
der-neutral (or masculine) self within a realist story. Today there is
no solidified ethnographic identity. The ethnographer works within
a “hybrid” reality. Experience, discourse, and self-understandings
collide against larger cultural assumptions concerning race, eth-
nicity, nationality, gender, class, and age. A certain identity is never
possible; the ethnographer must always ask not “Who am I?” but
“When, where, how am I?” (Marcus, 2009).
Qualitative research is a moral, allegorical, and therapeutic
project. Ethnography is more than the record of human experience.
The ethnographer writes tiny moral tales, tales that do more than
celebrate cultural difference or bring another culture alive. The
researcher’s story is written as a prop, a pillar, that, to paraphrase
William Faulkner (1967, p. 724), will help men and women endure
and prevail in the opening years of the twenty-first century.
While constant breaks and ruptures define the field of qualita-
tive research, there is a shifting center to the project: the avowed
humanistic and social justice commitment to study the social world
from the perspective of the interacting individual. From this prin-
ciple flow the liberal and radical politics of action that are held by
feminist, clinical, ethnic, critical, queer, critical race theory, and
cultural studies researchers. While multiple interpretive communi-
ties now circulate within the field of qualitative research, they are all
united on this single point.
History, Politics, and Paradigms

To better understand where we are today, to better grasp current
criticisms, it is useful to return to the so-called paradigm wars of
the 1980s, which resulted in the serious crippling of quantitative
research in education. Critical pedagogy, critical theorists, and fem-
inist analyses fostered struggles for power and cultural capital for
the poor, non-whites, women, and gays.
Teddlie and Tashakkori’s history is helpful here. They expand
the time frame of the 1980s war. For them there have been at least
three paradigm wars, or periods of conflict: the postpositivist-

constructivist war against positivism (1970–1990); the conflict
between competing postpositivist, constructivist, and critical
theory paradigms (1990–2005); and the current conflict between
evidence-based methodologists and the mixed methods, interpre-
tive, and critical theory schools (2005–present).1
Guba’s (1990a) Paradigm Dialog signaled an end to the 1980s
wars. Postpositivists, constructivists, and critical theorists talked to
one another, working through issues connected to ethics, field stud-
ies, praxis, criteria, knowledge accumulation, truth, significance,
graduate training, values, and politics. By the early 1990s, there was
an explosion of published works on qualitative research; handbooks
and new journals appeared. Special interest groups committed to
particular paradigms appeared; some had their own journals.2
The second paradigm conflict occurred within the mixed-
methods community, and involved disputes “between individuals
convinced of the ‘paradigm purity’ of their own position” (Teddlie &
Tashakkori, 2003, p. 7). Purists extended and repeated the argument
that quantitative and qualitative methods—that postpositivism and
the other “isms”—cannot be combined because of the differences
between their underlying paradigmatic assumptions. On the meth-
odological front, the incompatibility thesis was challenged by those
who invoked triangulation as a way of combining multiple methods
to study the same phenomenon (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003, p. 7).
Thus was ushered in a new round of arguments and debates over
paradigm superiority.
A soft, apolitical pragmatic paradigm emerged in the post-

1990 period. Suddenly, quantitative and qualitative methods
became compatible, and researchers could use both in their
empirical inquiries (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003, p. 7). Pro-
ponents made appeals to a “what works” pragmatic argument,
contending that “no incompatibility between quantitative and
qualitative methods exists at either the level of practice or that of
epistemology…. There are thus no good reasons for educational
researchers to fear forging ahead with ‘what works’” (Howe, 2004,
38 Norman K. Denzin
p. 44). Of course what works is more than an empirical question.

It involves the politics of evidence.
This is the space that evidence-based research entered. This is
the battleground of war number three. Enter Teddlie and Tashak-
kori’s third moment, mixed methods and evidence-based inquiry
meet one another in a soft center. This is a space for abstracted
empiricism. Inquiry is cut off from politics. Biography and history
recede into the background. Technological rationality prevails.
Reading Resistance
We are nearly a half-century down the road since the methodological
conflicts of the 1970s and the 1980s. A familiar litany of criticisms
easily summarized:
Qualitative Inquiry is non-scientific.
Qualitative Inquiry is fiction.
Qualitative Inquiry is soft journalism.
Qualitative Inquiry is political.
Qualitative Inquiry has no truth criteria.
Qualitative Inquiry is armchair inquiry.
Qualitative Inquiry is an anything goes methodology.
Qualitative Inquiry is romantic postmodernism.
Qualitative Inquiry only yields moral criticism.
Qualitative Inquiry only yields low quality research results.
Qualitative Inquiry only yields results that are stereotypical.
Qualitative Inquiry only yields results that are close to

common sense.
Qualitative Inquiry signals the death of empirical science.
Qualitative Inquiry is an attack on reason and truth.
Qualitative Inquiry is not rigorous.
Qualitative Inquiry is not systematic.
Qualitative inquiry lacks an objective methodology.
Qualitative Inquiry does not yield causal analyses.
Qualitative Inquiry does not use randomized controlled

experiments.
Qualitative Inquiry does not produce work that can be
replicated.
Qualitative Inquiry does not produce work that can be
generalized.
Qualitative Inquiry has no well-defined variables.
Qualitative Inquiry produces no hard evidence.
At best, case study, interview, and ethnographic methods offer
descriptive materials that can be tested with experimental methods.
The epistemologies of critical race, queer, postcolonial, feminist, and
postmodern theories are rendered useless, relegated, at best, to the
category of scholarship, not science (Ryan & Hood, 2004, p. 81). It is
also important to remember that criticisms of the new writing were
linked to identity politics and feminist theory, and in anthropology
to postcolonial criticisms. These criticisms involved a complex set of
questions, namely, who had the right to speak for whom, and how?
(Clough, 2000).
The need to represent postcolonial hybrid identities became the
focus of experimental writing in ethnography, just as there has been
“an effort to elaborate race, classed, sexed, and national identities in
the autoethnographic writings of postcolonial theorists” (Clough,
2000, p. 285). These debates about writing, agency, self, subjectiv-
ity, nation, culture, race, and gender unfolded on a global landscape,
involving the transnationalization of capital and the globalization
of technology (p. 279). Thus, from the beginning, experimental
writing has been closely connected to gender, race, family, nation,

politics, capital, technology, critical social theory, and cultural
criticism; that is, to debates over questions of knowledge and its rep-
resentation and presentation.
Interpretive critics contend that the positivist endorses a narrow
view of science, while celebrating a “neoclassical experimentalism
that is a throwback to the Campbell-Stanley era and its dogmatic
adherence to an exclusive reliance on quantitative methods” (Howe,
2004, p. 42; see also Maxwell, 2004). Interpretive critics contend
40 Norman K. Denzin
that evidence-based researchers fail to understand that all facts are

value-and-theory-laden; there is no objective truth.
If the opposition to positivist science by the poststructuralists
is seen as an attack on reason and truth, then the positivist science
attack on qualitative research is regarded as an attempt to legislate
one version of truth over another.
A Standoff?
A half-century? Yes. Same criticisms? Yes. Any Change? Yes. What?
In the traditional and golden ages of qualitative inquiry, positiv-
ism reigned. All inquiry was judged against a narrow set of criteria:
objective, valid, reliable, accounts of the “Other” and his or her way
of life. Today, that picture has been shattered. The myth of the objec-
tive observer has been deconstructed. The qualitative researcher is
not an objective, politically neutral observer who stands outside and
above the study of the social world. Rather, the researcher is histori-
cally and locally situated within the very processes being studied. A
gendered, historical self is brought to this process. This self, as a set of
shifting identities, has its own history with the situated practices that
define and shape the public issues and private troubles being studied.
In the social sciences today there is no longer a God’s-eye view
that guarantees absolute methodological certainty. All inquiry
reflects the standpoint of the inquirer. All observation is theory-lad-
en. There is no possibility of theory- or value-free knowledge. The
days of naive realism and naive positivism are over. The criteria for
evaluating research are now relative.
A critical social science seeks its external grounding not in sci-

ence, in any of its revisionist, postpositivist forms, but rather in a
commitment to critical pedagogy and communitarian feminism
with hope but no guarantees. It seeks to understand how power and
ideology operate through and across systems of discourse, cultural
commodities, and cultural texts. It asks how words and texts and
their meanings play a pivotal part in the culture’s “decisive perfor-
mances of race, class [and] gender” (Downing, 1987, p. 80).
We no longer just write culture. We perform culture. We have
many different forms of qualitative inquiry today. We have multiple
criteria for evaluating our work. It is a new day for my generation. We

have drawn our line in the sand, and we may re-draw it. But we stand
firmly behind the belief that critical qualitative inquiry inspired by
the sociological imagination can make the world a better place.
Changing the World

Qualitative inquiry can contribute to social justice in the following
ways. First, it can help identify different definitions of a problem and/
or a situation that is being evaluated and where there is some agree-
ment that change is required. It can show, for example, how battered
wives interpret the shelters, hotlines, and public services that are
made available to them by social welfare agencies. Through the use of
personal experience narratives, the perspectives of women and work-
ers can be compared and contrasted.
Second, the assumptions, often belied by the facts of experi-
ence, that are held by various interested parties—policy makers,
clients, welfare workers, on-line professionals—can be located
and shown to be correct, or incorrect (Becker, l967, p. 23). Third,
strategic points of intervention into social situations can be identi-
fied. In such ways, the services of an agency and a program can be
improved and evaluated. Fourth, it is possible to suggest “alterna-
tive moral points of view from which the problem,” the policy, and
the program can be interpreted and assessed (see Becker, l967, pp.
23–24). Because of its emphasis on experience and its meanings,
the interpretive method suggests that programs must always be
judged by and from the point of view of the persons most directly
affected. Fifth, the limits of statistics and statistical evaluations

can be exposed with the more qualitative, interpretive materials
furnished by this approach. Its emphasis on the uniqueness of
each life holds up the individual case as the measure of the effec-
tiveness of all applied programs.
Critical scholars are committed to showing how the practices
of critical, interpretive, qualitative research can help change the
world in positive ways. They are committed to creating new ways
of making the practices of critical qualitative inquiry central to the
workings of a free democratic society.
42 Norman K. Denzin
This commitment rests on the importance of interpretation and

understanding as key features of social life. In social life there is only
interpretation. That is, everyday life revolves around persons inter-
preting and making judgments about their own and others’ behaviors
and experiences. Many times these interpretations and judgments are
based on faulty or incorrect understandings. Persons, for instance,
mistake their own experiences for the experiences of others. These
interpretations are then formulated into social programs which are
intended to alter and shape the lives of troubled people—for example,
community services for the mentally ill or the homeless, treatment
centers for alcoholics, medical services for AIDS patients.
But often the understandings that these programs are based
upon bear little relationship to the meanings, interpretations, and
experience of the persons they are intended to serve. As a conse-
quence, there is a gap or failure in understanding. The programs
don’t work because they are based on a failure to take the perspec-
tive and attitude of the person served. The human disciplines and
the applied social sciences are under a mandate to clarify how inter-
pretations and understandings are formulated, implemented, and
given meaning in problematic, lived situations. Ideally, this knowl-
edge can also be used to evaluate programs that have been put into
place to assist troubled persons. The perspectives and experiences of
those persons who are served by social justice programs must be grasped,
interpreted, and understood if solid, effective, applied programs are to
be created.
Whose Science, Whose Research?

We cannot allow the new positivist, scientifically-based research
(SBR) camp to claim control over the word science, just as we must
reclaim control over what we mean by research (Hammersley,
2004). Eisenhart and Jurow (2011) propose a model of qualitative
science that is interpretive and practical. Likewise, queer, feminist,
indigenous, and postcolonial models of science open up additional
spaces for resisting the narrow, hegemonic SBR framework (Den-
zin, 2013; Koro-Ljungberg & Maclure, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011).
We need to find new strategic and tactical ways to work with one
another in the new new paradigm dialog. This means that dialogues
need to be formed between the poststructural, post-postructural,
mixed-methods, and SBR advocates (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012).
These four main interpretive communities need to develop ways of
communicating with and learning from one another.
This means we must expand the size of our tent; indeed, we
need a bigger tent! We cannot afford to fight with one another.
Mixed-methods scholars have carefully studied the many different
branches of the poststructural tree. The same cannot be said for the
poststructuralists and post-poststructuralists. Nor can we allow the
arguments from the SBR community to divide us.
We must learn from the paradigm conflicts of the 1980s to not
over-reach, to not engage in polemics, to not become too self-satis-
fied. We need to develop and work with our own concepts of science,
knowledge, and quality inquiry. We need to remind the resurgent
postpositivists that their criteria of good work apply only to work
within their paradigm, not ours.
Over the course of the last two decades, poststructuralists
have fought hard to claim an interpretive space for inquiry which
questions norms of objectivity, emphasizes complexity, subjective
interpretive processes, performance, textuality, difference, uncer-
tainty, politics, power, and inquiry as a moral as well as a scientific
process (see Lather, 2007). These understandings, like obdurate
structures, ought not be compromised. They are knots in our inter-
pretive handkerchief.
Further, we cannot just erase the differences between QUAN

and QUAL inquiry, QUAN and QUAL departments and their
graduate training programs. Specialization in discourses is still a
requirement. Qualitative inquiry is a huge field, not easily mastered
by taking one or two overview courses (see Eisenhart & DeHaan,
2005). A minimal competency model, methodological bilingual-
ism, seems superficial, perhaps even unworkable.
44 Norman K. Denzin
Carrying On the New Paradigm Dialogs

I want to return to the themes outlined in Guba’s 1990 essay, “Car-
rying on the Dialog” (1990b). This essay enumerates ten emergent
themes and three agenda items from the 1989 Alternative Paradigm
Conference, the conference that is recorded in Guba (1990a). I
believe these themes and agenda items can guide us today. I phrase
them as injunctions, or theses:
Thesis 1: There needs to be a greater openness to alternative
paradigm critiques.
Thesis 2: There needs to be a decline in confrontationalism by
alternative paradigm proponents.
Thesis 3: Paths for fruitful dialog between and across paradigms
need to be explored.
Thesis 4: Simplistic representations of the newer (and older)
paradigms need to be avoided. This will help address confusion.
Thesis 5: Complexity and interconnectedness, not simplicity,
are ineluctable (Guba, 1990b, p. 373).
Thesis 6: The commensurabilty theses, as they apply to para-
digms and methods, need to be revisited. What is gained and
what is lost with these two theses?
Thesis 7: A change in paradigmatic postures involves a personal
odyssey; that is, we each have a personal history with our pre-
ferred paradigm, and this needs to be honored.
Thesis 8: The three main interpretive communities (poststruc-
tural, mix-methods, SBR) must learn how to cooperate and

work with one another. This is so because paradigm dominance
involves control over faculty appointments, tenure, training,
funding, publication, status, and legitimation (Guba, 1990b, p.
374).
Thesis 9: There is a need for conferences which will allow schol-
ars from competing paradigms to see one another face-to-face
and to interact. The annual International Congress of Qualita-
tive Inquiry is one attempt to address this need (Icqi.org).
Thesis 10: The complexity of the field of qualitative research needs

to be honored. Polarization and elitism need to be avoided. In
conferences and congresses multiple language communities need
to be represented. Dialog between persons and interpretive com-
munities is critical.
Into the Future

Three agenda items emerged from the 1989 Conference. I move
them forward into the present, to 2015. They offer a framework for
action and collaboration. It is time to stop fighting. To repeat, we
need to form strategic and tactical alliances. We need to form inter-
active networks across interpretive communities.
The Intellectual Agenda: The global community of qualitative
inquiry needs annual events where it can deal with the problems
and issues that it confronts at this historical moment. These
events should be international, national, regional, and local.
They can be held in conjunction with “universities, school sys-
tems, health care systems, juvenile justice systems, and the like”
(Guba, 1990b, p. 376). 3
The Advocacy Agenda: The community needs to develop
“systematic contacts with political figures, the media … the pro-
fessional press and with practitioners such as teachers, health
workers, social workers, [and] government functionaries” (p.
376). Advocacy includes: (1) showing how qualitative work
addresses issues of social policy; (2) critiquing federally man-
dated ethical guidelines for human subject research; and (3)

critiquing outdated, positivist modes of science and research.
The Operational Agenda: Qualitative researchers are encour-
aged to engage in self-learning and self-criticism—to resocialize
themselves, if necessary. Their goals should include building pro-
ductive relationships with professional associations, journals,
policymakers, and funders (p. 376). Representatives from many
different professional associations (AERA, AEA, ASA, APA,
AAA) need to be brought together.
46 Norman K. Denzin
In Conclusion
The goal is to create a safe space where writers, teachers, and stu-
dents are willing to take risks, to move back and forth between the
personal and the political, the biographical and the historical. In
these spaces research participants perform painful personal experi-
ences. Under this framework we teach one another. We push against
racial, sexual and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of
freedom; the gift of love, self-caring; the gift of empowerment,
teaching and learning to transgress. We talk about painful experi-
ences, those moments where race, class, gender, sexuality intersect.
We take these risks because we have created safe space for such per-
formances—from classrooms, to conference sessions, to the pages
of journals, and in our books—and the pay-off is so great. We are
free in these spaces to explore painful experiences, to move forward
into new spaces, into new identities, new relationships, new, radical
forms of scholarship, new epiphanies.
This is performance-centered pedagogy that uses performance
as a method of investigation, as a way of doing autoethnography,
and as a method of understanding (Denzin, 2014). Mystory, perfor-
mance, ethnodrama, and reality theatre are ways of making visible
the oppressive structures of the culture—racism, homophobia,
sexism (Saldana, 2005, 2011). The performance of these autoeth-
nographic dramas becomes a tool for documenting oppression, a
method for understanding the meanings of the oppression, and a
way of enacting a politics of possibility.
The pedagogical model I offer is collaborative. It is located in a
moral community created out of the interactions and experiences that

occur inside and outside the walls of the seminar room. In this safe
space scholars come together on the terrain of social justice. While
this is done in the sacred safe spaces of collaborative discourse, the
fear of criticism and misunderstanding is always present. When criti-
cism and misunderstanding occur, we seek pedagogies of forgiveness.
The lives and stories that we here study are given to us under a
promise, that promise being that we protect those who have shared
with us. And, in return, this sharing will allow us to write life docu-
ments that speak to the human dignity, the suffering, the hopes, the
dreams, the lives gained, and the lives lost by the people we study.
These documents will become testimonies to the ability of the
human being to endure, to prevail, and to triumph over the struc-
tural forces that threaten at any moment to annihilate all of us. If
we foster the illusion that we understand when we do not or that
we have found meaningful, coherent lives where none exist, then
we engage in a cultural practice that is just as repressive as the most
repressive of political regimes.
Notes
1. They contend that our second moment, the Golden Age (1950–
1970) was marked by the debunking of positivism, the emergence
of postpositivism, and the development of designs which used
mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. Full-scale conflict
developed throughout the 1970–1990 period, the time of the
first “paradigm war.”
2. Conflict broke out between the many different empowerment
pedagogies: feminist, anti-racist, radical, Freirean, liberation
theology, postmodernists, poststructuralists, cultural studies,
and so forth (see the essays in Guba & Lincoln, 2005; Luke &
Gore, 1992; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007).
3. On May 7, 2005, on the last day of the First International Con-
gress of Qualitative Inquiry, the International Association of
Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI) was founded in Urbana, Illinois, USA.

IAQI is the first international association solely dedicated to the
scholarly promotion, representation, and global development of
qualitative research. At present, IAQI has 1,500 delegates repre-
senting sixty nations worldwide. It has established professional
affiliations with over fifty collaborating sites in Oceana, Africa,
North and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle
East, Japan, Korea, and China (see qi2008.org). The IAQI News-
letter appears quarterly, as does the journal, International Review
of Qualitative Research.
48 Norman K. Denzin
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1.

We each have a responsibility for conducting ethical research

W hat is the role of critical qualitative research in a historical pres-

paradigm challenges prevailing forms of inequality, poverty, human

encourages the use of qualitative research for social justice purposes,

This challenge mobilizes members of the interpretive commu-

1. Place the voices of the oppressed at the center of inquiry;

life experiences of their historical moment.

The International Qualitative Inquiry Community

They work at the centers and the margins of intersecting disciplines,

politics of possibility (Madison, 1998) that redresses social injustices

Ours is a gendered project. Feminist, post-colonial, and queer

History, Politics, and Paradigms

three paradigm wars, or periods of conflict: the postpositivist-

A soft, apolitical pragmatic paradigm emerged in the post-

p. 44). Of course what works is more than an empirical question.

Qualitative Inquiry only yields results that are close to

Qualitative Inquiry does not use randomized controlled

writing has been closely connected to gender, race, family, nation,

that evidence-based researchers fail to understand that all facts are

A critical social science seeks its external grounding not in sci-

criteria for evaluating our work. It is a new day for my generation. We

Changing the World

affected. Fifth, the limits of statistics and statistical evaluations

This commitment rests on the importance of interpretation and

Whose Science, Whose Research?

Further, we cannot just erase the differences between QUAN

Carrying On the New Paradigm Dialogs

tural, mix-methods, SBR) must learn how to cooperate and

Thesis 10: The complexity of the field of qualitative research needs

Into the Future

dated ethical guidelines for human subject research; and (3)

moral community created out of the interactions and experiences that

Qualitative Inquiry (IAQI) was founded in Urbana, Illinois, USA.

Hammersley, M. (2004). Teaching qualitative methodology: Craft, profes-

Saldana, J. (2005). An introduction to ethnodrama. In J. Saldana (Ed.),

Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2003). Major issues and controversies in

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