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To cite this article: (2023) Norman Denzin tributes, International Journal of Qualitative Studies
in Education, 36:10, 1912-1923, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2023.2260158
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2023.2260158
OBITUARY
Introduction
Norman Denzin, friend, colleague, and mentor to many, many individuals, died on August 6.
Norman did more to validate and support qualitative research, across all academic disciplines,
than anyone in the last few decades. In addition, he was a generous friend and mentor to so, so
many people. He did his own impressive intellectual work. And he provided several journal and
handbook venues for the publication of qualitative research, especially that work that was social
justice-oriented.
Rather than have one, longer tribute to Norman, we at QSE decided to ask several of those
who worked closely with him. Those who wrote tributes are Michael D. Giardina, James Salvo,
Joseph A Naytowhow, Cynthia Dillard, Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, Robert E. Rinehart, Patti Lather,
and Liora Bresler.
As I read the eight tributes, there were some obvious themes. First, everyone said he was a
kind, considerate person, avoiding the superstar status that he could have claimed. Second, many
discuss his mentoring of individuals from literally all over the world. Third, his work with journals
and handbooks was highly lauded, as this provided many venues for publishing qualitative work.
Fourth, he did his own impressive intellectual work.
Norman, wherever you are or are not, there is absolutely no question that you will be seri-
ously missed by many, many individuals.
Jim Scheurich*
School of Education, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA
jscheuri@iupui.edu
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6450-1782
*I thank Jim Scheurich for the invitation to contribute these thoughts to QSE.
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 1913
Jack Lemmon. Written by sportswriter Mitch Albom, the book chronicled Albom’s interactions
with his former sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying from amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”). Stylistically, the chapters in Albom’s
book took the form of a series of “lessons” from each of his sixteen Tuesday visits with Schwartz
(e.g. “lessons” on family, marriage, fear of aging, death, etc.). And although the comparisons
between our DIS and Albom’s book ended with the play-on-words title of that project, well…
here we are.
At the end of the term our group disbanded and scattered to the four winds of academia
far from Illinois, but I sort of…didn’t. At least, not right away. I completed my PhD in 2005,
then spent another four years as a faculty member in the same College of Media as Norman,
before moving to Florida State University where I have been ever since. In those intervening
23 years, Norman and I forged a productive scholarly relationship—and an even better friend-
ship.3 But this reflection is not about our scholarship, or even our conversations over cups of
chili at the Potbelly’s in Champaign. Rather, and in what remains of this short reflection, I want
to borrow from Albom’s trope of “lessons” and touch on the following one4: It’s more than just
a manuscript.
Norman’s primary office in Gregory Hall was in an oblong space at the end of a hallway on
the third floor. The entrance to the Institute of Communications Research’s suite of administrative
and some faculty offices was located just before and to the right. Across the hall was a space
used as a graduate student lounge. Norman’s office wasn’t so much a faculty office in the tradi-
tional sense as it was a space for the management of his various journals (even though it was
his primary office, it was often simply referred to as “the journal office”). If you walked in the
door, there was a chair tucked directly around the corner to the right for visitors to sit and chat.
Straight ahead was Norman’s chair and workspace, facing the wall (i.e. his back would be to the
door if he was working). On his desk was an iMac computer; a wide array of manuscripts, papers,
books, folders, and so forth was spread out and piled high; just to his left sat an old typewriter,
one that was also usually buried under stacks of papers. And jazz music; jazz music was almost
always playing from the small CD player located somewhere amidst the organized clutter.
Notes
1. I thank Mary for reminding me of this DIS in an email I received from her shortly after Norman’s passing.
2. James Salvo reminded me that this particular office had been communication scholar James Carey’s office
at one time before Norman moved into it. Carey left the University of Illinois for Columbia University around
1988; it is likely the VCR had been in the office since at least that time, considering how well it worked (or
didn’t). Given the glacial pace at which Gregory Hall has been updated and renovated over the years, there
is a non-zero chance it is still located somewhere in the building.
3. During that time, we co-edited more than 20 books together on qualitative research, organized the annual
International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry for much of 2005 to the present, and eventually co-edited
several SAGE journals together, including Qualitative Inquiry.
4. There are many others. I am not ready to write about them yet.
5. Primarily, I am referring to the following, in which he was editor-in-chief: Qualitative Inquiry (1995–2023);
Cultural StudiesCritical Methodologies (2000–2023); International Review of Qualitative Research (2007–2023);
The Sociological Quarterly (1992–2000); Studies in Symbolic Interaction: A Research Annual (1978–2023);
Cultural Studies: A Research Annual (1993–2000). Put differently, this represents a total of 128 collective ed-
itorial years of service as a journal editor. It is not hyperbole to suggest that he has likely been the editor
of more scholarly journal volumes than anyone else over the last 50 years if not longer, at least in the
social sciences.
6. A second note, reading “Principles before personalities”, reinforced this belief; it, too, was tacked to the
corkboard.
7. In sporting terms, GOAT means greatest of all time. I am not the first person to use this term in reference
to Norman (see Pierce, 2023).
References
Denzin, N. K. (1970). The research act: A theoretical introduction to sociological methods. Jossey-Bass.
Denzin, N. K. (1997). Interpretive ethnography: Ethnographic practices for the 21st century. Sage.
Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., Giardina, M. D., & Cannella, G. S. (Eds.). (2023). The SAGE handbook of qualitative research
(6th ed.). Sage.
Pierce, J. (2023). Fishing with the GOAT: Honoring Norman K. Denzin. Studies in Symbolic Interaction. A Research
Annual, 55, 157–166.
Michael D. Giardina
Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA
mgiardina@fsu.edu
This passage is many things, but foremost, it is a statement of target. It is also a call, one
indicating that we probably ought to continue working together to supplement this statement
of target with methodological statements of aim.
If not a war, then a dialogue. But a dialogue toward what? I presume that this would be a
dialogue toward peace. Peace, like balance, is difficult to achieve. How so? The sustained occa-
sion of peace seems to have constitutive rules that cannot be violated if peace as a concept is
to cohere, yet peace is something that goes beyond its own rules. Inasmuch as any rule can be
1916 OBITUARY
formally reduced to the form of a prohibition, if peace were only a type of constitutional justice,
then a certain set of fair and enforceable prohibitions might be the path toward achieving it.
However, those for whom peace is sought are also beings having free will, at least it is reason-
able to presume so. In the totality of wills, there are not always only compatibilities, and it is
not the case that prohibiting these incompatibilities is always fairly enforceable. Thus, it can be
the case that peace be in a state of deferral should otherwise just incompatibilities of will exist,
when otherwise reasonable and ethical people find themselves in disagreement about what
they would like to do in terms of how they would like to be. This deferral is not a necessary
state, but one that obtains when those in disagreement are restrained from their willed state
of being.
Microcosmically, in polemics both subtle and unsubtle, we often see otherwise reasonable and
ethical people finding themselves in disagreement when we read broadly in our academic disci-
plines, especially in the methodological discourses. Should finding a unary consensus be the aim
of such discourses? Not necessarily, for even though one may believe that there is one truth
regarding what fairness is conceptually, one can still imagine how—like a balanced ruler upon a
crayon—there can be multiple ways to even a purportedly singular truth, perhaps a small multi-
ple, but not a necessarily singular way nevertheless. So if peace is the target and consensus is
not the aim we need to be working toward, then what?
Perhaps it is the case that while not needing consensus, peace can be achieved through
cooperativity—as Denzin writes—a cooperativity that can persist even through the incompatibil-
ities of just wills. If a place to start finding the contours of what such a cooperativity is can be
found by articulating what it is not, then perhaps we can turn to what seem to be the constitu-
tive rules of a coherent conceptualization of peace itself. While I do not promise to exhaust those
rules in what I write next here, the following rule of peace does seem to be uncontroversially
constitutive, for it is but tautological: Peace cannot sustain itself through anything that itself
threatens peace.
If we are not to violate the tautological and constitutive rule of peace above, then that sug-
gests treating our methodological discourses not as destructive competitions, and if not destruc-
tive competitions, then perhaps well-reasoned attempts at persuasion. If we imagine even our
potential allies as but enemies at the gate, how are we to hope to collectively partake in an
inclusive flourishing of peace wherein retaining our free will is a necessary condition of that
flourishing? Destructiveness is divisive, something that is, too, definitionally, non-cooperative.
Destructiveness may be more facile, but it is not, by definition, peaceful. Still, who said peace
was easy? And again, this is not to say that there are no incompatibilities of wills that are just,
but only to suggest that rhetorically speaking, if we only ever focus on the incompatibilities,
then that would seem to be in service of but a rhetorical foreclosure of the possibility of useful
dialogue.
It is but a microcosmic request—one with the pay-off of being better situated to address
incompatibilities—and still, it is a big ask nonetheless: May we please work together to find
where our methods agree, at least as a place to start? Norman Denzin seems to have, on some
level—a profound one at that—requested that we do this.
Reference
Denzin, N. K. (2008). The new paradigm dialogs and qualitative inquiry. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in
Education, 21(4), 315–325. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390802136995
James Salvo
Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
salvo3000@gmail.com
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 1917
Joseph A. Naytowhow
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada
jnaytow1@sasktel.net
God
Is Change.
When I heard that Norm Denzin had transitioned, there was a simultaneous whisper to my heart:
All that you touch, you change. I immediately reached for Octavia Butler’s wisdom, the kind of
holy wisdom you need in moments like these, when words are insufficient to describe the ways
that my life and work has been changed by Norm. While many are left unspoken here because
of space and time, here are three distinct moments where that truth of that change is over-
whelmingly clear in my life as an endarkened/Black feminist scholar. These short (re)memberings
I offer as a tribute to my friend, Norm Denzin.
My first (re)membering was as a doctoral student at Washington State University. This was in
the early 1980s, at a time when I was learning about the production and pursuit of knowledge
through research and engaging the explosion of new Black feminist writers and knowledge mak-
ers. Along with the entire fields of education, I was, for the first time encountering new ways to
inquire into the nature of things as a Black woman and ways of proceeding in that pursuit called
qualitative research. Qualitative research provided an alternative to assumptions of “objectivity.” It
provided a way of being with participants vs. standing apart from them. It opened a way to
imagine being both Black and feminist AND refusing to continue to pathologize communities I
cared deeply about. Yvonna Lincoln, Egon Guba and Norm Denzin became my nourishment and
in tandem with Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Patricia Bell-Scott and others, I ate EVERY word! I
learned skills and ways of being a qualitative researcher that would be my foundation. But never
did I think that I would eventually meet and be so deeply touched by Norm Denzin. I entered
the field as an assistant professor, true to my preparation as a newly minted qualitative researcher.
Norm Denzin’s bold ideas about an ethical and culturally responsive way of engaging inquiry
literally changed my life and my work. “All that You touch, You change.”
My second (re)membering is wrapped up in the process of going up for tenure at The Ohio
State University. By then, I’d had the opportunity to really focus my scholarship in (re)presenta-
tion and in practice on Black and endarkened feminisms and Norm was one of my biggest cheer-
leaders. I would arrive at ICQI and he would seek me out to have discussions about an article or
piece I’d written that he’d just read – and I relished those conversations with someone who had
so deeply shaped my work. This giant of a human once even sent me an email to say that he
“was teaching on of my articles that evening” and wanted me to know! When it was time for me
to submit my list of external reviewers, I (rather timidly) put his name on my list, never imagining
that such an influential scholar would say yes to me. But he did. This was a rare gift, especially
as a Black woman scholar. I believe he knew that lending his name, stature in the field and
attendant privileges to my academic work would matter deeply. So I bear tribute and witness to
this all-too-rare-gift that Norm seemed to share so freely: “All that you Change Changes you.”
My last (re)membering was when Norm asked me to give the Egon Guba Lecture at the ICQI
Conference in 2010. I reflected on that invitation with a feeling of both tremendous honor and
tremendous fear. I’d watched 9 brilliant lectures to that point, including from Gloria Ladson
Billings, Antjie Krog, Michelle Fine, D. Soyini Madison and others– and now it was my turn to join
them, focused on the topic of Qualitative Inquiry For a Global Community in Crisis. Spending
time for nearly a year in deep preparation, I focused on how cultural memory and (re)membering
was fundamental to responding to the challenges of our global community, informed by my
educational and cultural work in Ghana and the ways those pursuits had changed my entire life.
To say that this opportunity provided by Norm’s invitation transformed everything in my life and
work would be an understatement: The reverberations continue today in my leadership work as
Dean of Education. As Octavia Butler says: “The only lasting truth is Change.”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 1919
Norm Denzin was a rare human being, one who opened a way for so many to be our best
and most full selves, especially as scholars of color. And while I will miss him dearly, I also under-
stand this truth put forward by the Buddhist thinker, Daisaku Ikeda in a lecture in 1993. He says
that “death is more than the absence of life: Death, together with an active life, is necessary to
the formation of a larger more essential whole.” Thank you, Norm, for your active life and for the
invitation to be a part of that more essential whole that is the worldwide qualitative research
community. I am forever grateful and forever changed by knowing you. Rest in peace and power.
Cynthia B. Dillard
Nana Mansa II of Mpeasem, Ghana, West Africa,
Seattle University, Seattle, Washington
cdillard@seattleu.edu
open structure in which I was able to do my own work for several decades. Norman was always
there, and I could count on him.
When my students complain about not getting a paper published or a conference proposal
accepted or about something else that limits them in disciplines that truly are paradigms behind,
I always say you have to do the work to open things up—establish a new journal, organize a
conference, edit a special issue of a journal or a handbook. Create a structure that is not afraid
of difference. Do the work. Be like Norman Denzin.
scientists were replacing humans with integers, variables, predictability. He went against the
mainstream, following his heart, weaving his love of literature and philosophy with his fascination
with sociological method, ideas, questions and answers.
Oh, yes, he had a vast vision for how things might emerge into a more utopian world. Born
in the middle of World War II, he grew up in a time of Cold War, Sputnik, JFK's and Martin’s and
Malcolm X’ and RFK’s assassinations, the CIA’s illegal and immoral incursions—Cold War versions
of colonizing behaviours themselves—and, as most of us did, attempted to make sense of the
clamour of the present moment. His project was inclusionary. His project was, and is, radical and
hopeful. It is radical in the sense that it demands confrontation with the forces of authoritarian-
ism, environmental degradation, and personal and public iterations of regressive systems. It is
hopeful because, really, there is no other choice. Human beings, we know from our being
touched by this wonderful, amazing human being, have the abilities to exert agency, the make
a difference, to fulfil change, and to join and become active within the circle.
I—we—the Universal Singular—will miss him.
Robert E. Rinehart
Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand
rrine55020@aol.com
I can only hope that the field-defining journals and edited collections and the International
Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) go into the future strongly as the best possible tribute to
his founding and sustaining efforts.
Rest in Power, Norm, with the deep admiration and affection of a global qualitative family you
had no small part in bringing into being.
Patti Lather
Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA
lather1@osu.edu
ICQI became a mecca for qualitative researchers across the globe, creating a festive, commu-
nal plaza for qualitative researchers, that was unprecedented in the academic culture. When
Norman asked me in 2013 to organize and chair the Day of the arts Section 1 was delighted to
do that, together with Kimber Andrews (Bresler & Andrews, 2014). The Day of the arts reflected
the diversity and spirit of the conference, with colleagues from across the globe. Norman gave
me carte blanche to organize it as playfully and creatively as I wanted, responding promptly with
“Yes!” to my suggestions. On the one occasion that he didn’t respond (regarding my question
about the rejection of papers), I came to understand that it was a No. We eventually found a
modus vivendi, learning to work with our different principles and communication style – my very
direct one and his less so.
In the last 35 years, Norman and I sat on a number of AERA panels and on a large number of
doctoral committees on campus. In those very diverse settings, his vibrant presence and gener-
osity, his ability to create and when needed, to hold his convictions, were deeply educational. He
welcomed when I pushed my own boundaries exploring the experience of unknowing in schol-
arship and life, and the interplay of unknowing in qualitative research, contemplative traditions,
and the arts (Bresler, 2019). I miss Norman’s animated and animating presence, and am pro-
foundly grateful for having his intellectual and personal force in my life.
Note
1. The papers in this panel were published as a special issue in the Educational Theory.
References
Bresler, L. (2009). The academic faculty as an entrepreneur: Artistry, craftsmanship and animation. Visual Arts
Research, 35(1), 12–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/20715484
Bresler, L. (2019). Wondering in the dark: The generative power in the arts and in qualitative research. In Denzin,
N. & Giardina, M. Qualitative inquiry at a cross-road (pp. 80–95). Routledge.
Bresler, L., & Andrews, K. (2014). Special issue: Selected papers from the day of the arts at the 8th annual interna-
tional congress for qualitative inquiry. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(2), 155–160. https://doi.
org/10.1525/irqr.2014.7.2.155
Denzin, N. (1994). Romancing the text: The qualitative researcher-writer as Bricoleur. In L. Bresler (Ed.), Special focus:
Qualitative methodologies in music education (Vol. 122, pp. 15–30). Council of Research in Music Education.
Liora Bresler
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA
liora@illinois.edu