Remembering Norman Denzin
Back in 2007, I presented a paper at the frankly enormous Qualitative Inquiry Conference at the University of Illinois’s Urbana-Champaign campus, a couple of hours train ride south of Chicago. It was a memorable trip for a number of reasons.
My first memory was of seeing the American football stadium which held 110,000 people and hosted only a handful of games every year. When the home team played, the town emptied which, I suppose, would've made it an ideal time to be a bank robber.
The second was the appearance of the singer José González performing an evening set sitting on his amplifier in the student cafeteria on the first night of the conference. (You might remember González from the ‘bouncing balls’ advert from around the same time). It still seems incongruous that such a well-known singer was there and performing such a low-key set.
The third was the experience of seeing my doctoral supervisor — Prof Julianne Cheek — repeatedly stopped for customs checks at every airport on our way back to Oslo after the conference had finished. Julianne was later told by a security guard that the reason she kept getting stopped was because she had a ‘flag’ on her boarding pass, probably because of an underlying security concern. (We were still experiencing a lot of post 9/11 travel paranoia back then). Julianne surmised that the only reason why she might have this flag was because she had once written with the nurse sociologist Sam Porter who had, in turn, served as Gerry Adams’ private Secretary (Adams was then President of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the provisional IRA).
But this was all in the future as I sat in the auditorium for the conference opening. Just as the conference was due to begin, a man – looking uncannily like the janitor – walked up to the microphone to make an announcement. I thought he was going to tell us that somebody had left their lights on in the car park, or had dropped a credit card in the foyer. But as he spoke, it became apparent that this was the very honourable Norman Denzin.
I'd never seen a picture of him, but even if I had I would've been surprised that this rumpled, frowsy, monkish-looking man could have been the doyen of new thinking in qualitative research, whose name I’d seen in countless publications. And yet here he was, with his unruly shock of white hair, cargo shorts, and ill fitting pull-over, addressing an auditorium of at least 2000 people.
Many of you will have heard of his recent death and will have your own memories of his work: his incredible output and his bravery and innovation. And perhaps some of you may have even met him. I never had that good fortune. 10 rows back in the auditorium was as close as I got.
My ex-doctoral supervisor Julianne along with Mitchell Allen, César Cisneros-Puebla and Joy Pierce have just published a lovely tribute to Norman (Link) and I really encourage you to read. It's a poignant reminder, as they put it, that;
‘when one of the giant evergreens falls in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, its desiccated trunk becomes a nurse log, an elevated platform rich in humus and protection against pathogens that hosts dozens of new sprouts rising to restore and expand the canopy. Norman’s departure from our lives is this kind of transformation, one that nourishes the seedlings of ideas of future generations of mighty qualitative scholars, some of whom may be spoken about with the same reverence with which we describe Norman today’.
Would that we could all do as much to nourish the soil as much as Norman did, and will continue to do for years to come.