“Lovely”

Abstract

This article is an early 1990s experimental text that takes the form of an e-mail exchange between University of Illinois scholars Nate Kohn and Synthia Sydnor. The authors sought in their composition to pay tribute to the life and thought of Norman K. Denzin and to illuminate Denzin’s place in the development of the disciplines of communication studies and kinesiology. The writing echoes Denzin’s call at the time for re-imagining social science research, theory, and methodology and their dissemination into academe and culture at large. Purposefully minimalist, the essay plays methodologically with voice and authority, interweaving narrative with ironic and paradoxical statements that critique—in Denzinian style—profound ethnographic issues, both classic and current.