Remembering Norm

Abstract

This is my response, from the heart, to the loss of Norm Denzin. The invitation to contribute to this special issue, focussing on remembering Norm, gave me a chance to find words to talk about what his loss meant to me, and to find words to say just how profound has been the contribution he made to the world—and will go on making.

When I heard the news of Norm’s death—I was gutted. He hadn’t been well for some time, so his death was not a surprise. Rather, it was a terrible shock—the loss of an incredible leader in our field, a man who brought people together from around the world, who facilitated their work—our work—made a space for it that wasn’t there before. He was a generous, inspired, giant of a man. And now he was gone, leaving a huge, gaping hole in our universe.

In the time before Norm, that is, before my encounter with Norm, the academic world as I knew it, was divided into distinct, separated, broad areas, North America, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Europe, each with their own subdivisions. Each sufficient to themselves. And then, of course, Australia, my country, and New Zealand, both tucked in below Asia, in the southern hemisphere; we were scholars who the northern hemisphere academics (with some exceptions) weren’t particularly aware of, and were rarely in contact with, and for the most part couldn’t care less about.

In the 1970s and 80s, quantitative research, globally, was the dominant force in academe, lording it over the weakling, subordinated, qualitative research. Australia in the 1970s was pretty much a quant stronghold. When I completed my qualitative PhD in the late 1970s, running very much against the Australian quant tide, it was primarily to the northern hemisphere that I turned for explorations of the conditions of possibility being opened up in qualitative research. There were no journals in Australia that recognized qualitative research. So, my academic life necessarily involved international travel, seeking out in the north, in each of those separate places, people I could talk to, who might appreciate the ideas I was struggling to unfold. I was searching for ways to think what was not yet thinkable. That was in the days before email and zoom.

So low and so little did Australian scholarship register on British consciousness, at that time, however, that I was confronted, the night before the first ever British symposium on ethnography, with the conference organizer visiting me, in the dingy Oxford college room I was staying in, to tell me he’d changed his mind, and I must withdraw my paper. He didn’t know me, he said, and could not trust that I would have anything worth saying. I might spoil the show. (I refused, incidentally, to do as he asked, not least because the funding I’d received to travel there obligated me to deliver my paper. And not to mention the drama, as a single parent, that I’d gone through as I left my three small children in care, for the time I was away from home. And not least because of the appalling insult of it . . .)

And then there was Norm and the birth of ICQI. For the first time in my life, the scholars I had come to know in these separate places, (not including the pompous Oxford don, I am pleased to say) were all together in one place. We were no longer isolated from each other, as we had been, belonging to separate academic terrains; we stood, miraculously, it seemed to me, on the same ground in Urbana-Champaign. We had become an identifiable force, an international congress of scholars, whose work resonated, and reverberated with each other’s work, on that common ground. Not only that, as if that were not momentous enough, Norm recognized the profound importance of international journals that could recognize what we were doing, and he set out to establish them.

I don’t know if Norm realized how extraordinary his leadership was in facilitating and inspiring qualitative research globally. When I was sitting beside him on the podium before giving my keynote address at ICQI, watching the members of the audience gathering to take their seats, he confessed that he always felt anxious at this very moment, fearful that the people would not come, and that the congress would be a flop. Such humility was endearing and extraordinary. He had made our coming together possible, gathering us from all corners of the globe. Our academic lives were flourishing in large part through his generosity, his wisdom, his scholarship, and his kindness.

We owe him so much.

And as I write those last words, I realize that the gaping hole I thought was there, is not a hole at all. The empty space I had seen was actually full—of memories of Norm, of the love of those who knew him, of the flourishing academic lives and thought that he had facilitated. His impact will continue, even after those of us who have known and loved him, are gone.