Opening the Tent for the Scholarship of Hope

Abstract

The contributions of Norman Denzin to qualitative inquiry are vast, meaningful, and humbling. His wish for his memorial, however, was not for people to simply “say nice things” about him; he wanted people to challenge the field and question where we are going as a qualitative community. This address asks the reader to consider the “qualitative tent” and the dangers of staying within its confines. It challenges the qualitative community to open the tent to engage with communities, including those that are structurally disadvantaged, but also policy-makers, government administration, industry, and others complicit in maintaining structural disadvantage. It asks us to engage with communities to ultimately fulfill what Norman so deeply cared about and asked us to do— support social justice, reduce inequity, and produce real change. By engaging with communities, our qualitative tent becomes a place for the scholarship of hope, so desperately needed in our troubled and upended world.

Introduction

It was Norman’s wish that today’s addresses not simply be “friends saying nice things about me.” He wanted this time together to be about the broader qualitative inquiry community and to celebrate the “big tent” (Tracy, 2010) nature of the field with a look to the future. Before I do this, I would like to share a bit about myself to provide context for how I arrived at the qualitative tent Norman setup for us.

I grew academically through the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology at the University of Alberta, with Janice Morse at the helm. In the 1990s, Jan created the Qualitative Health Research journal, “a qualitative institute, an annual conference, several book series,” and “corresponding international sites” that paralleled Norman’s “work in the social sciences” (Cheek et al., 2023, p. 928). I have had the privilege of being and learning in both Jan’s space and Norm’s space.

I am a community-engaged researcher. I situate my work at the intersection of government, industry, not-for-profit, structurally disadvantaged, Indigenous, and clinician communities. My work is grounded in the policy environment and focuses on how we can work together on complex health and social issues. In allyship with community partners, we focus on the structural causes of disadvantage and how to mobilize against systems of inequity, using primarily qualitative and community-engaged research.

I have been coming to the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI; hereinafter, “the Congress”) since Year 1 in 2005, missing only a few years here and there. Being at the Congress has exposed me to areas of scholarship that I admire, cherish, and respect, and has made me appreciate all of that which we call qualitative inquiry. Today, I talk about my own area of scholarship and where, I think, it can take us. I do not argue it as better than others. I argue for it to be part of our collective story and opportunity to make things—in this unsettled and upended world—a bit better.

Contributions

To appreciate Norman’s contributions from my perspective, I need to take you back almost 30 years ago, to 1995, the year that I defended my solely qualitative PhD dissertation. The year prior, in 1994, the first Handbook of Qualitative Research was published (see Denzin & Lincoln, 1994). While I held on dearly to Lincoln and Guba (1985), the Handbook legitimized what I was doing. It was more than its massive size and pink cover. It became a “permission slip” for me, providing approval to travel with “Denzin and Lincoln”—and their invited authors—into the complex and beautiful spaces only qualitative inquiry can take us.

Did I read all of the chapters? No. Cite it? Maybe? But it did change things. Qualitative research was indeed “a thing,” and my work was part of a legitimate field of inquiry.

That first Handbook, for me, created a space where our work could flourish. And in this space, under this tent, Norman—as one of my colleagues said—“got shit done.”

Michelle Lavoie, then an artist who has since become an accomplished arts-based researcher, shared a story with me. Michelle came to the Congress in 2011 with her partner, Maxi Miciak—my PhD student at the time. Maxi was delivering her first-ever conference paper on the “underbelly of collaboration.” Michelle was struggling with her health at the time but could feel that there was something very special about the Congress. She walked up to Norman and requested an art show—36 life-size portraits, called “seeing through stories”—for the following year. She knew that if she could do this show, she would begin to feel better.

What was Norman’s response to her request? “Sure!” Despite the slight chaos of no poster boards or pins when it was time to set up, for this new qualitative artist, like for many others, Norman opened the tent.

And the space in the tent grew.

“The Day-In” different languages preconference was established. Friends and colleagues could gather and speak about advances in qualitative inquiry in Mandarin, Turkish, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese. The Special Interest Groups followed, for example, in Social Work, Arts-Based Research, Mixed-Methods, and Autoethnography.

This was a brilliant move, reserving tent space for particular kinds of inquiry and spawning other conferences around the globe, enabling gatherings important for particular geographic regions and in first languages.

We cannot dismiss what has happened at the Congress over the past 20 years. Under this tent, scholars and students—who have started and grown entire methodological traditions (autoethnography stands out)—have captivated us with their creativity, their stories, their images, and the unending opportunities we have as a qualitative community to make things better.

Community Engagement

But among this creativity and growth, one area of scholarship, for me, was missing: community-engaged or participatory work. This Special Interest Group was not taken up until 2021, with its third gathering this year. And community-engaged work is my area of inquiry.

In community-engaged work, our community partners direct the inquiry and interpret the data alongside us. They call bullshit on anything that they see not having the potential to impact, like I mean really and directly, impact their lives. I often joke that I would rather do my PhD defense or any defense among my academic peers over going to a community meeting. It is there you get harder questions than academics even know how to ask.

In my work, we have developed a food rescue program for families and a mobile grocery store that drives to low-income neighborhoods and offers fresh food at reduced cost. I have served on my city-run poverty task force for 10 years which has targeted the creation of “good jobs” (e.g., with living wages and benefits) primarily in the construction sector. We are now working on a project to indigenize businesses, and we support a rural tuition program taken up by women who never thought they could ever get a postsecondary education. In this work, we ask research questions determined by our partners and often hire community members to do data collection. We talk about rigor and reflexivity, and to the horror of some, we may even talk about generalizability, qualitatively defined, of course.

In my qualitative methodology class, I have students read a chapter written by Tony Adams called “post-coming out complications” (Adams, 2016). He talks about coming out as the act of disclosing a stigmatized identity. One of the messages is that “coming out” is not a “one-time affair” and a focus of the chapter is the “moments of distress and the unexpected disdain that can emerge in a relationship after the initial coming out act.” He shared a story: While attending a conference near his family’s home, his father picked him up for dinner; Tony let his Dad pick the restaurant. His father chose Hooters, a restaurant “with scantily clad female servers, a large male clientele and the celebration of heterosexuality.” Tony had come out to his father 7 years previous.

In discussing this chapter in class, one young man saw his story in Tony’s, but with “coming out” as vegan. He travels home for Thanksgiving dinners, and special occasions and has to “remind” his mom that “no, being vegan isn’t a fad,” and “no I’m not ‘over it’,” and “no, it’s not just a stage I’m going through.” He is constantly met with disapproval because, making matters worse, he grew up on a farm and the message is “in this family, we eat meat and by not eating meat (or flesh as he refers to it) you are deliberately hurting us, our livelihood, and our family identity as farmers.” Tony’s chapter helped him understand his disapproved everyday life, having to “come out” as vegan to his family, over and over again.

Why do I share this story?

In my world, having my student see the “coming out” construct in his context is called generalizability, again, qualitatively defined. ¹ And generalizability is beautiful, and amazing, and makes the hair stand up on your arms, and it changes lives.

But in a workshop at this Congress one year, I had a woman walk out because she was offended when I used the term “generalizability”; in their view, generalizability could only be associated with the positivist paradigm.

Belonging

If I could not use the term “generalizability” or the words “data” or “findings” or even “research”—again, even with the caveat that we define these terms qualitatively, did I belong at the Congress? If I could not speak the language I need to work with community members, policy-makers, and other researchers (not all of them qualitative ones)—who are all working together to try to make the world a better place—I had to ask, “Was the space, the tent, that was created and nurtured, really the space I thought it was?”

I have to admit, I was feeling this way at a similar time when Johnny Saldaña wrote “Blue-collar qualitative research: A rant,” published in 2014 in Qualitative Inquiry (which Norm published). He wrote this:

And while we’re at it, to be “critical” doesn’t mean to bitch and whine ’bout it. It means to take somethin’ apart, to show where all the warts are, and to right the wrongs. If you really wanna know what’s wrong with the world, then git your ass out to the ’hood, walk ’round and talk to people. Listen to what they have to say. And one more thing: Blue-collar qualitative researchers don’t give a goddamn fuck ’bout what Foucault says. (p. 978)

Well, I do care about what Foucault says—I have even read Foucault for Dummies—but my point is that Foucault underpins only one form of scholarship, which shouldn’t be used to the exclusion and judgment of other forms of scholarship.

But if I had this feeling that my scholarship was unwelcome, I had to ask myself, “Why do I keep coming back to the Congress?” More on that later.

Relevance

Looking back, more than 20 years ago, the tent that Norman constructed, alongside all of us, provided a safe haven when we had a common concern: postpositivism. In those days, we were enacting a collective resistance that was profoundly antiquantitative, because we had to. We desperately needed to come together to create a space where we did not have to fight to be heard, or taken seriously, or legitimized (Denzin & Giardina, 2006). While that postpositivist threat still lingers, more or less for some of us, what is the threat now?

Could it partly be our relevance? Is the problem that our work unfolds within our limited academic community?

This has become a critical issue in recent years when the very value of universities is being questioned. When my own university’s budget was cut by the government repeatedly over 3 years—reaching hundreds of millions of dollars—the university was quite shocked when the community did not come forward in droves to say how important we are. It was the fact that the community—meaning those external to the university—didn’t see us in the community.

And when the community does ask us about relevance, what do we say? We often respond by listing the number of books, publications, and awards we have garnered, the kinds of products that appear on our faculty annual report. Even in the memorial statements at Norman’s passing, there were constant referrals to the three journals, 50 books, and the Handbooks of Qualitative Research he (co) produced. While we all do admire this work, because of the enormous dedication required to produce it, people who are living rough, and those who work with them, do not care. When communities are asking about what we are tangibly doing as intractable issues, such as poverty, the unhoused, racism, addictions, and hate, soar, can we say more than “I wrote a chapter on that”?

I do really struggle with our relevance.

I also had a difficult time reconciling the books that came out of the Congress: Qualitative Inquiry Outside the Academy (Denzin & Giardina, 2014); Qualitative Inquiry and Human Rights (Denzin & Giardina, 2010); Qualitative Inquiry and Social Justice (Denzin & Giardina, 2009); and Qualitative Inquiry and the Politics of Advocacy (Denzin & Giardina, 2012). Those titles speak to me but rarely do I see cases in these books describing where, for example, advocacy has been done—just that we should do it. Yet, these books did play an important role by asking the qualitative community to embrace advancing the discourse on these topics.

However, if we are the scholars that Norman has asked us to be—to strive to support social justice, reduce inequity, and produce real change—we need to move beyond advancing discourse. We need to live our scholarship in real, and direct, and political, and meaningful allyship with structurally disadvantaged communities.

By working with community partners, outside the qualitative tent, we may be better able to draw attention to neglected issues—those that are deliberately ignored or silenced. We may be better able to take on issues of political or ideological concern, and do the work that acts on the core values of human dignity. Together, we can go into spaces and answer questions people would rather not have answered. One of the most exciting parts of community-engaged work is when our community partners explain how and why people’s stories coalesce or collide, and under what circumstances. It is then we start to get at the complexity of intractable social issues, and can begin to effect change.

But by not engaging with community partners, who are we silencing and what differences are we closing down? Let us not perpetuate the privilege we so adamantly write and rail against. We have to radically listen to each other. Listening to people should be particularly easy for us as qualitative researchers, as we already care deeply about the human condition.

We must talk with and open up our space for those we stand in solidarity with. We need cooperative scholarship; we need to have conversations with those we so vehemently argue for. We need to engage with policy-makers, government administration, industry, and others complicit in maintaining structural disadvantage to understand the barriers they face in altering the status quo. We all learn by being in relationship but it is through our doing that our curiosity and comradery transforms us and our world.

Norman’s vision was to make the world a better place.

As scholars who care deeply and write about justice, are we missing an opportunity to change the world if we just work and write for each other?

This begs the question, is the problem the tent itself?

The Tent

Mitch Allen, who is an archeologist and has studied the nomadic groups of the Middle East, shared with me that the tent protects the group from both natural and human dangers. When sandstorms arise or a hostile tribe is heard over the next ridge, the tents are shut tight against the danger. But on a warm spring day, the roof of the tent stands, but the sides are opened to allow in cooling breezes, watch children play, monitor herds grazing on the hillslope, wave to neighbors, and allow passage throughout the community with ease.

Let us not shelter under the qualitative research tent. If we remain sheltered and insular, our tent might collapse. And if our tent collapses, how will those outside the academy view this community of scholarship that bears the name qualitative research?

The Scholarship of Hope

The most difficult question for me when writing this (which also drives the point home about writing as reflexivity and analysis) was, if I did not feel welcome at the Congress, why did I keep returning?

It had to be more than the lipstick-stained wine glasses at Murphy’s pub. And it was also more than the beautiful people that I see and embrace every year. It was the hope—and expectation—that Norman created for a better possible future. I have that hope, no matter the difficulties that seem endless, and divisive, and weighty. I try to practice that hope through my scholarship and in the wholeness of my body, mind, and spirit, suspending myself in the wonder of the communities we, as academics, are to serve.

Mike Agar, an anthropologist, ethnographer, professor emeritus, and good friend who passed in 2017 sent me a note after I got tenure (alert, this is a mother-in-law joke):

You’re doomed. In the bad old days of my youth, we used to say getting tenure is like the definition of mixed emotions, watching my mother-in-law drive off a cliff in my new car.

He went on to say, “When I got tenure, my first reaction was, now it’s my responsibility to take risks.”

Norman opened a space and nurtured that space, and it was called “the tent.” We need to keep the space open and give each other strength. We need to make sure we are doing work that draws attention to neglected issues, honors the complexity of these issues, and serves more purposes than just those of publication and self-promotion. We need to take risks in and with communities if we truly want to better support social justice, reduce inequity, and produce real change—that which Norman has asked us to do.