Walking With Norman

Abstract

This brief autoethnographic text considers the legacy of Norman Denzin – in who he was/is and through his work – and how he continues to be re-membered in the lives and autoethnographic work of both individuals and institutions.

I write, walking, talking into my phone, a cold, grey morning in Edinburgh in early May 2024. With each word, each hesitation, each pause, I tread the grass across The Meadows, the public park near my office at the University just south of the city centre. The Meadows’ angled avenues of elms and cherry trees, whose blossom has now passed, fan across and between stretches of open grass. Often, this park is alive with students playing volleyball or tight-roping between the trees, with cyclists and speeding e-cyclists, and with dog-walkers and their dogs. Often there are whole communities – furballs? – of dogs and their humans, gathered on the grass, the humans standing in conversation, and around and in between them their dogs chasing, running, jumping and barking. This morning, all is quiet, save for one bundle of brown dog-fluff who runs in front of me after a bouncing orange ball, catches it, and returns proudly whence it came.

I walk as I write, talking into my phone, knowing my phone will not hear or understand everything, knowing it will re-write as it goes, transcribing words I do not say but may mean. I writetalkwalk into my phone because I want to feel the words in my body as I move, feel them vibrate as I speak, as I speak with, about and from this place. I writetalkwalk into my phone to feel/think with and about Norman Denzin, which may be the same thing: to notice the continuing vibrations of Norman here in Edinburgh.

I choose to walk on the grass not the paths, to feel the grass give under my feet, to feel how it affords, allows, how it softens. My shoes will be damp the rest of the day but I choose not to care. I want to walk on the grass, I want to writetalkwalk on grass, with Norman, here.

In two weeks, I will travel to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, for the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), the annual conference Norman Denzin inaugurated in 2005. I attended that year – travelling there with Ken Gale, both of us wide-eyed at what we encountered, at what we were beginning to realise was possible – and have attended all but one ICQI since, most of them also with Ken. I will make the journey there again soon. It will be the first ICQI since Norman’s passing in August 2023.

This grass here is not the neat rectangle lawn of the Illini ‘quad’. It does not have that grass’ dryness, its firmness. And this day is not an Illini, ICQI, day. This damp, cold Edinburgh morning is not the Illini, ICQI, day that I imagine: the bright warmth I always associate with that time, that place, that moment. The paths that circumnavigate and cross that quad in Illinois are concrete, not the dark bitumen of the paths on which I am choosing to not tread here. None of this, now, is as it will be when those of us at the conference are together, walking, talking, remembering Norman; or ‘re-membering’ Norman, in the sense that narrative therapist, Michael White, proposes of coming into a new, different, relationship with him, and he with us (White, 2000).

Except. There is how I catch a glimpse of – re-member – Norman here, now, on this dull Edinburgh morning, Norman sitting tall and upright on his tall and upright bike, short shirtsleeves billowing as he rides, wearing his long shorts and Birkenstocks, even today when the rest of us are wearing coats and gloves.

And how later this month we will catch glimpses of Norman there, bearing down on us as we walk the quad’s concrete paths, his eyes narrowing as he smiles that diffident smile, and passes, waving, continuing on his way to do what Norman does.

None of this, now, is as it will be when we are at the conference together, walking, talking, re-membering Norman. Except. There is, in Edinburgh, the ‘Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry’, ‘CCRI’ or, as we prefer, ‘Sea∼Cry’ (Murray, 2020). We prefer ‘Sea∼Cry’ for its informality, its disruptiveness, its movement, its poetry; and we do not like ‘centre’: too static, too hierarchical (see Murray & Wyatt, 2025). Sea∼Cry has been officially around since 2017, although Sea∼Cry was happening before then, before it became called something. Sea∼Cry does things – reading groups, writing groups, seminars, conferences, workshops, exhibitions, hosting visitors – involving and initiated by students, faculty, practitioners and interested others, both in Edinburgh and well beyond. Sea∼Cry is a gathering, a moment. It is a concept, a flight of concepts, on the move.

Sea∼Cry is here and, sometime, it will be gone. It is here, and has been for these few years, because of Norman. How Norman was, and what Norman did, created a space for Sea∼Cry. In initiating and hosting ICQI, in the books he wrote and edited, in the journals he established, in his championing of and arguing for qualitative inquiry, a qualitative inquiry committed to social justice, and in his nurturing of and support for qualitative inquirers, he made something like Sea∼Cry find its place in the academy. Sea∼Cry would not be here without him.

I stop writingtalkingwalking for a moment, crouch, and place a hand on the damp Meadows grass, to feel its life.

When I meet my student in 10 minutes’ time in my office on the other side of The Meadows, in Edinburgh, UK, this early morning, May 2024, that student’s writing, their performative, political, autoethnographic writing, their ‘critical vulnerability’ (Denzin, 1999, p. 513), which we will dwell with for an hour, thinking and feeling our way into what it is saying and what it is doing, will be infused with Norman. Their writing, all our students’ writing, the presence of this student and the presence of all our students, all undertaking qualitative inquiry, all finding a place in the academy to do such work are possible only because of Norman.

My own presence at Edinburgh and my work, the space that has been created for me and those spaces I help create, are possible only because of Norman.

All of us, together on a Wednesday afternoon in Urbana-Champaign in two weeks, will be there only because of Norman. The space we have here, the spaces we all have wherever we are, to do this work is possible because of Norman. Who rides towards us on his bike as we walktalk, on whichever paths or stretches of grass we are choosing to take, wherever we are. Because of Norman, who rides past us to continue to do what Norman does.