I was hometown bound, a farm boy raised eight miles south of Iowa City, Iowa who took all his degrees – humanities, sociology and psychology – from the University of Iowa (AB, 1963; PhD, 1966). But ours was a traveling family. My father was a Farm Bureau County Agent, a traveling salesman of sorts. We moved from one county to the next, from Johnson, to Iowa, to Linn, Warren, Wayne, and Muscatine, settling finally in the summer of 1953 back in Pleasant Valley Township in Johnson County on the family farm.
I was 12 years old. About this time my father’s luck ran out. This was the summer my parents divorced for the first time. This was also the summer dad’s drinking got out of hand. That fall he would join Alcoholics Anonymous and we became an A.A. family.
Six years later our little world changed forever. I came home from high school and found a note from Dad. It was short, it read, ‘I have to leave you. You and Mark are on your own now.’ I was 18 and Mark was 14. Mother was crushed.
* * *
In later life my father became a devout conservative, a Reagan–Bush Republican; over his desk hung a photo of him and George Bush shaking hands. Across the top, Bush wrote, ‘Thanks to my good friend Ken Denzin.’ My father believed in the American dream, the Horatio Alger myth, a welfare-free nation, capitalism, hard work, handcrafted bookcases, dark blue serge suits, gray sweaters, home cooked meals, community theatre, sobriety, kindness, and generosity, and fierce loyalty to family.
When he died he left a few clothes, three broken Timex watches, two pocketknives, a woodworking shop full of hand-oiled tools, awls, files, screwdrivers, little planes, saws, drills, bits, levels, hammers, pliers. My father’s legacy, three wood boxes and a handful of tools.
My father’s life segues into this question, ‘What went wrong with our generation’s and our parent’s generations version of the American Dream? What was my father running away from?’
* * *
I entered graduate school in 1963. Sometime during my second year in graduate school I decided I wanted to write the story of my family, how my father left us, how I felt ashamed being the son of a traveling salesman who belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. I struggle to this day to find the voice that will help me tell this story.
* * *
In graduate school C. Wright Mills was my hero. His Sociological Imagination (1959) became my bible. Mills exhorted sociologists to write from their biographies into the spaces of history and culture. He urged writers with the sociological imagination to connect biography and history, to join the personal with the public. He implied that we could change history by inserting ourselves into it. If we did not do this, history would go on behind our backs. For Mills, as it was for Marx, our project is to change society, not just interpret or write about it.
These were heady issues in 1963. I have lived with Mills’s message for nearly a half-century, and struggle to this day to implement it. Mills wanted his sociology to make a difference in the lives that people lead. He challenged people to take history into their own hands. He wanted to bend the structures of capitalism to the ideologies of radical democracy.
I want a critical methodology that enacts its own version of the sociological imagination. Like Mills, my version of the imagination is moral and methodological. And like Mills, I want a discourse that troubles the world, understanding that all inquiry is moral and political.
So I am coming full-circle, back to 1963 and C. Wright Mills, fighting still to find my voice in my version of the sociological imagination, my version of an agenda for the global community of critical scholars in the 21st century.
* * *
As an undergraduate I was excused from mandatory ROTC and just barely missed being drafted into the Vietnam War because three years of high school football left me with two damaged knees, and three operations for torn cartilages. I had two majors: Humanities and Sociology, with a minor in Psychology. In the 1960s the University of Iowa was a hotbed of Vienna positivism and Skinnerian behaviorism, but in sociology under Manford Kuhn there was a tradition of symbolic interactionism, and Chicago School pragmatism. I was drawn to Kuhn and this framework, like a moth to a light on a warm summer night. As an undergraduate I wrote papers on George Herbert Mead, Max Weber and T. Veblen.
When it came time for graduate school I applied to the University of Wisconsin because that is where Mills got his PhD. However, Kuhn had just secured a five-year NIMH training grant in Mental Health, and I was awarded a five-year fellowship. I entered graduate school as a qualitative sociologist in waiting, because there were no courses on qualitative methodology at that time. Manford died the semester I entered graduate school, Mills died the year before.
I was fortunate to bond with an old grade school friend, George McCall, who had been hired back at Iowa under Kuhn’s NIMH grant. George and I fantasized about someday creating our version of the Chicago School. He soon left for the University of Illinois, and opened the door for me to follow in 1966. Upon arrival I was given an assignment to teach a course in field method. The next year I began teaching a course called ‘Field Methods’ to graduate students. I have taught an evolving version of this course, now called ‘Advanced Interpretive Methods,’ every year since (except for sabbaticals).
In 1966 there were no qualitative research methodology textbooks. There was a large body of work connected to the Chicago School on case study, life history, participant observation, interviewing, analytic induction, naturalistic observation, ethics and an emerging discourse on triangulation and the use of multiple methods. Grounded theory was on the horizon. My lectures from these two courses became The Research Act.
In my classes students did field projects, interviewing, taking notes, and observing behavior in public places – drug stores, taverns, fraternities, sororities, athletic events, buses, classrooms. They turned in their research reports and I graded them in terms of completeness, and attention to detail. They took three essay exams over the logic of different methods of inquiry. I saw myself training a new generation of Chicago school sociologists, and used the works of Blumer, Hughes, Strauss, Becker, Geer as my mentors (see Denzin, 1992). I had no teaching model, other than my own student experiences, to draw upon. I did not understand that I was teaching students methods for representing social action and making the world visible. I had no other focus, beyond this concern for teaching students how to do field methods.
I now understand that the literature on teaching qualitative research reflects two pedagogical camps, or two poles on a continuum, a right pole and a left pole (Eisenhart and Jurow, 2011). On the right pole are the traditionalists who view methods as objective tools. Traditionalists focus their teaching on questions of design, technique and analysis. This is ‘qi’ in small letters.
As expected, the experimentalists are on the left pole. This is QI in big letters! Those on the left pole take a more ‘avant-garde’ activist view of method and pedagogy. They adopt a subjective, interpretive approach to inquiry. They concentrate on method as praxis, or method as a tool for social action. Performance ethnographers, action researchers, and community organizers are all in the left pole group. They want to change the world by creating texts that move persons to action. They want texts that move from personal troubles to public institutions. They want to teach students how to do this.
There is a third pole; this is the space of social justice. Right and left pole methodologists can be united around social change issues. Traditional methodologists like left pole activists, can teach students how to do ground level social justice inquiry. This is inquiry that is indigenous, collaborative, and community-based.
Teaching to the left pole for bricoleurs
Teaching to the left pole involves more than technique. It centers on postmodern epistemological, philosophical principles, including the politics of knowing, as well as issues surrounding objectivity, performance, reflexivity, writing and the first-person voice, complicity with the other, ethics, values, and truth. In order to travel to the place of the experimental text, students obviously need instruction in a large literature that has traditionally not been regarded as central to methodology. This is qualitative research that is messy, performative, poetic, political, and reflexive. It is autoethnographic, inquiry shaped by the call to social action, by a commitment to undo pedagogies of oppression.
So conceived, there are three attitudes to be enacted, or goals to be pursued. First, teaching, understood as critical pedagogy, is the practice of making the political and the ideological visible through the act of performance itself (Conquergood, 1998). Teaching is a performative act. Second, this act is an invitation for students to use their own experiences as vehicles for pushing back against structures of racial, sexual and class oppression, an invitation to become agents in their own biographies. Third, in order to realize the first two goals, students become autoethnographers, authors of dramas about their own lives.
A teaching template
Currently my one-semester performance-based seminar is based on a single principle: qualitative research is not just about method or technique. Inquiry is performative, moral and political. Qualitative research is about making the world visible in ways that implement social justice goals. Accordingly, readings and assignments foreground personal narratives and performance-based texts grounded in epiphanic, racialized personal experience. Writing groups lead class discussions. The classroom becomes a sacred space, a sanctuary where students take risks. Students prepare and perform texts that are presented at the annual meetings of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (qi2012.Org).
My seminar puts usual forms of qualitative inquiry into relief. It is not a how-to-do-it course. The goal is to create a community in the classroom. Students are asked to prepare and share soul food (a home cooked dish) two times during the semester. They sign up for reading, performance and film groups that meet outside the class. The focus is on the production of personal performance narratives that are crafted in interactions in the writing and performance groups. The performance texts are grounded in epiphany, or turning point personal experiences connected to a moment of heightened racial consciousness.
* * *
Mary Clearman Blew (1999: 25) speaks of being bone deep in landscape, of reaching for performative connections between her personal story, a style of writing, and the history of a family homestead on the banks of the Judith River in north central Montana. She writes of being anchored to a place, being bone deep in its landscape, and its histories, the umbilical tangle between place, person and writer (1999: 6). With Blew, I search for the proper storied relationship between my past, and its landscapes.
For years I have written as an ethnographer, an interpretive interactionist, a cultural critic, an occasional social theorist. But then something happened. Like Blew I came to a divide. I felt a hollowness that writing ethnography and theory would not fill (see Blew, 1999: 4). Three deaths within the space of three years changed the way I thought of myself as a writer. In 1994 Carl Couch, my intellectual mentor died. In 1995 my father died, and my mother died the next year.1
These three deaths located me in three different landscapes; rural central Iowa, Urbana, Illinois, where I currently live and work, and south central Montana. A month before Carl Couch died, my wife and I bought a small cabin on Rock Creek, four miles outside Red Lodge, Montana, 20 miles from the Wyoming border, and 69 miles from Yellowstone Park. The death of my parents brought me back to a family history I had repressed; a rural Iowa childhood marked by illnesses, addictions, violence, divorces and deaths.
Today I am in-between landscapes. Westward looking, from my writing table in Urbana, telling Montana stories returns me to my youth, to the places of family legend and lore. I seek today to retell this Iowa childhood; to tell it through the words of a person who is writing himself into a new place; a new landscape, the places and sounds of south central Montana. I want to re-vision, to re-experience these prairie landscapes, where I was bone deep in misery and pain.
Footnote
References
Blew MC (1999) Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading and Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Conquergood D(1998) Beyond the text: Toward a performative cultural politics. In: Dailey SJ (eds) The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions. Washington, DC: National Communication Association, pp. 25–36.
Denzin NK (1992) Symbolic Interactionism and Cultural Studies: The Politics of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Denzin NK (1997) I love Lucy. Cultural Studies: A Research Annual. Vol. 2: 163–165.
Denzin NK (1998) That Psychiatrist. Cultural Studies: A Research Annual. Vol. 3: 285–290.
Denzin NK (1999) Two-stepping in the ’90s. Qualitative Inquiry. 5(4): 568–572.
Denzin NK (2012a) A box of books. Qualitative Inquiry. 18(2): 191–192.
Denzin NK (2012b) Mother and Shane. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies 12(4): in press.
Eisenhart M, Jurow AS(2011) Teaching qualitative research. In: Denzin NK, Lincoln YS (eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research. 4th edn, Thousand Oaks. CA: SAGE, pp. 699–714.
Mills CW (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
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