Like all writing, biographies are interpretive. They require no less than organizing into text the chaos of human existence. Interpretive Biography Norman Denzin combines one of the oldest techniques in the social sciences and humanities with one of the newest. Bringing in elements of postmodernism and interpretive social science, he reexamines the biographical and autobiographical genres. The book points up the inherent weaknesses in traditional biographical forms, and outlines a new way in which biographies should be conceptualized and shaped.

With numerous examples taken from his own work and those of past biographies, this practical volume makes provocative reading for all social scientists.

"I believe most sociologists will find this work useful because of several contributions. Of particular merit here is the development of the sociological enterprise along lines of the ''sociological imagination.'' Denzin not only adds to the Mills tradition, but also extends it . . . most useful for those also versed in phenomenological and cognitive theories."

--Teaching Sociology

"Denzin?s critical grasp of the subtle issues in biography production can serve as conceptual benchmarks in the production of biographical ''texts'' in the field."

--Nexus: The Canadian Student Journal of Anthropology

"In five short chapters, Interpretive Biography provides an excellent guide to the assumptions of the biographical method, to its key terms, and to the strategies for gathering and interpreting such materials. In this book, he introduces the key concept of epiphany, or turning points in person?s lives. Along the way, a host of examples are provided, making this an extremely valuable volume for practitioners of the method."

--The Sociological Review

"Skillfully uses examples from sociological life stories to show deficiencies in current research procedures and the new dimensions that semiotic analysis can add."

--Contemporary Sociology

"A welcome addition to the literature on qualitative research methodology."

--Qualitative Studies in Education

Now issued as part of the Routledge Education Classic Edition series, A Qualitative Manifesto provides a "call to arms" for researchers from the leading figure in the qualitative research commnunity, Norman Denzin. Denzin asks for a research tradition engaged in social justice, sensitive to identity and indigenous concerns, brave to risk presentation in forms beyond traditional academic writing, and committed to teaching this to their students and colleagues. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in research, society and in social justice since the publication of the original edition. Denzin looks to the past, present and future of the field, underlining the continuing importance of this brief, provocative book.

Now issued as part of the Routledge Education Classic Edition series, A Qualitative Manifesto provides a "call to arms" for researchers from the leading figure in the qualitative research commnunity, Norman Denzin. Denzin asks for a research tradition engaged in social justice, sensitive to identity and indigenous concerns, brave to risk presentation in forms beyond traditional academic writing, and committed to teaching this to their students and colleagues. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in research, society and in social justice since the publication of the original edition. Denzin looks to the past, present and future of the field, underlining the continuing importance of this brief, provocative book.

This new edition of the SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research represents the sixth generation of the ongoing conversation about the discipline, practice, and conduct of qualitative inquiry. As with earlier editions, the Sixth Edition is virtually a new volume, with 27 of the 34 chapters representing new topics or approaches not seen in the previous edition. To mark the Handbook’s 30-year history, we are pleased to offer a bonus PART VI in the eBook versions of the Sixth Edition: this additional section brings together and reprints ten of the most famous or game-changing contributions from the previous five editions.

Transformative Visions for Qualitative Inquiry takes as its central theme the idea of transformation, transformative action, transformative possibilities, and potentialities for the future for qualitative inquiry. In a present moment defined by a pandemic of meanings over COVID-19, climate change, political upheaval, inequality, and oppression of all kinds, contributors to this volume seek a new way forward-to reimagine a post-pandemic pedagogy of hope and compassion both for qualitative research and for the communities in which we inhabit. Empathy. Healing. Collaboration. Survival. Discomfort. Protection. Justice. Creative agency. The arts. These are the watchwords for the road ahead. In these uncertain times, leading international scholars from the United States, Canada, and Australia look ahead with a renewed sense of hope, but remain grounded in the reality that much work lies ahead-that our inquiry must meet the demands of our hopeful but evolving future. More specifically, contributors focus on such topics as: academic healing; environmental justice; the hegemony of higher education and challenges to critical education; arts-based research such as songwriting, participatory workshops, and autopoetics; disruptions to conventional humanist and Western modes of thought; and questions of empathy and spirit-writing. Transformative Visions for Qualitative Inquiry is a must-read for faculty and students alike who are interested in imagining new ways to restore healing from the pandemic-to push back, resist, heal, share, laugh, and live.

Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry critically reflects on and explores the role of qualitative research amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic. Against this unprecedented backdrop, it asks what research means during a global pandemic and what it means to be an academic. Leading international scholars from the United States, Canada, Chile, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom wrestle with the changing dynamics of research in pandemic times. Collectively and collaboratively, contributors call for a critical, performative, social justice inquiry directed at the multiple crises of our historical present-a rethinking of where we have been, and, critically, where we are going. More specifically, contributors focus on such topics as: the emotional geographies of academic writing; assaults on science and truth; pedagogies of the imagination; indigenization and reconciliation; the search for our common humanity; and the relevance of qualitative inquiry in an era of big data and digital transformation. Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry is a must-read for faculty and students alike who are interested in imagining new ways to collaborate, to engage in research and activism, and represent and intervene into social life in pandemic times.

Rereading Ishi's Story offers a manifesto of sorts through a critical reading of an anthropological classic, Theodora Kroeber's 1961 book, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. The heart of the analysis involves a five-play cycle, built around Gerald Vizenor's trickster-survivance model. It gives Ishi a voice he never had in Kroeber's book and imagines an Ishi who was not the happy warrior in Kroeber's book. The author follows the story line in Kroeber's book, focusing on key events as recounted by Alfred Kroeber and his associates Saxton Pope and Thomas Waterman. Chapter 1 tells Ishi's story in his own words; Chapter 2 retells Ishi's capture narrative, which includes the recording of his story of the wood ducks; Chapter 3 builds on stories told about Ishi by Zumwalt Jr.; Chapter 4 criticizes Kroeber and associates for making Ishi return to his homeland, asking him to 'play' Indian; and Chapter 5 takes up his death and the recovery of his brain. The concluding chapters address repatriation practices, genocide, Indigenous ethics, discourses of forgiveness, and a performance autoethnography ethic for this new century, returning to the Kroebers and their autoethnographic practices. This book continues a four-volume project on Native Americans, the postmodern Wild West shows, museums, violence, genocide, and the modern U.S. American use of the Native American in a collective search for an authentic identity (Denzin, 2015, 2013, 2011, 2008). It will be of great interest to scholars and students of qualitative inquiry, anthropology, and Native American studies.

Participants from Couch-Stone Symposium 2014 have transformed their presentations into elegant papers for this collection. Chapters fall into three categorical themes, largely reflecting their position in the symposium but, more importantly, reflecting a natural progression in scope of symbolic interactionist work in music: moving from observations of the individual to observation of organizations to interdisciplinary observations of music from scholars in related disciplines.

In Indians in Color, noted cultural critic Norman K. Denzin addresses the acute differences in the treatment of artwork about Native America created by European-trained artists compared to those by Native artists. In his fourth volume exploring race and culture in the New West, Denzin zeroes in on painting movements in Taos, New Mexico over the past century. Part performance text, part art history, part cultural criticism, part autoethnography, he once again demonstrates the power of visual media to reify or resist racial and cultural stereotypes, moving us toward a more nuanced view of contemporary Native American life. In this book, Denzin-contrasts the aggrandizement by collectors and museums of the art created by the early 20th century Taos Society of Artists under railroad sponsorship with that of indigenous Pueblo painters;-shows how these tensions between mainstream and Native art remains today; and-introduces a radical postmodern artistic aesthetic of contemporary Native artists that challenges notions of the "noble savage."

Volume 27 of "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" emphasizes new developments in interactional theory and practice, as well as examples of post-modern ethnography and performance texts focused on border crossings and border performances. The volume also presents essays honoring Laurel Richardsons contributions to Symbolic Interaction and Communications, as well as the inaugural address in the "Peter M. Hall Lecture Series."

Even as their nations and cultures were being destroyed by colonial expansion across the continent, American Indians became a form of entertainment, sometimes dangerous and violent, sometimes primitive and noble. Creating a fictional wild west, entrepreneurs then exported it around the world. Exhibitions by George Catlin, paintings by Charles King, and Wild West shows by Buffalo Bill Cody were viewed by millions worldwide. Norman Denzin uses a series of performance pieces with historical, contemporary, and fictitious characters to provide a cultural critique of how this version of Indians, one that existed only in the western imagination, was commodified and sold to a global audience. He then calls for a rewriting of the history of the American west, one devoid of minstrelsy and racist pageantry, and honoring the contemporary cultural and artistic visions of people whose ancestors were shattered by American expansionism.

Even as their nations and cultures were being destroyed by colonial expansion across the continent, American Indians became a form of entertainment, sometimes dangerous and violent, sometimes primitive and noble. Creating a fictional wild west, entrepreneurs then exported it around the world. Exhibitions by George Catlin, paintings by Charles King, and Wild West shows by Buffalo Bill Cody were viewed by millions worldwide. Norman Denzin uses a series of performance pieces with historical, contemporary, and fictitious characters to provide a cultural critique of how this version of Indians, one that existed only in the western imagination, was commodified and sold to a global audience. He then calls for a rewriting of the history of the American west, one devoid of minstrelsy and racist pageantry, and honoring the contemporary cultural and artistic visions of people whose ancestors were shattered by American expansionism.

Now issued as part of the Routledge Education Classic Edition series, The Qualitative Manifesto provides a "call to arms" for researchers from the leading figure in the qualitative research community, Norman Denzin. Denzin asks for a research tradition engaged in social justice, sensitive to identity and indigenous concerns, brave to risk presentation in forms beyond traditional academic writing, and committed to teaching this to their students and colleagues. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in research, society and in social justice since the publication of the original edition. Denzin looks to the past, present and future of the field, underlining the continuing importance of this brief, provocative book.

Now issued as part of the Routledge Education Classic Edition series, The Qualitative Manifesto provides a "call to arms" for researchers from the leading figure in the qualitative research community, Norman Denzin. Denzin asks for a research tradition engaged in social justice, sensitive to identity and indigenous concerns, brave to risk presentation in forms beyond traditional academic writing, and committed to teaching this to their students and colleagues. A new preface text by the author reflects on the changes in research, society and in social justice since the publication of the original edition. Denzin looks to the past, present and future of the field, underlining the continuing importance of this brief, provocative book.

This book is a manifesto. It is about rethinking performance autoethnography, about the formation of a critical performative cultural politics, about what happens when everything is already performative, when the dividing line between performativity and performance disappears. This is a book about the writing called autoethnography. It is also about what this form of writing means for writers who want to perform work that leads to social justice. Denzin's goal is to take the reader through the history, major terms, forms, criticisms and issues confronting performance autoethnography and critical interpretive. To that end many of the chapters are written as performance texts, as ethnodramas. A single thesis organizes this book: the performance turn has been taken in the human disciplines and it must be taken seriously. Multiple informative performance models are discussed: Goffman's dramaturgy; Turner's performance anthropology; performance ethnographies by A. D. Smith, Conquergood, and Madison; Saldana's ethnodramas; Schechter's social theatre; Norris's playacting; Boal's theatre of the oppressed; and Freire's pedagogies of the oppressed. They represent different ways of staging and hence performing ethnography, resistance and critical pedagogy. They represent different ways of "imagining, and inventing and hence performing alternative imaginaries, alternative counter-performances to war, violence, and the globalized corporate empire" (Schechner 2015). This book provides a systematic treatment of the origins, goals, concepts, genres, methods, aesthetics, ethics and truth conditions of critical performance autoethnography. Denzin uses the performance text as a vehicle for taking up the hard questions about reading, writing, performing and doing critical work that makes a difference.

Part I of Volume 34 of "Studies in Symbolic Interaction" contains 12 outstanding contributions by leading activist scholars on Commodity Racism, Chief Illiniwek, and Native American Sport Mascots. Part II, New Interpretative Works, contain seven performance narratives - black womanhood, masculinity, whiteness, and gender, sexual violation, old civilization and democratic citizenship.

Hardbound. Cultural Studies is an interdisciplinary series, drawing on contemporary scholarship in such fields as speech communication, education, anthropology, sociology, history, and English. Papers focus on the intersection of interpretive critical theory, qualitative inquiry, culture, media, history, biography and social structure. This international research publication creates a space for the study of those global cultural practices and cultural forms that shape the meanings of race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and gender in the contemporary world.

This 19th volume in the series discusses a variety of topics in the field of symbolic interaction.

This 21st volume in the series discusses a variety of topics in the field of symbolic interaction. It is divided into three parts, which address: remembering Anselm Strauss; the pragmatic heritage; and, reading self, media and culture.

Norman Denzin presents a social psychological account of how the lives of children are shaped by social interaction, particularly interaction with parents and other caretakers. He examines the special language of children, their socialization experiences, and the emergence of their selfconceptions- all as they occur in natural surroundings: daycare centers, homes, playgrounds, schools, and many other places. Denzin is concerned not with sequential developmental changes during childhood, but with how children themselves enter into the processes that lead to self-awareness, socialized abilities and attribute-such as pride, perceptiveness, dignity, and poise. Through his symbolic interactionist approach, Denzin shows how language-the key link between children and others-is required in everyday interpersonal relationships and how the sense of self develops as linguistic skills grow. He stresses the importance of play and games as processes by which children teach themselves about social behavior; he also shows that, for children, play takes on the seriousness of adults' work. Denzin maintains that the definitions of childhood by the 1970s had become detrimentally entrenched in educational and political policies regarding children. He recommends a new definition that recognizes children as individuals seeking meaning for their own actions. This book will be valuable to all social scientists concerned with symbolic and linguistic foundations of the socialization process. A new introduction reviews developments since publication of the original edition. This book raises the interactions between adults and children to a new level.

New from award winning editors Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, The Qualitative Inquiry Reader offers the best of the popular SAGE journal, Qualitative Inquiry. These collected works aim to introduce the necessary critical framework that will allow scholars and students scholars to interpret cutting edge work in the field of qualitative inquiry. By providing this framework, readers will then be able to use this work as it applies to critical political and moral discourses.

A comprehensive collection of contemporary and classical readings on sociological method, this book provides students with systematic analyses of each of the major strategies employed in sociological research. It may be used as a supplement or as the basic set of readings for all courses in methods. The book contains thirteen sections dealing with theory and its development; issues of sampling units; problems of developing new measurement techniques; difficulties surrounding the interview (with special emphasis on interviewing deviant, hostile, and silent respondents); the nature of causation; and a review of the major methods of proof available to the sociologist. Actual research studies, focusing in turn on the experiment, the survey, participant observation, life-histories, and unobtrusive analysis, are also included. Each section is preceded by an introduction, that defines the major issues in each paper, offers a discussion of problems not covered explicitly in the readings, and in general shows how each paper contributes to a view of interactional research processes. Because of its interactional approach, its use of classic articles, its anticipation of problems not yet formulated clearly in the literature, its illustrations of how social organizations may be studied, its inclusion of articles relevant to the social psychology of experiments, and its new statements on the ethics of research, this book will be invaluable in methods courses. Especially when used in conjunction with its companion text, The Research Act, the book provides perhaps the most original and most useful compendium available to students today.

Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times is written from the perspective that the scholarly lives of academics are changing, constantly in flux, and increasingly bound to the demands of the market - a context in which the university has increasingly morphed into a business enterprise, one that treats students as consumers to be marketed to, education as something to be purchased, and research as something to be capitalized on for financial gain. The effects of this market-orientation of scholarly life, especially on those in the social sciences and humanities, are ones that demand serious examination. At the same time, qualitative inquiry itself is changing and evolving within and against the rhythms of this 'new normal'. This volume engages with these emerging debates in qualitative research over new materialism, 'data', public policy, research ethics, public scholarship, and the corporate university in the neoliberal age. World-renowned contributors from the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand present a global perspective on these issues, framed within a landscape of higher education marked if not marred by efficiency metrics, accountability, external funding, and university rankings. Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times is a must-read for faculty and students alike interested in the changing dynamics of their profession, whether theoretically, methodologically, or structurally and materially. This title is sponsored by the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry, a major new international organization that sponsors an annual congress.

This 18th volume in the series discusses a variety of topics in the field of symbolic interaction.

This volume brilliantly advances our understanding of the use of narrative in the social sciences. It brings together contemporary work on narrative theory and methods and presents a fascinating range of case-studies, from Princess Diana's Panorama interview to the memoirs of the wives of US nuclear scientists.