Table Of ContentTRANSFORMATIVE VISIONS
FOR QUALITATIVE INQUIRY
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.
Norman K. Denzin is Emeritus Professor of Communications, Sociology,
and the Humanities, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Founding
Director of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
Michael D. Giardina is Professor of Physical Culture and Qualitative Inquiry at
Florida State University, and Director of the International Congress of Qualitative
Inquiry.
TRANSFORMATIVE
VISIONS FOR
QUALITATIVE INQUIRY
Edited by
Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina
Cover image: johnwoodcock / Getty Images
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Norman K. Denzin and Michael
D. Giardina; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina to be
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and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-032-18315-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-18317-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-25401-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003254010
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Transformative Visions for Qualitative
Inquiry 1
Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina
SECTION I
Performative Transformations 11
1 Empathy as a Collaborative Act 13
Ronald J. Pelias
2 Autoethnographic Reparative Pedagogies and Academic
Healing 28
Sophie Tamas
3 Collaborative Spirit-Writing for Social Justice 44
Bryant Keith Alexander and Mary E. Weems
4 “Nobody Ever Told Me”: Remembering Blackqueer
Pasts for Blackqueer Futures 54
Durell M. Callier
vi Contents
SECTION II
Philosophical Transformations 63
5 Bursting Forth: Attending to the More-than-Human in
Qualitative Research 65
Kathy Roulston
6 Against lists: A Post-Manifesto for a Wild, Ecological
Creativity 85
Daniel Harris and Stacy Holman Jones
7 Refusal for Survival and the Cultivation of Discomfort in
Hegemonic Academia AND Problematizing English as
Master(y) Language for Qualitative Research AND 98
Mirka Koro, Ananí M. Vasquez and Adnan Turan
SECTION III
Artistic Transformations 117
8 Allying Arts-Based and Indigenous Approaches for
Environmental Protection and Social Justice 119
Geo Takach
9 Placed-Based Songwriting 139
John Christopher Haddox
10 Dramatizing and Workshopping the Data: Applied
Theatre as Dialogic Research 154
Joe Norris, Nadia Ganesh, Kevin Hobbs and
Michael Martin Metz
Coda: Trumpism and the Challenge of Critical Education 176
Henry A. Giroux
Editor Bios 199
Index 205
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank editor-extraordinaire Hannah Shakespeare and Matt Bickerton at
Routledge for their support of this volume and the larger ICQI project. Thanks
are also due Amy Polenske for expert copyediting, and Balaji Karuppanan for
production design. Many of the chapters in this book were presented as plenary
or keynote addresses at the seventeenth International Congress of Qualitative
Inquiry, which was held virtually in May 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions still
in place on in-person conferences and events. We thank the Institute of Com-
munications Research, the College of Media, and the International Institute for
Qualitative Inquiry for continued support of the Congress.
For information on future Congresses, please visit www.icqi.org
Norman K. Denzin
Michael D. Giardina
November 2021
INTRODUCTION
Transformative Visions for Qualitative
Inquiry
Norman K. Denzin and Michael D. Giardina
Proem
More than 20 years ago, Paula Treichler (1999) argued that the AIDS epidemic
was “simultaneously an epidemic of a transmissible lethal disease and an epidemic
of meanings of signification” (p. 10, our emphasis). In her landmark book, How
to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS, she specifically sought
to impress upon readers that:
[b]oth epidemics are equally crucial for us to understand, for, try as we
may to treat AIDS as “an infectious disease” and nothing more, meanings
continue to multiply wildly and at an extraordinary rate. This epidemic of
meanings is readily apparent in the chaotic assemblage of understandings of
AIDS that by now exists. The mere enumeration of some of the ways AIDS
has been characterized suggests its enormous power to generate meanings.
(1999, pp. 10–11, our emphasis)
We would reason that the COVID-19 pandemic can be read in similar
ways. The sheer volume of published biomedical and bio-scientific research on
COVID-19 reveals one particular way of understanding the pandemic (i.e., as a
disease spread through aerosolized particles), and important work by the likes of
Greenhalgh (2020) and Rencken, Rutherford, Ghanta, Kongoletos, and Glicks-
man (2021) have contributed greatly to our understanding of the public health
benefits of wearing masks in public, properly ventilating enclosed spaces, and
mitigating interactions with large numbers of (unvaccinated) people. At the same
time, the mere act of wearing a mask (whether at the grocery store or in a
school classroom) or getting the safe and widely normalized Pfizer-BioNTech
DOI: 10.4324/9781003254010-1
