International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol. 19, No. 6, November-December 2006, pp.

769782

Disciplining qualitative research1

Norman K. Denzina*, Yvonna S. Lincolnb and Michael D. Giardinaa
aUniversity
International 10.1080/09518390600975990 TQSE_A_197500.sgm 0951-8398 Original Taylor 2006 0 6 19 Professor n-denzin@uiuc.edu 00000November-December and & Article Francis NormanDenzin (print)/1366-5898 Francis Journal Ltd of Qualitative 2006 (online) Studies in Education

of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA; bTexas A&M University, USA

Qualitative research exists in a time of global uncertainty. Around the world, governments are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what counts as good science. These regulatory activities raise fundamental, philosophical epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. This essay contests this methodological fundamentalism, and interrogates the politics of re-emergent scientism, the place of qualitative research in mixed-methods experimentalism, and the pragmatic criticisms of anti-foundationalism. Furthermore, it outlines three models of scientifically based research (SBR), and discusses how each is operative within the current historical conjuncture. In the process, it advocates for a qualitative research paradigm that is committed to social justice and the promise of radical, progressive democracy.

I. Proem To invoke and paraphrase William Kittredge (1987, p. 87), today in post-9/11 America with Patriot Acts, Homeland Security Administrations, No Child Left Behind Acts, Faith-Based Initiatives and a president who performs scripts of fear written by others, we are struggling to revise our dominant mythology, to find a new story to inhabit, to find new laws to govern our liveslaws designed to preserve a model of a free democratic society based on values learned from a shared mythology. The ground on which we stand has shifted dramatically. The neoconservatives have put into place a new set of myths, performances, narratives and storiesa new set of laws that threaten to destroy what we mean by freedom and democracy (Giroux, 2004; Lakoff, 2006). Qualitative research exists in this time of global uncertainty. Around the world, government agencies are attempting to regulate scientific inquiry by defining what counts as good science (for the case in Australia, see Cheek, 2006; for the case in
* Corresponding author. Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, 229 Gregory Hall, mc-463, 810 S. Wright St., Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Email: n-denzin@uiuc.edu ISSN 0951-8398 (print)/ISSN 1366-5898 (online)/06/06076914 2006 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09518390600975990

770 N. K. Denzin et al. the UK, see Torrance, 2006). Conservative regimes are enforcing evidence- or scientifically based, biomedical models of research (SBR). Yet, as in the case with such illconceived endeavors as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, this experimental quantitative model is ill suited to:
examining the complex and dynamic contexts of public education in its many forms, sites, and variations, especially considering the subtle social difference produced by gender, race, ethnicity, linguistic status or class. Indeed, multiple kinds of knowledge, produced by multiple epistemologies and methodologies, are not only worth having but also demanded if policy, legislation and practice are to be sensitive to social needs. (Lincoln & Canella, 2004a, p. 7)

Born out of a methodological fundamentalism that returns to a much discredited model of empirical inquiry in which only randomized experiments produce truth (House, 2006, pp. 100101), such regulatory activities raise fundamental, philosophical epistemological, political and pedagogical issues for scholarship and freedom of speech in the academy. In response to such challenges, a methodology of the heart, a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism that embraces an ethics of truth grounded in love, care, hope and forgiveness is needed. Indigenous scholars are leading the way on this front. During the Decade of the Worlds Indigenous Peoples (19942004), a full-scale attack was launched on Western epistemologies and methodologies. Indigenous scholars asked that the academy decolonize its scientific practices (Battiste, 2006; Grande, 2004; Smith, 2006). At the same time, these scholars sought to disrupt traditional ways of knowing, while developing methodologies and approaches to research that privileged indigenous knowledges, voices, and experiences (Smith, 2005, p. 87). An alliance with the critical strands of qualitative inquiry and its practitioners seemed inevitable. Today, non-indigenous scholars are building these connections, learning how to dismantle, deconstruct and decolonize traditional ways of doing science, learning that research is always already both moral and political, learning how to let go. Ironically, as this letting go occurs, a backlash against critical qualitative research gains momentum. New gold standards for reliability and validity, as well as design, are being advanced (St.Pierre, 2004). So-called evidence-based researchincluding the Campbell and Cochrane2 models and protocolshave become fashionable (Pring, 2004; Thomas, 2005), even while its proponents fail to recognize that the very act of labeling some research as evidence-based implies that some research fails to mount evidencea strongly political and decidedly non-objective stance. The criticisms, it seems, are coming in from all sides. *** The demands of SBR raise questions that require serious public discussion: What is truth? What is evidence? What counts as evidence? How is evidence evaluated? How can evidenceor factsbe fixed to fit policy? What kind of evidence-based research should inform this process? How is evidence to be represented? How is evidence to be discounted or judged to be unreliable, false or incorrect? What is a fact? What is

Disciplining qualitative research 771 intelligence? What are the different discourseseducation, law, medicine, history, cultural or performance studiesthat define evidence? (Pring, 2004, p. 203). Moreover, the limitations of the SBR model involve the politics of truth. They intersect with the ways in which a given political regime fixes facts and intelligence to fit ideology (as in the case of global warming policy, or the debate over whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction). What is true or false is determined, in part, by the criteria that are used to judge good and bad evidence. Qualitative researchers twist and turn within these politicized spaces (Lather, 2004; Cannella & Lincoln, 2004a, 2004b).3 In what follows, we interrogate the politics of this re-emergent scientism, the place of qualitative research in mixed-methods experimentalism, and the pragmatic criticisms of anti-foundationalism. We then outline three versions of SBR, advocating in the process for a qualitative research paradigm that is committed to social justice and the promise of radical, progressive democracy. II. The politics of evidence The resistances to and critiques of qualitative research illustrate the complex politics embedded in this field of discourse. To better understand these criticisms, it is useful to distinguish analytically the political (or external) role of [qualitative] methodology from the procedural (or internal) one (Seale et al., 2004, p. 7). Politics situate methodology within and outside the academy. Procedural issues define how qualitative methodology is used to produce knowledge about the world (Seale et al., 2004, p. 7). Political and procedural resistances reflect an uneasy awareness that the interpretive traditions of qualitative research commit one to a critique of the positivist or postpositivist projects. Still, the positivist resistance to qualitative research goes beyond the ever-present desire to maintain a distinction between hard science and soft scholarship (Carey, 1989, p. 99). Qualitative research that decolonizesor dismantles traditional methodologies is seen as an assault on this tradition. At this point, positivist researchers often retreat into a value-free objectivist science model to defend their position. They seldom attempt to make explicitlet alone critiquethe moral and political commitments in their own contingent work (Carey, 1989, p. l04). In some instances, those adherents appear even to be unaware of those moral and political commitments, or to use the claim that there are no such commitments to buttress their own claims for scientific superiority. Thus, the retreat into a valuefree objectivist science model is less a reasoned value position and rather more of a true believers methodological fundamentalism (House, 2006).4 Positivists further allege that the so-called new wave ethnographers and nontraditional qualitative researchers write fiction, not science. The new ethnographers, they claim, have no way of verifying their truth statements. For the critics, a decolonized methodology dissolves into values and politics. Ethnographic poetry, performance texts and fiction signal the death of empirical science, and there is little to be gained by attempting to engage in moral criticism. These critics presume a stable, unchanging reality that can be studied with the empirical methods of objective social

772 N. K. Denzin et al. science. They seek to preserve this stable, unchangingand imaginaryworld against the attacks from the inside and the outside. The opposition to positivist science by indigenous scholars is seen, then, as an attack on reason and truth. At the same time, the positivist science attack on both non-indigenous and indigenous qualitative research is regarded as an attempt to legislate one version of truth over another. Politics and re-emergent scientism The scientifically based research movement (SBR), first introduced by the federal government in the Reading Excellence Act of 1999 and later incorporated by the National Research Council (NRC), has created a new and hostile political environment for qualitative research. Connected to the disastrous No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, SBR embodies a re-emergent scientism (Maxwell, 2004), a positivist, so-called evidence-based, epistemology. Researchers are encouraged to employ rigorous, systematic, and objective methodology to obtain reliable and valid knowledge (Ryan and Hood, 2006, p. 58). The preferred methodology has well-defined causal models using independent and dependent variables. Causal models are examined in the context of randomized controlled experiments that allow replication and generalization (Ryan & Hood, 2006). Under this framework, qualitative research becomes suspect. Evidence from quantitative research is prioritized while qualitative inquiry is marginalized, because there are no well-defined variables or causal models. Observations and measurements are not based on random assignment to experimental groups. Unequivocal evidence is not generated by these methods. At best, case study, interview and ethnographic methods offer descriptive materials that can be tested with experimental or survey methods, critics of qualitative research aver. The epistemologies of indigenous, critical race, queer, postcolonial, feminist and postmodern theories are rendered useless, relegated at best to the category of scholarship, not science (National Research Council, 2002; St.Pierre, 2004; Ryan & Hood, 2006). Critics of the SBR movement are united on the following points. The alliance between the SBR movement and the new public accountability and new public management schools rests on an incorrect assumption; namely, that quantitative measures, in contrast to qualitative materials, are to be preferred because they are more transparent and more objective (Hammersley, 2004;: Torrance, 2006). But transparent and objective to whom, and how are transparency and objectivity represented? The assertion that connects accountability and improved performance with objectivity is dangerous. It focuses attention on the performance indicator and not on performance itself (Ryan & Hood, 2006), as well as focusing on a statistical normality that tends to relegate diversity, variation, difference and other indicators of cultural richness to non-normality and/or pathology (Baez & Boyles, 2006). It ignores the contexts of experience. It turns subjects into numbers. It turns social inquiry into the handmaiden of a technocratic, globalizing managerialism. It gives research a dirty name. And it offers false hopes for practitioners.

Disciplining qualitative research 773 The critics continue, arguing that Bush Science (Lather, 2004, p. 19) and its experimental, so-called evidence-based methodologies represents a racialized, masculinist backlash to the proliferation of qualitative inquiry methods over the last two decades (Lather, 2004). The movement endorses a narrow view of science, celebrating a neoclassical experimentalism that is a throwback to the Campbell-Stanley era and its dogmatic adherence to an exclusive reliance on quantitative methods (Howe, 2004, p. 42). There is nostalgia for a simple and ordered universe of science that never was (Popkewitz, 2004, p. 62). With its emphasis on only one form of scientific rigor, the NRC ignores the need for and value of complex historical, contextual and political criteria for evaluating inquiry. We might add that the move to a neoexperimental scientific model also represents a backlash against the deep and moving portraits of social injustice, racism and myriad forms of oppression operating under the apparently just fabric of American social life. Additionally, neoclassical experimentalists extol evidence-based medical research as the model for educational research, particularly the random clinical trial (Howe, 2004, p. 48). But the random clinical trialdispensing a pillis quite unlike dispensing a curriculum (Howe, 2004, p. 48), nor can the effects of the educational experiment be easily measured, unlike a 10-point reduction in diastolic blood pressure (Howe, 2004, p. 48). Qualitative researchers must learn to think outside the box as they critique the NRC and its methodological guidelines (Atkinson, 2004). We must apply our critical imaginations to the meaning of such terms as randomized design, causal model, policy studies and public science (Cannella & Lincoln, 2004b; Weinstein, 2004). More deeply, we must resist conservative attempts to discredit qualitative inquiry by placing it back inside the box of positivism. There is a great deal of stake in these arguments. As St.Pierre (2004) observes, the SBR criteria marginalize many forms of qualitative inquiry, including critical race, queer, postcolonial, feminist, indigenous and decolonizing theories. They endorse a narrow view of science and evidence. They celebrate a historical moment when the methods of positivist science were not being challenged. In valorizing the experimental model, they ignore many criticisms of experimentalism, developed more than four decades ago, involving the inability to adequately treat rival causal factors associated with internal and external validity as well as the limitations of nave realism; the erasure of the valuefacttheory distinction; the death of the disinterested observer who has a Gods-eye view of objective reality; the reliance on an ethics of deception; and a refusal to consider either the contexts of knowledge production or the researchersubject relationship (Campbell & Stanley, 1963; Lincoln & Guba, 2000; Howe, 2004). Mixed-methods experimentalism Howe (2004) observes that the NRC finds a place for qualitative methods in mixedmethods experimental designs. In such designs, qualitative methods may be employed either singly or in combination with quantitative methods, including the use of randomized experimental designs (Howe, 2004, p. 49). Mixed methods are

774 N. K. Denzin et al. direct descendants of classical experimentalism. They presume a methodological hierarchy with quantitative methods at the toprelegating qualitative methods to a largely auxiliary role in pursuit of the technocratic aim of accumulating knowledge of what works (Howe, 2004, pp. 5354). The mixed-methods movement takes qualitative methods out of their natural home, which is within the critical, interpretive framework (Howe, 2004, p. 54; but see Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003, esp. p. 15). It ignores ontological, epistemological and axiomatic differences between positivist and postpositivist work and its critics who labor within critical, constructivist and interpretive epistemological frameworks. It fails to recognize legitimate differences in ways of knowing possessed by diverse groups and peoples, and imposes a Western sensibility and rationality on experience even when Western sensibilities and rationality are highly inappropriate and indeed meaningless. It divides inquiry into dichotomous categories, exploration versus confirmation, failing to understand the complex and necessary interplay between the two. Qualitative work is assigned to the first category, quantitative research to the second (Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). Like the classic experimental model, it excludes stakeholders from dialogue and active participation in the research process. This weakensor entirely vitiatesits democratic and dialogical dimensions, returns all power to researchers, and decreases the likelihood that previously silenced voices will be heard (Howe, 2004, pp. 5657). Howe cautions that it is not just the methodological fundamentalists who have bought into [this] approach. A sizeable number of rather influential educational researchers have also signed on. This might be a compromise to the current political climate; it might be a backlash against the perceived excesses of postmodernism; it might be both. It is an ominous development, whatever the explanation (2004, p. 57). The pragmatic criticisms of anti-foundationalism Seale et al. (2004, p. 2) contest what they regard as the excesses of an anti-methodological, anything goes, romantic postmodernism that is associated with our project. They assert that, too often, the approach we value produces low quality qualitative research and research results that are quite stereotypical and close to common sense (2004, p. 2). In contrast they propose a practice-based, pragmatic approach that places research practice at the center. Research involves an engagement with a variety of things and people: research materials social theories, philosophical debates, values, methods, tests research participants (p. 2). Their situated methodology rejects the anti-foundational claim that there are only partial truths, that the dividing line between fact and fiction has broken down (p. 3). They believe that this dividing line has not collapsed, that we should not accept stories if they do not accord with the best available facts (p. 6). Oddly, these pragmatic procedural arguments reproduce a variant of the evidencebased model and its criticisms of poststructural, performative sensibilities. They can

Disciplining qualitative research 775 be used to provide political support for the methodological marginalization of many of the positions we endorse. In any event, we know fewif anyanti-methodological, Feyerabendian, anything goes, romantic postmodernists. Our experience has shown most of our colleagues to be quite rigorous, extremely attentive to method and methodology, and far more hard-nosed than romantic. We are not quite certain who these wishy-washy folk are but they most assuredly are not so powerful as to prompt a return to the failed social science of the past 150 years. III. SBR and the war on truth There are at least three versions of SBR. SBR One is the model incorporated by the National Research Council (2002). SBR Two is a simulacrum of SBR One. It was the model used by the Bush administration when it sold the unilateral intervention and occupation of Iraq to the world. This model produces simulacra of the truth. SBR Three (see below) rejects SBR One and Two, and articulates a politics and methodology of truth based on a decolonizing critical pedagogy and a feminist, prophetic, ethical pragmatism (West, 1989, 1991; Denzin, 1996, 2003, 2005; Seigfried, 1996). SBR One, with its focus on objectively verifiable evidence, was not in play when the Bush administration decided unilaterally to invade and occupy Iraq. Instead, they used SBR Two, which allowed them to act as if they were gathering objective, reliable, generalizable evidence. But they were not doing this! The intent, instead, was to gather evidence that appeared to have these characteristics. Under the Bush regime, a fact or piece of evidence is true if it meets three criteria: (a) it has the appearance of being factual; (b) it is patriotic; and (c) it supports a political action that advances the White Houses far-right neoconservative agenda. Evidence that contradicts that agenda is flawed and/or biased. The Bush administration wanted to assert its will in the Middle East. It fabricated a set of facts, using its version of SBR OneSBR Twoto justify that activity. Challenges to the war were unpatriotic, and discredited because they were claimed to undercut the administrations desire to protect Americans from violent terrorists who oppose our political system. An unnamed senior advisor to President Bush described this troubling relationship between performance and reality when he contrasted the reality-based communitypeople who believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality (quoted in Suskind, 2004, p. 51), with his own world-view:
Thats not the way the world really works anymore. Were an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality well act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too. Were historys actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (2004, p. 51)

How do we respond to a statement such as this? Whose history are they creating? And for what ends? Who gave them this power? Who is holding them responsible for the consequences of their historical actions? If they do not like the effects of one reality, they create a new one, to which we must respond, living out the consequences of their experiments in reality construction.

776 N. K. Denzin et al. SBR Three: critical pedagogy, ethics and prophetic pragmatism Against the above-mentioned developments, what does it mean to assert that journalists and social scientists can only write about the reality created by historys actors? What does it mean to state that journalists and social scientists write the first drafts of history? In effect, what is truth? For this we turn to the post-pragmatists (see Seigfried, 1996). For the post-pragmatist feminist there is no neutral standpoint, no objective Gods-eye view of the world. The meaning of a concept or a line of action or a representation lies in the practical, political, moral and social consequences it produces for an actor or collectivity. The meanings of these consequences are not objectively given. They are established through social interaction and the politics of representation. All representations are historically situated, shaped by the intersecting contingencies of power, gender, race and class (Seigfried, 1996; Collins, 1998, 2000). Patricia Hill Collins (2000) offers four criteriaprimacy of lived experience, dialogue, an ethics of care, an ethics of responsibilityfor interpreting truth and knowledge claims. This framework privileges lived experience, emotion, empathy and values rooted in personal expressiveness (Edwards & Mauthner, 2002, p. 25). The moral inquirerwhether a politician or a social scientistbuilds a collaborative, reciprocal, trusting, mutually accountable relationship with those studied. This feminist ethical framework is care and justice based. It seeks to contextualize shared values and norms. It privileges the sacredness of life, human dignity, non-violence, care, solidarity, love, community, empowerment, civic transformation. It demands of any action that it positively contribute to a politics of resistance, hope and freedom (Denzin, 2003, p. 258). For the prophetic post-pragmatists there are no absolute truths, no absolute principles, no faith-based beliefs in what is true or false. At the level of politics and ideology, the post-pragmatist, following Cornel West (1989, 1991) acts as a critical moral agent, one whose political goal is the creation of greater individual freedom in the broader social order. Paraphrasing West (1991, pp. 3536), prophetic pragmatists as moral agents understand that the consequences of their interventions into the world are exclusively political, judged always in terms of their contributions to a politics of liberation, love, caring and freedom. Following Collins (2000), Pelias (2004), and Freire (1999), the moral inquirer enacts a politics of love and care, an ethic of hope and forgiveness. Love, here, to borrow from Darder and Mirn (2006):
means to comprehend that the moral and the material are inextricably linked. And, as such, [we] must recognize love as an essential ingredient of a just society. Eagleton (2003) defines this concept of love as a political principle through which we struggle to create mutually life-enhancing opportunities for all people. It is grounded in the mutuality and interdependence of our human existencethat which we share, as much as that which we do not. This is a love nurtured by the act of relationship itself. It cultivates relationships with the freedom to be at ones best without undue fear. Such an emancipatory love allows us to realize our nature in a way that allows others to do so as well. Inherent in such a love is the understanding that we are not at liberty to be violent, authoritarian, or selfseeking. (p. 150)

Disciplining qualitative research 777 Materially, actions are thus judged in terms of moral consequences and the meanings people bring to them. Consequences are not self-evident. They are socially constructed through the politics of representation. The concept of truth is thus replaced with a consequential theory of meaning. Experience, folded through what Stuart Hall (1996) calls the politics of representation, becomes the site of meaning and truth. Facts about the world are treated as facticities, as lived experiences. The pragmatist examines the effects, or consequences, of any line of action on existing structures of domination. The pragmatist asks, that is: What are the moral and ethical consequences of these effects for lived human experience? Do they contribute to an ethical self-consciousness that is critical and reflexive, empowering people with a language and a set of pedagogical practices that turn oppression into freedom, despair into hope, hatred into love, and doubt into trust? Do they engender a critical racial self-awareness that contributes to utopian dreams of racial equality and racial justice? If people are being oppressed, denied freedom or dying because of these effects, then the action, of course, is morally indefensible. *** In short, we are advocating for an engagement with and promotion of a qualitative research paradigm that imagines creative and critical responses to the fundamentalist regulatory efforts outlined above. This paradigm is forthright in its belief that the personal is political, and that the political is pedagogical. It shares in experiences, problems and hopes concerning the conduct of critical, qualitative inquiry in this time of global uncertainty. It advocates that safeguards protecting scientists and the scientific community from censorship, misrepresentation, repression and politicization must be commonplace. That the values of progressive democracy must be at the forefront when scientific advice is used for policy-making decisions. And that the pragmatic consequences for a radical democracy must be taken into account when scientific recommendations for social action are implemented. To be sure, this is a gendered project, a project where feminist, postcolonial, queer and indigenous theorists question the logic of the heterosexual ethnographic narrative. It is a moral, allegorical and therapeutic project, one in which the researchers own self is inscribed in the text as a prop to help men and women endure and prevail in the opening years of the twenty-first century. And it is avowed in its commitment to a project of social justice and radical progressive democracy. When the divisions disappear between reality and its appearances, critical inquiry necessarily becomes disruptive, explicitly pedagogical and radically democratic; its topics: fascism, the violent politics of global capitalist culture, the loss of freedom in daily life. Where the hyperreal appears more real than the real, pragmatists and cultural critics require apparatuses of resistance and critique, methodologies and pedagogies of truth, ways of making real realities that envision and enact pedagogies of hope. Such pedagogies offer ways of holding fraudulent political regimes accountable for their actions. We demand that historys actors use models of evidence that answer to these moral truths.5

778 N. K. Denzin et al. IV. Coda The past two decades have seen a steady growth in the practice and the creation of new qualitative methods, as well as the training of new inquirers prepared to undertake such work. After a period of strong growth, qualitative research as a field seemed to stop to take a breath, a breath that was followed by a virtual explosion of new methods, new critiques, new insights, new theoretical developments, new proposals, and new and highly experimental work. The greatest breakthroughs came, from our perspective, in the collapses between the ontological and the epistemological, and between the epistemological and the methodological, in the various proposals, theoretical perspectives and lenses through which qualitative research has been filtered and refined (Lincoln, 2000). We now can embrace sophisticated theoretical stances on critical and qualitative race and ethnic perspectives, border voices, queer, feminist, indigenous and other non-Western lenses and epistemologies. Previous generations of inquirers could distinguish themselves simply as qualitative researchers; we know now that the field and its practitioners are neither unitary nor united, except in their critical and/or interpretive stances. We have a rich variety of resources, theories and perspectives through which we may draw the results of our studies, illuminating aspects of social, educational and cultural life previously unknown save to those who lived the experience. Whereas once a qualitative researcher might well claim to have read virtually every extant work on qualitative research, now such a project is practically impossible. As these changes have occurred, there are centripetal forces attempting to return us to a central and unified discourse around what constitutes science. Federal funding increasingly falls under the same guidelines attached to the No Child Left Behind Act, mandating randomized field experiments. If qualitative research is permitted, it is clearly labeled as ancillary to the central project of experimental design. Private foundation monies are increasingly falling prey to suggested Federal guidelines on homeland security, such that Ford and other philanthropic foundations mandate what shape and form final results must conform to. Attacks on qualitative research, some under the guise of developing a new paradigm for research (see, for instance, Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003), which claims to take the best of both paradigms, the conventional and the interpretive, and to leave unfruitful debates behind, continue unabated. Still, students sign up in large numbers for whatever training they can get. Qualitative methods books, particularly those that demonstrate some innovation in qualitative research methods, such as works on Internet research, or visual methods, or documentary usage, sell extremely well. Such signs seem to indicate that against all odds, qualitative research is mature and thriving, and inquirers-in-training want to know all they can about how to practice such arts and sciences. Clearly, for many the call is radically different. Many desire to transform and change the spaces in which we exist in the academy. We desire to take hold of the terms that define our existence in relationship to the other disciplines, the journals, the apparatuses, the departments, and tenure, recruitment, teaching, instruction, funding, publishing and journals. We desire to take hold of our own existence, our own history,

Disciplining qualitative research 779 and make it into a dream that was there from the beginning when we were called into this space. Critical, interpretive qualitative research creates the power for positive, ethical, communitarian change, and the new practitioners entering this field deeply desire to use the power of the university to make such change.6 Notes
1. 2. 3. This chapter draws on and reworks Denzin and Lincoln (2005); Denzin (2006); Denzin and Giardina (2006). For a concise overview of Campbell and Cochrane models, see Mosteller and Boruch (2002). Clearly, the tensions and contradictions that characterize the field do not exist within a unified arena. The issues and concerns of qualitative researchers in nursing and healthcare, for example, are decidedly different from those of researchers in cultural anthropology, where statistical and evidence-based models of inquiry are of less importance. The questions that indigenous scholars deal with are often different from those of interest to critical theorists in educational research. Nor do the international disciplinary networks of qualitative researchers necessarily cross one another, speak to one another, read one another. House (2006) argues that methodological fundamentalists are motivated by similar concerns to those of religious fundamentalists. This observation is particularly striking given the extent to which the Bush administration has aligned itself with the Christian right on issues related to abstinence education, stem-cell research, intelligent design, same-sex marriage. In so doing, the administration has appointing unqualified persons to scientific advisory committees; fired whistle-blowing scientists; erased large national data files that contradict official White House policy; and hired fake journalists to promote its educational policies (Kaplan, 2004; Rich, 2006). For more on this alliance, see especially Michelle Goldbergs (2006) Kingdom coming: the rise of Christian nationalism; Esther Kaplans (2004) With God on their side: George W. Bush and the Christian right; and Chris Mooneys (2005) The Republican war on science. For more, see most especially the collection of essays in Denzin and Giardina (2006). This is what the newly formed International Association of Qualitative Inquiry is all about. For more on this association, see http://iaqi.org. See also http://qi2007.org for information on the 3rd International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, which is currently organized in concert with the Association.

4.

5. 6.

Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Professor of Communications, Research Professor of Communications, Cinema Studies, Sociology, Criticism & Interpretive Theory, and Interim Head, Department of Advertising & Consumer Studies, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is founding President of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry (2005). Yvonna S. Lincoln is Distinguished Professor of Higher Education and Ruth Harrington Chair of Educational Leadership at Texas A&M University. She is the co-editor of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions of the Handbook of qualitative research, and the founding co-editor, with Norman Denzin, of the journal Qualitative Inquiry. Michael D. Giardina is Visiting Assistant Professor of Advertising & Consumer Studies, Program for Cultural Studies & Interpretive Research, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author/editor of seven books, including From soccer moms to NASCAR dads: sport, culture, and politics in a nation divided (Paradigm, forthcoming).

780 N. K. Denzin et al. References

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