Norman K. Denzin is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology, and Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. One of the world’s foremost authorities on qualitative research and cultural criticism, he is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including The Qualitative Manifesto; Qualitative Inquiry Under Fire; Reading Race; Interpretive Ethnography; The Cinematic Society; The Alcoholic Self; and a trilogy on the American West. He is past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor of six editions of the landmark SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, co-editor (with Michael D. Giardina) of 18 books on qualitative inquiry, co-editor (with Yvonna S. Lincoln and Michael D. Giardina) of the methods journal Qualitative Inquiry, founding editor of Cultural Studies?Critical Methodologies and International Review of Qualitative Research, editor of four book series, and founding director of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
As the world's culture has become both postmodern and multinational, so too must ethnography. In this volume, Norman K Denzin examines the changes and sounds a call to transform ethnographic writing in a manner befitting a new age. The author ponders the prospects, problems and forms of ethnographic interpretive writing in the twenty-first century. He argues cogently and persuasively that postmodern ethnography is the moral discourse of the contemporary world, and that ethnographers can and should explore new types of experimental texts - performance-based texts, literary journalism and narratives of the self - to form a new ethics of inquiry.
