An American
resident of Canada, experimenting with new forms of critical media ethnography in Cultural Farming.
Norman Denzin:
...We must create a new narrative, a narrative of passion, and commitment, a narrative that teaches others that ways of knowing are always already partial, moral, political, and contested…(but) we should have a model of disciplined, rigorous, thoughtful, reflective inquiry, a ‘postinterpretivism that seeks meaning but less innocently, that seeks liberation but less naively, and that… reaches toward understanding, transformation and justice (Denzin & Giardina, 2008, p.29-30).
...The person who wishes to understand (comprehend) the text must be given a way to enter into parts and spaces of the listener and speaker… This is Bakhtin’s moral and epistemological imperative: an ethical aesthetic that demands that texts be written and read in ways that morally move readers and viewers. …Ethnographic researchers must learn to look at themselves from both sides of the keyhole, seeing themselves looking at themselves through the eyes of the modernist gaze. Reversing the logic of the traditional, masculine, investigative project (Denzin, 1997,p.39, 47).
...A critical, performative cultural studies attempts to put in place subversive performance texts that carry forward Trinh’s agenda for the retelling of stories that the sciences of the human disciplines have reduced to fiction and mirror literature or have marginalized, stigmatized, and paternalized as politically correct multicultural performances (Denzin, 1997, p.115).
...The challenge now is to think video, to think cinematically, to visualize, not only theory and culture as products of a complex visual cinematic apparatus, but to show how that apparatus entangles itself with the very tellings we tell. To tell a theory… is to argue for a new ethnographic relationship to old-fashioned writing itself” (Denzin, 1995, p.200).
...Here, adrift in a phenomenology and cultural analysis of late capitalism we find ourselves, voyeurs all, products of the cinematic gaze. Our challenge is clear. Begin to write, and live our own pedagogical versions of postmodernism, making our own playful ‘mystories’ of this bewildering, frightening, terrifying, exhilarating historical moment. ...Theorists of postmodernism are storytellers. ...Our most powerful effects as storytellers come when we expose the cultural plot and the cultural practices that guide our writing hands (Denzin, 1991, p.156).