Opening the Tent for the Scholarship of Hope

The contributions of Norman Denzin to qualitative inquiry are vast, meaningful, and humbling. His wish for his memorial, however, was not for people to simply “say nice things” about him; he wanted people to challenge the field and question where we are going as a qualitative community. This address asks the reader to consider the “qualitative tent” and the dangers of staying within its confines. It challenges the qualitative community to open the tent to engage with communities, including those that are structurally disadvantaged, but also policy-makers, government administration, industry, and others complicit in maintaining structural disadvantage. It asks us to engage with communities to ultimately fulfill what Norman so deeply cared about and asked us to do— support social justice, reduce inequity, and produce real change. By engaging with communities, our qualitative tent becomes a place for the scholarship of hope, so desperately needed in our troubled and upended world.