Blue-Collar Writing for Fruitful Dialogue?

Abstract

Norman Denzin has called for a reformed discourse to enable qualitative researchers to achieve a fruitful dialogue about democracy and social justice throughout the world. In this essay, I endorse Denzin’s emancipatory project which uses a critical framework modeled on writers such as Wright Mills, Paulo Freire, bel hookes, and Cornell West. I use material from Freire and Mills especially to suggest that fruitful dialogue also requires us as researchers and writers to become simpler, even “blue-collar,” in our own craft-writing. I do so in the hope that we can learn to speak and write “human” and move away from what Mills called the “academic pose.”