Norman K. Denzin

"In Performance Ethnography, one of the world's most distinguished authorities on qualitative research establishes the initial published connection of performance narratives with performance ethnography and autoethnography, the linkage of these formations to critical pedagogy and critical race theory, and the histories of these formations. He then shows how they may be connected."--Jacket.

What influence does the cinema have on visual culture and social understanding? In what ways are we products of the cinematic gaze? This timely book, written by one of the leading commentators in the sociology of culture, highlights the extent to which the cinema has contributed to the rise of voyeurism throughout society. The cinema not only turns its audience into voyeurs, eagerly following the lives of its screen characters, but repeatedly casts its key players as onlookers, spying on other people's lives. The nature of the cinematic voyeur - the obsessive outsider, the ethnic or sexual Other - is examined in depth, as are its implications for contemporary society. Denzin analyses Hollywood's manipulations of gender, race and class, and, drawing on the work of Foucault, argues that the cinematic gaze must be understood as part of the machinery of surveillance and power which regulates social behaviour in the late twentieth century.

"Symbolic interactionism is one of the most enduring--and certainly the most sociological--of all social psychologies. In this landmark work, Norman K. Denzin traces symbolic interactionism's history from its roots in American pragmatism to its present-day encounter with poststructuralism and postmodernism." "Arguing that if interactionism is to continue to thrive and grow it must incorporate elements of poststructural and post-modern theory into its underlying views of history, culture, and politics, the author develops a research agenda which merges the interactionist sociological imagination with the critical insights of contemporary feminism and cultural studies." "Norman Denzin's programmatic analysis of symbolic interactionism develops a politics of interpretation, merging theory and practice, which will be welcomed by students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines--from sociology to cultural studies."--Jacket.