Norman Denzin: The Power of the Special Issue

Norman Denzin's career as a symbolic interactionist spans many years and has produced an incredible amount of high-quality scholarship. His work as editor of Studies in Symbolic Interaction has served as a platform for disseminating a wide range of innovative ideas, research, and reviews in our discipline. In this chapter, I will discuss two features of Studies that point to the great value of its work to symbolic interaction in general and to the areas of music studies in particular. Those two features are planting the seed of interactionist scholarship in an initial paper, and growing collective interactionist projects through special issues. My examples will be drawn from my own experiences with Studies over the years, and my approach to research and writing on music phenomena.