Critical Duoethnography: A Social Justice Research Methodology for Educational Researchers

Introduction

Critical duoethnography, as a research methodology, is discussed as an innovative way to assist educational researchers engaged in social justice research projects. This chapter offers four responses to the question how can critical duoethnography be used by educational researchers to further social justice initiatives? First, critical duoethnography will be described as a tool for reflexivity, second, as an engaged form of collaborative reading and deciphering, third as an interactive feminist approach to interviewing, and fourth as a research methods pedagogy

Duoethnography has its roots in Bakhtin’s (1981) notions of a dialogic imagination capable of holding multiple perspectives simultaneously and in a combination of constructivist and interpretive epistemologies active in Laurel Richardson’s work. Sociologist Laurel Richardson forged the way with her ground-breaking work on writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson, 1994) where she juxtaposed other notions of writing as documenting what is known versus writing as a way of coming to know. Once writing could be understood as an activity for exploration it opened the way for educational researchers to experiment with writing as a form of innovative data generation. These ways of knowing as explicated by Bakhtin and Richardson served to expand the possibilities when researchers applied these ideas in contexts where they teamed up to simultaneously inquire. It also connects to other related qualitative methodological conversations about the fruits of collaborative writing such as those explicated by Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, Davies, Denzin & St. Pierre (2014).

Norris and Sawyer (2012) explained that duoethnography was a way to confront and disrupt the metanarratives that can result from solitary writing. Duoethnography therefore had the potential to include multiple voices that discussed differences of experience, regarded the life of a person as curriculum (currere) and in so doing, regarded the self as not the topic of research but as the site of the research. Scholars (such as Eisner, 1994; Norris & Sawyer, 2012; Sawyer & Norris, 2013) have been reluctant to provide the how to’s of duoethnography to avoid pinning down or limiting its potential. Such a stance has allowed duoethnography to grow and for any duoethnographic research projects to be regarded as “collaborative field testing” (Norris and Sawyer, 2012, p. 12). In all its variety, Sawyer and Norris (2013) clearly see the advantages of duoethnography as a research process specifically aimed at advancing social justice knowledge and related practices. Norris and Sawyer (2012) were instrumental in pointing out the connections between a duoethnographic method and philosophical theories of curriculum, specifically pointing to currere and self-interrogation practices, that understand the role culture and subcultures have on the ways researchers make meaning or interpret any process of knowledge construction. Currere, as a way for educators in particular to understand the intertwining of the autobiographical with the concept of curriculum, was explicated in a distinct way by Pinar (1975). Pinar understood currere as a method involving the connections between a person’s identity construction, life history, academic experiences, and their process of socially reconstructing meaning. From this understanding Pinar developed a writing process to move educators through four stages namely 1.) regressive (focused on past experiences), 2.) progressive (focused on potential future experiences), 3.) analytical (focused on the known present) and 4.) synthetical (focused on integrating the stages one through three). Moving Pinar’s process, designed as a series of individual self-reflections, into a collaborative exchange was an important methodological move made by Norris and Sawyer (2012) that opened up the necessity of dialogue as a key for unlocking the role culture plays on knowledge constructions and allows for a more pronounced transformation. At the heart of this form of interrogation is unearthing the shapes and contours of the epistemology at work for the critical duoethnographers.