Duoethnography

Duoethnography is a relatively new research genre that has its genealogy embedded in two narrative research traditions: storytelling and William Pinar's concept of “currere.” Its approach is to study how two or more individuals give similar and different meanings to a common phenomenon as it was experienced throughout their lives. Created by Rick Sawyer and Joe Norris, duoethnography avoids the hegemonic style of the meta-narrative found in autoethnography by critically juxtaposing the stories of two or more disparate individuals who experience a similar phenomenon. Like currere, which conceptualizes one's history as a composite of learning experiences and thus makes it an informal curriculum, duoethnography examines how individuals have acquired beliefs that influence their actions and the meanings they give them. Norris uses currere to assist graduate students in examining their life histories to determine how their curriculum of a concept, such as beauty, size, what to fear, quality, or life/death, influences their beliefs and behaviors. Andrew Foran used the framework in his dissertation, Teaching Outside the School: A Phenomenological Inquiry, to examine how attitudes toward the outdoors are taught and learned. Whereas [Page 234]currere examines an individual's perspective on a concept, duoethnography extends currere by employing multiple voices in dialogue. Its purpose is to explore how the life histories of different individuals affect the meanings they give to experiences.

The investigation is loosely based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's belief that consciousness and culture influence experience and that experiences are always mediated by the meanings given to past experiences. Duoethnography is an examination of the process through which individuals make meaning out of a particular phenomenon. Pinar claimed that currere is a regressive, progressive, analytical, and synthetical process with the aim of reconceptualizing oneself and the world in which one lives and that duoethnography employs these elements. Duoethnography not only reports the participants' stories but also interrogates them in a collegial conversation.

Each author of a duoethnographic piece is both the researcher and the researched. The team employs storytelling to simultaneously generate, interpret, and articulate data. Stories beget stories and—like interview questions—the stories enable the research-writing partners to recall other past events that they might not have remembered on their own. Their stories weave back and forth in juxtaposition to one another, creating a third space between the two into which readers may insert their own stories. Tom Barone claimed that a story acts as an evoker of the meanings of others, enabling readers to both recall and reexamine their own experiences of the phenomenon in the light of the written discussion. Duoethnography, as Norman Denzin suggested about all qualitative research, has a pedagogic element. Readers witness the authors in conversation with one another as the writers analyze both their own meanings and their partners' meanings. This dialogic element models analytic reflection to readers, inviting them to engage in the conversation and teaching them the act of self-interrogation. Unlike Clifford Geertz's concept of “bracketing out,” Norris and Sawyer considered the personal to be essential and called for a “bracketing in.”

But this does not mean that duoethnography is egocentric. Antoinette Oberg encourages autoethnographers to situate themselves within their research as the sites—not the topics—of their research. Following Oberg's suggestion, duoethnography explores the informal and formal curriculum of a topic focusing not on the individuals themselves but rather on their experiences of a phenomenon. For example, the phenomenon of beauty is examined through the individuals' experiences. The participants are the sites, but the concept of beauty and how it is made manifest in society and within individuals is the topic. Its aim is to provide multiple stories that intersect and, at times, contradict one another. The monologue in autoethnography becomes dialogue in duoethnography, extending the text beyond one individual's perspective.

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