What is already known about this topic: What this topic adds:

In this article, we share our use of poetry as a research supervision tool. We are not only colleagues but are also in a student–supervisor relationship. Early on in the PhD process, we began writing poems to each other on email as a way of communicating aspects of our research ideas that we felt were not able to be expressed in prose. We found that this use of poetry enabled a direct emotional engagement with the work and ideas we were forming. At the same time, we shaped our writing activities as a form of resistance, indulging in a form of anti-neoliberal critique. Crucially, however, we found that poetry also allowed us to form a closer relationship because it required both of us to be open and vulnerable. We didn’t allow time to write and edit the poems but emailed them as soon as they were written.

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to engage with challenges the authors encountered in duoethnographic inquiry, including questions about what it means to tell the truth, and the decisions the authors made about what stories to include and exclude. The focus is on the ethical challenges involved in duoethnography and the ways in which the authors chose, and or felt compelled to, overcome them. The authors provide an argument for the need of intimate, eclectic and open-ended inquiry-based research that poses questions, challenges dominant discourses and promotes a compositional methodology in which to explore lived the experience of participants. Design/methodology/approach: – The authors’ own duoethnographic process, embedded in an anthropological hermeneutics (Ricoeur, 1991), within a mode of narrative inquiry, developed over a period of three to four months. The authors had a number of formal and informal conversations – some recorded and transcribed, others remembered and reflected on later in e-mails or in draft academic papers. The authors shared articles, e-mailed, conversed with family and examined photos. Reflecting on some of these conversations, the authors were sometimes uncomfortable with the way the stories they shared had the potential to expose aspects of themselves and those the authors are close to. The authors developed fictionalising techniques and poetry in order to tell these stories. Findings: – Duoethnography engages with method that reveals truth as layered, contradictory and necessarily intersubjective. It is this tentative and contingent nature of truth that augers for a hyper-consciousness of the relationship between transgression and transformation. Using fictional ways of knowing: poetry, scripting and metaphor; and the usual technologies of research: anonymisation, de-identification; and drawing on notions of redaction and under erasure the authors found safe ways to represent particularly challenging issues. The process involved intimate revealing – small stories that the authors shared here to argue for the importance of the affective in transformative educational research. Research limitations/implications: – The authors continue to work in uncomfortable places and suggest that ethics often involves irreconcilable and incommensurate discourses which cannot always be accounted for in normalised codes of ethics. The authors argue that this tension provides an important on-going ethical encounter where, as researchers, the authors continue to generate and implement creative and innovative methodologies. Originality/value: – Throughout the paper the authors have suggested ways to challenge the linear, logical and the predictable as the authors wrestled with how personal narratives may reveal personal truth and transformation that may open ways for larger transformative actions.

“Ūkaipo,” she tells me. “Your place of contentment.” And there it is—a gift. The gift of a word to story my “belonging” to my place. The gift from my friend, a Māori scholar. The gift of an indigenous Māori word to a Pākehā, the descendent of a colonial New Zealander. I receive this gift as a taonga, a treasure. As a critical autoethnography, this article demonstrates the process of layering the personal story alongside the wider historical and social story, and alongside stories of other peoples, through a Critical Family History. As a strategy of decolonization, the stories are interrogated using critical theory. Cognizant of Smith’s seminal work on decolonizing methodologies, this work illuminates the power dynamics embedded in my family stories and indigenous stories and histories are central to the work. I create a factionalized script drawing on data generated through my critical family history research to provide a coherent story and generate the conditions for deep emotional understandings.

The purpose of this paper is to use duoethnography to explore experiences of service as work in the university, an institution increasingly shaped by neoliberal values. The authors trace the shift in emphasis within the university from one of a care-oriented form of service to a highly managerial form of service. The authors first interrogate childhood stories to make sense of the initial response to the role of service in a lecturer position, and then to the increasing organisational demand for leadership within the university. As two women academics the authors see the work in teacher education as a particular form of service—as “our calling”. This duoethnography reveals different histories in relation to service, but similar ways of thinking about the changing nature of service in the university. With particular regard to women in the academy, it reveals the desire for a more transformative approach, recognising the importance of collegial relationships, and valuing an ethics of care, in order to develop inclusive and transformative service and leadership in the academy. This paper provides clear links to how changes in the university are understood and approached differently by people. This paper argues for the importance of autoethnographic and duoethnographic explorations of the personal stories in the university to better understand wider definitions of service and leadership.

DNA analysis has enabled a much deeper interrogation of our surnames, Keesing and Fitzpatrick, than was possible via traditional genealogical research. This can inform us regarding the potential ‘hidden’ complexities of some surnames. Through juxtaposing the narratives of our family histories and DNA findings we demonstrate, using collaborative autoethnography, how surnames can be haunted by ghosts both real and imagined. The DNA-enabled critical exploration of the history of our surnames, in the context of the social and political factors that shaped them, generates a deeper and more complex understanding of how our surnames were taken/given. In this paper we investigate and deconstruct our Irish and Jewish ancestry. Fitzpatrick and Keesing are anglicised/normanised/colonised surnames that exemplify attempts to dis/member our identities. Here we re/member them, but with that comes a realisation that ‘everything has changed’ and with that come new dis/memberings and re/memberings.