Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter: Engaging Duoethnography to Cultivate Love and Flight in Divided Landscapes

• In Event: Difficult Dialogues in Uncertain Times: Creating Duoethnographic Spaces and Taking Responsibility as Scholar-Educators

Abstract

This presentation addresses the question of how, in deeply divisive times, do we grapple with what Toni Morrison named as “the shit that weighs you down?” How do women and scholars for justice ululate the painful edges of messy lives and rejoice in the struggle of loving challenge and critique? These essential questions lead to a greater freedom when we “acknowledge the roles we play in sustaining an array of social and educational inequities,” (AERA, 2020) and use this responsibility for a deeper accountability for our roles as researchers, teachers, and informed actors. We face these questions through biographies as sites of research (Norris, Sawyer, & Lund, 2013). Indeed, our presentation posits that duoethnographic engagements help us to “explore conversation as a reciprocal process of learning about liberating forms of knowledge” and act as “a form of reflective inquiry in which we each legitimate the others’ writing” (Gergen & Gergen, 2012, p. 258), research, teaching, and activism. We demonstrate how duologue can be “a deeply feminist commitment to ‘cut to heal not to bleed’” (Dillard, 2000) and a critical foundation for connecting us to the lives we live while deepening scholarship and leadership.

Our work offers narrative ‘snapshots,’ poetic interludes, and images—data—as we witness the obstacles our faculty and students of color face; as we deal with dismissive colleagues and the racism embedded in our institutions; as we work through what it means to move “to the dark side” of higher education administration; as we face the challenge of the impossibility of work/life balance; as we work to move away from compartmentalizing the various parts of our identities for those at work and at home; and as we dismiss that old cliché that “women can have it all.” In doing so, we saw duoethnography as a liberatory space to examine our own practices and perspectives and collaboratively work through the “shit that weighs us down.”

We share how we listen and invite marginalized students and faculty to talk through hard truths; how even when voices are stifled, we learn and relearn to hear and amplify through dialogic actions. Bearing witness to racism and the pain we see in the youth with whom we work defies the blind comfort of whiteness; it speaks to a pedagogy of vulnerability in which we must “contextualize that self in societal constructs and systems, co-learn, admit you do not know, and be human” (Brantmeier, 2013, p. 2). We share the deep learning from this vulnerability and the chances it provides to act in relationship with and listen for when we need to yield to the leadership of others or move to the front. A duoethnographic approach personified the notion that the personal is pedagogical and is fertile ground for what Gwendolyn Brooks (1968) called "Blooming in the noise of the whirlwind" (p. 51). A fragmented self can’t sustain us and does not allow us to bring our motherscholar/sisterscholar selves to bear as the bridge that makes the personal pedagogical.

Authors

• Candace Marie Thompson, University of North Carolina - Wilmington

• Sheri Carmel Hardee, University of North Georgia