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New faculty often encounters myriad professional and personal challenges during their first year of employment. In order to foster connection, support and critical dialogue throughout this potentially taxing transition, the authors utilized duoethnography to establish a peer mentorship relationship. The purpose of this paper is to describe how duoethnography can cultivate peer mentorship and further understand the experiences of first-year faculty.

This qualitative study used duoethnography as a mechanism for peer mentoring for two first-year faculty located within the Midwest and Western regions of the USA. Data sources included an online journal with multiple author entries and e-mail correspondence.

The analysis revealed that duoethnography was helpful for maintaining peer mentorship for two counselor education faculty, as they critically evaluated their experiences transitioning into higher education through an online journal. Several key moments of mentoring emerged from the data including navigating tenure, holding hope, balancing and finding place.

In this study, the authors found the use of duoethnography to be helpful for peer mentorship as the authors navigated unfamiliar settings and established the professional identities as educators. Future studies utilizing duoethnography for peer mentorship may provide insight into experiences in higher education to support faculty professional development.

Although prior research has examined the experiences of faculty and traditional mentorship, the authors are unaware of research examining the use of duoethnography to establish peer mentorship for new, tenure-track faculty. This manuscript provides higher education faculty a tool for promoting mentorship, critical dialogue, collaboration and transformation through duoethnography.

Due to the limitations to the purpose and practice of both phenomenological and duoethnographic research methodologies, the purpose of this paper is to propose phenomenological polyethnography as a hybrid qualitative methodology, which would guide skilled researchers in conducting phenomenological exploration of an emergent experience as insiders.

This study is an applied a hybridization approach to phenomenology and duoethnography as two distinct qualitative research traditions.

Employing a poststructuralist perspective, researcher-participants with relevant difference co-investigate a phenomenological question together. Borrowing elements from both hermeneutic phenomenology and duoethnography, this methodology involves the consideration of a phenomenon, the use of authors with relevant difference who have both special insight into that phenomenon as participants and skill as qualitative researchers, the intentional collection of prereflective data while all researcher-participants are experiencing the phenomenon or immediately after, the subsequent reflection upon and interpretation of the phenomenon as it was similarly and differently experienced by the researcher-participants, and the description of both the essence and meaning of the phenomenon.

This new, hybrid qualitative methodology will enable researchers to more efficiently analyze and disseminate the research of insider knowledge on emergent phenomena in higher education and other settings.

As a new methodology, it may be used to investigate events and provide rich, thick description in a way not before seen.

The purpose of this duoethnography was to share our narratives as a left-behind early career faculty (ECF) and graduate student with minoritized identities and reflect on academic socialization processes. Specifically, when many scholars are raising alarms about the retention and success of faculty with minoritized identities, it is crucial to recognize the dimensions of socialization within the organizational context of academia.

The authors sought an approach that would facilitate the interrogation of the overlap and divergence of the authors’ perspectives. Duoethnography research design was chosen for its focus on self-reflection as well as on the importance of the expression and consideration of those diverging perspectives. The goal was collaboration to generate a discussion that deepens a complex understanding of socialization in and professional commitment to academia.

The central insight that surfaced from the analysis of our duoethnography data is the enhanced understanding of the “nameless-faceless” dimension of academic socialization. Endeavoring to understand why faculty leave and how those who are left behind make sense of that departure led the authors to examine the unknown entities the authors are responsible to and for so they may better understand their commitment to academia.

The authors’ findings reveal that the nameless–faceless element is just a generalized behavior adopted in the interest of restricted and individual advantage. Diversity and equity practices are touted as a priority, but frequently, institutions act in ways that establish their own self-interests. The authors argue that we are all the nameless–faceless when they participate in academic norms that work to uphold and perpetuate traditional practices in academia.

The authors’ findings point to intentional mentoring and integration of responsibility in faculty roles as potential recruitment and retention tools.

The authors extend the importance of collaboration and mentorship in retaining graduate students and EFC to the concept of intertwined professional commitment, or the theory that it is not simply the outcomes that are influenced by the support and cooperation between faculty with minoritized identities but that our professional commitment to academia is strengthened by that collaboration and witnessing each other's purpose and motivation to remain in academia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The authors are two social work academics working in a UK Higher Education Institute. Social work is underpinned by principles of anti-oppressive practice which leads to challenge discrimination and stigmatisation. The authors explored experiences of deficit imposed by others' perceptions of the physical and ethnic appearance and mental health status. The authors consider how these features influence how the authors locate themselves within the wider contexts of academic spaces in higher education institutions (HEI).

Using duoethnography, a collaborative research methodology, the authors recorded reflections on their experiences for five months and met weekly to discuss their material. This process enabled them to engage in dialogic narrative through collaborative writing using both structured and unstructured reflections. The authors analysed the reflections using thematic data analysis.

Four themes were generated that led to understanding how the authors could challenge oppression. The oppression became visible as the authors reflected on the common experiences of deficit. The understanding of other's oppression as well as the authors’ own became clearer as the unconscious experiences became conscious. The authors began to locate the experiences of being both privileged and oppressed in the wider social context of the HE. Finally, the authors recognised how the “deficit” identities could transform into strengths.

This personal journey of two academics reflecting on how they are paradoxically both privileged and yet oppressed challenges other professionals to honestly explore how they themselves can occupy both roles and become allies in confronting discrimination in all its forms.

This duoethnography explores feelings of belonging that emerged as being relevant to the participants of a doctoral organisational change study. It challenges the prolific change management models that inadvertently encourage anti-belonging.

A change management practitioner and her doctoral supervisor share their dialogic reflections and reflexivity on the case study to open new conversations and raise questions about how communicating belonging enhances practice. They draw on Ubuntu philosophy (Tutu, 1999) to enrich Pinar's currere (1975) for understandings of belonging, interconnectedness, humanity and transformation.

The authors show how dialogic practice in giving employees a voice, communicating honestly, using inclusive language and affirmation contribute to a stronger sense of belonging. Suppressing the need for belonging can deepen a communication shadow and create employee resistance and alienation. Sharing in each other's personal transformation, the authors assist others in better understanding the feelings of belonging in organisational change.

Practitioners will need to challenge change initiatives that ignore belonging. This requires thinking of people as relationships, rather than as numbers or costs, communicating dialogically, taking care with language in communicating changes and facilitating employees to be active participants where they feel supported.

For both practice and academy, this duoethnography highlights a need for greater humanity in change management practices. This requires increasing the awareness and understanding of an interconnectedness that lies at the essence of belonging or Ubuntu (Tutu, 1999).

This study aims to review how the mental ill-health of academic staff is regarded in higher education institutions (HEIs) and explore the decision to disclose (or not) a mental health condition whilst working in this sector.

The choice to disclose is explored by using duoethnography undertaken by two female academics working in this context who both experience mental ill-health. Both authors recorded their experiences, which were then shared with each other and analysed using thematic analysis.

The themes that emerged from the authors’ reflections comprise: a discussion of the connection between work-life identities and the impact of mental ill-health in the workplace; a consideration of the elements that influence our decision to disclose (or not) mental health diagnoses within HEI; and an examination of the additional burden of identity work for those who experience mental ill-health.

The study contributes to this evidence base by exploring the choice to disclose a mental health diagnosis in HEIs. It investigates this highly personal decision and suggests that this choice depends on the context in which we are located and how we experience our different identities in the workplace. Furthermore, it highlights the importance for HEIs to develop positive employment practices to support academic staff with mental ill-health to disclose a mental health condition and to achieve a good workplace environment whilst emphasising the need for more empirical work to explore the decision to disclose (or not) in this sector.

The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies.

The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture.

The authors then discuss major tenets of and make the case for the use of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies as caring practices and research method(ologies) that may in fact push back against such hegemonic neoliberal practices in the academy. Finally, the authors link these caring types of ethnographies to the papers within this special issue.

This is an original look at the concepts of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies with relation to caring practices.

In this paper we contribute knowledge to the postgraduate supervision discourses by reflecting on our socio-spatial experiences of being supervised by colleagues, a process that we refer to as colleague postgraduate supervision (CPS).

We followed a duoethnographic research design by dialogically presenting and exploring our lived experiences of CPS and critiquing and questioning the meanings we give to those experiences. The experiences shared arose from two different contexts: a contact university and an open distance learning university.

The reflection suggests that social values of trust, compassion and care in CPS can outrun the spatial constraints for the benefit of the supervisees in the relationship. However, the colleagues in the CPS can also experience some subtle power dynamics and tensions that produce a constraining space, if the CPS process is not well communicated.

While CPS is a common practice in some universities, there is limited research that pays attention to its socio-spatiality, that is, the interaction between the social and the spatial aspects of this practice.