ABSTRACT
Exploring difference is a major tenet of duoethnography, and Nabavi and Lund’s duoethnography makes the exploration of difference problematic. In investigating power and privilege, they can potentially cast one duoethnographer as representative of the perpetrators and the other as representing the victims. As Lund reports, “My own childhood memories are infused with incidents that are now painfully embarrassing . . .” (p. 180). As someone who was born in Canada, he defines part of his early curriculum as racist. However, due to the nature of the duoethnographic method, he moves beyond such casting by juxtaposing his former self with his present self through the addition of the phrase, “and even shocking to my current self” (p. 180). Duoethnographers are not the topics but the sites of their studies, and ultimately readers witness Nabavi and Lund, not as victims or perpetrators but as different individuals trying to make meaning of their life histories and then reconceptualizing those meanings. Lund has the courage to make explicit some of his curriculum of racism, as did Norris in his articulation of his curriculum of homophobia (Norris and Sawyer, 2004). These and all duoethnographies portray researchers in flux, documenting the emerging and changing meanings, particular to the point of time of the writing.
