Doing Research ‘With’: Reading and writing our difference

As two women engaged in different research domains within the broader milieu of adult education, we perform critical action research on our own research practices of reading and writing research. This article is our dialogical narrative of reading and responding to each other's research and co-writing this process with a view to improving our practice of understanding the other and augmenting the attendant theory. It is our position that dialogical inquiry constitutes reflective practice and offers us multiple speaking positions to enact moral agency and social change through the narrative mode. We present a dialogical mode of engagement for action research that is based on an ethical mutual relationship. We speak in dual voices to embody our particular practices of critically reading each other's research. We make explicit this morally and epistemically valuable process of 'reading each other', surfacing tacit assumptions, personal preferences and orientations, similarities and differences. We generate a methodological and epistemological approach to improving the practices of reading and responding in writing to the other's research and in co-writing research. It is our position that this approach of relational knowing contextualizes transformative action research and authorship at the intersection of 'I' and 'you', self and other, theory and practice, public and private, reader and writer and text.