Why your next research project needs a dual narrative

Academic writing in higher education has long asked researchers to be detached, invisible and objective. Students are taught to describe people as “subjects” and their lived experiences as “raw data.”

This creates a problem when research involves personal, cultural or community stories. In these cases, a standard academic voice can feel like a breach of the trust that participants have placed in the researcher.

Researchers working on culture, diaspora or migration can learn from the work of Opaskwayak Cree scholar Dr Shawn Wilson. In his book Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, Wilson departs from the conventional academic format by writing in two voices, an approach this post calls the dual narrative technique.

What makes research a ceremony

The dual narrative makes sense only once Wilson’s central argument is clear. For Wilson, research is not a technical task completed to earn a degree. It is a process of building, respecting and maintaining relationships.

Conventional Western research trains the researcher to act as a detached expert who observes people, collects their data and leaves. Wilson rejects this model. He argues that knowledge is not an object that anyone owns. It exists in relationships between people, ancestors and the land.

Research becomes ceremony for three reasons:

• The process is part of the knowledge: shared meals, conversations and the time spent together are part of how knowledge is produced, not background to it.
• The researcher has relational accountability: the researcher is accountable to the people, communities and relationships involved in the research. Stories are held in trust, not owned.
• The researcher is present: the researcher cannot write as an invisible observer. Their background and their connection to the community are made visible in the writing.

Relational accountability and Ubuntu

Wilson writes from a Cree position, but his argument will be familiar to readers who work with Ubuntu. Ubuntu is often expressed through the saying “a person is a person through other persons.” It holds that identity, obligation and knowledge come through relationships with family, community, ancestors and the land. Wilson’s idea of relational accountability rests on the same foundation: the researcher does not stand outside the web of relationships being studied but is part of it and answerable to it.

Botswana scholar Bagele Chilisa has developed this connection from an African position. Her work describes a relational research paradigm, drawing on Ubuntu, in which the researcher is accountable to all relations, including participants, communities, ancestors and the environment. For African researchers, the dual narrative offers a way to write within Ubuntu ethics while still meeting the requirements of universities that expect conventional academic prose.

What is the dual narrative technique

Wilson divides his writing into two parallel voices. Parts of Research Is Ceremony are addressed directly to his sons in a personal voice and set in a different typeface from the academic sections, so the reader can always see which voice is speaking.

1. The academic voice: formal, theoretical prose written for the academy, drawing on frameworks, definitions and published literature.
2. The relational voice: a first person narrative describing the experience of doing the work, including community protocols and the relationships formed during the research.

Placing the two voices side by side shows that theory and personal experience are both legitimate sources of knowledge.

How the two tracks relate

• The relational track: first person, written from within the relationship. For example, a conversation over a shared meal with participants about identity.
• The academic track: theoretical and referenced. For example, an analysis of postcolonial code switching.
• The point of convergence: where the personal account extends and tests the academic theory, and the theory explains the patterns in the personal account.

Applying the dual narrative across the research process

The dual narrative is not something added at the writing stage. It shapes the whole project from the beginning. The table below shows how it applies at each stage of a hypothetical project with young Yoruba migrant women from Nigeria living in Canada. The project, the participants and the exchange reported in the next section are constructed for teaching purposes and do not come from a real study.

Research stage	The relational track	The academic track
Project title	Speaking Yoruba in strange lands: How Adeola and Temi hold onto home in Canada	A decolonial analysis of linguistic displacement among Yoruba youth in the Nigerian diaspora
Introduction	The story of how the researcher met Adeola and Temi, and a statement of the researcher’s commitment to their community	The research gap, the statement of the problem and the justification for the study
Literature review	Oral histories, knowledge from community elders and Yoruba proverbs passed down through the diaspora	A synthesis of peer reviewed literature on postcolonial theory, migration and assimilation
Methodology	The Baliano process (an African consensus building circle), building trust and eating together	The qualitative design, modified Delphi procedures, ethics approval and participant selection criteria
Data and coding	Recording the moment a female elder spoke about the spiritual meaning carried by the Yoruba word for epilepsy	Developing codes such as [Lingual hierarchy] to analyse the structural dominance of English
Discussion	Reflection on how the research has changed the researcher and how it can serve the community	Analysis of the findings using theory such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind

Example: coding and reporting findings

The example below shows how the two tracks work in a findings chapter. Both tracks report the same insight from a Baliano panel, but each approaches it differently.

Track 1: The relational narrative

During our second Baliano panel, our community’s circle for collective discussion, we began talking about how we name illness. One of the female elders leaned forward and told us something that made the group pause. She looked at me and said, “When we speak English, we say ‘epilepsy’ or ‘seizure’, and everyone treats it as a medical condition that a doctor can manage. But when we say wárápá in Yoruba, people step back. They talk about spiritual attack or a curse on the family, and some are afraid they will catch it if they touch the child. The English word sounds clean to us, even though it names the same illness. Our minds have been so colonised that we trust the English word and fear our own.” Her words made me realise how far the colonial language has separated us from our own understanding of illness. We have come to believe that what is English is good and what is Yoruba is dangerous.

Track 2: The academic narrative

Linguistic imperialism distorts Indigenous conceptualisations of health and illness (Phillipson, 1992). The English word “epilepsy” comes from the Greek epilambanein, meaning “to be seized” or “taken hold of.” In ancient Greece the condition was known as the “sacred disease” and was widely attributed to the gods. The English term therefore carries its own history of spiritual explanation. Within the postcolonial diaspora, however, English carries a prestige that presents the term as clinical and neutral, while the Yoruba term wárápá remains associated with spiritual causes, family misfortune and fear of contagion.

Conventional Western thematic coding might record this exchange as “sociolinguistic stigma.” An Indigenous methodological lens requires the exchange to be dual coded so that its relational and historical meaning is captured:

• Code A: [Lingual hierarchy / sanitised colonialism]: the sociopolitical elevation of English as objective or clinical, which conceals the spiritual history of the English term itself.
• Code B: [Spiritual violations of translation]: the shift from a clinical term to a spiritual explanation, such as spiritual attack or a family curse, when the condition is named in Yoruba.

The elder’s observation points to what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) calls the colonisation of the mind. The English term is accepted not because it is more accurate, but because colonialism has taught the diaspora to associate the coloniser’s language with safety, progress and medical neutrality, and to treat Indigenous languages as backward or harmful.

Why the convergence matters

Writing a project in this way means the findings are not reduced to linguistic facts. Track 1 gives readers the elder’s words and the context in which they were spoken. Track 2 provides the decolonial analysis that explains to an examination committee why those words carry the meaning they do.

Challenges of the dual narrative

The dual narrative is not without difficulty, and researchers should plan for the following:

• Examiner acceptance: some supervisors and examiners are unfamiliar with the format and may read it as a departure from academic standards rather than a deliberate methodological choice.
• Word limits: two tracks take more space than one, which can be a problem in theses and journal articles with strict limits.
• Perceptions of rigour: the relational track may be treated as decoration or as less rigorous than the academic track unless its role in producing knowledge is explained.
• Confidentiality: personal narrative can make participants identifiable, particularly in small diaspora communities where people know one another.
• Community consent: relational accountability means participants and the community should have a say in how their stories appear in the relational track, which adds time to the writing process.

Practical guidance for using the dual narrative

The following steps can help researchers use the dual narrative well:

• Discuss the format early: raise the approach with supervisors at the proposal stage rather than presenting it in a finished draft.
• Include it in the ethics application: explain how stories will be recorded, how participants will review the relational track and how identities will be protected.
• Keep a reflective journal: record conversations, meals, protocols and personal reflections throughout the project. This becomes the main source for the relational track.
• Signal the two voices clearly: use a different typeface, indentation or labelled headings so readers always know which track they are reading.
• Explain the format at the start: include a short note in the introduction describing the two tracks and why they are used.
• Return drafts to the community: share the relational track with participants before submission so they can correct, remove or add to what has been written.

For researchers who feel they must set aside their own identity and relationships in order to write academically, Wilson’s dual narrative offers an alternative. It treats research as a process of storytelling, relationship and responsibility, and it allows both the researcher and the community to be visible in the final text.

More and related readings

• Archibald, J. (Q’um Q’um Xiiem). (2008). Indigenous storywork: Educating the heart, mind, body, and spirit. UBC Press.
• Chilisa, B. (2012). Indigenous research methodologies. SAGE Publications.
• Chilisa, B. (2006). Situating language in decolonial meditations. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(4), 413 to 432.
• Chilisa, B., & Preece, J. (2005). Research methods for adult educators in Africa. Pearson Education Africa.
• Chilisa, B. (2002). The impact of HIV/AIDS on the University of Botswana: Developing a comprehensive strategic response. University of Botswana.
• Kovach, M. (2009). Indigenous methodologies: Characteristics, conversations, and contexts. University of Toronto Press.
• Lambert, L. (2014). Research for Indigenous survival: Indigenous research methodologies in the behavioral sciences. Salish Kootenai College Press.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. James Currey.
• Phillipson, R. (1992). Linguistic imperialism. Oxford University Press.
• Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.