How Dialogical Are We Really? Insights Gleaned from Un-Dialogical Moments

This essay emphasizes the writing of dialogical research as a crucial step in the dialogical research process. Dialogical research accounts should not suppress the ongoing struggles that accompany a genuine desire to engage dialogically in research contexts. Thus, we advocate and model evocative retellings of these struggles. Questioning our own fieldwork based on the work of Martin Buber and Mikhail Bakhtin, we highlight principles of dialogue that also serve as guidelines for dialogical research reporting: unfinalizability, engaging paradoxes, and creative (critical) transformation.