Resisting Technical Rationality in Mental Health Nurse Higher Education: A Duoethnography

This duoethnographic study has three aims: the first is to coherently situate our emerging duoethnographic dialogue in relation to an overview of both its parent methodology and related approaches within the narrative inquiry paradigm. Our second aim is to then enable readers to make contextual sense of our dialogue. We do so by prefacing it with a brief, focused overview of our theoretical, empirical and fiction work, and related literature, selected for the purpose of clarification. Following this, our final aim is to demonstrate in our dialogue the differences between our respective attempts as academics to work against the neoliberal ideology of technical rationality. We believe that this negatively impacts on contemporary mental health nurse higher education and thus necessitates our respective remedial contributions to this discipline. We conclude by considering the extent to which we feel we have met our aims and describing emerging implications for mental health nursing and other scholars, internationally. Keywords: Duoethnography, Neoliberal Higher Education, Technical Rationality, Ideology, Null Curriculum, Mental Health Education