"By convention, the property on the parent side of a primary-foreign key relationship is marked for serialization. The other side in a bidirectional association is not serialized."
Is it possible to somehow reverse this so that the child side serializes the parent instead?
it does not appear to be possible. instead of using the DataContractSerializer i opted to use an XmlSerializer and just control the 'visibility' of the entities with relation to each other making them either public or internal as seen fit. this in conjunction with XmlInclude instead of KnownType attributes allowed me to accomplish what i intended in the first place.