Buckley, C.;
Syska, A.;
Heggie, L.;
(2024)
Grounded in liquidity: writing and identity in third space.
London Review of Education
, 22
(1)
, Article 26. 10.14324/LRE.22.1.26.
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Abstract
In this article, we argue that writing for publication has the potential to support the creation, negotiation and stabilisation of the professional identities of third space practitioners in higher education. Caught in the impermanence and unpredictability of liquid life, third space opens up unique opportunities in writing that afford its practitioners a means of building and sustaining identity. It expands academic writing beyond its normative constraints, creating a tension between the apparent permanence and solidity of writing and the liquidity that allows for the negotiation of meaning and identity. As such, writing, particularly for dissemination, provides third space practitioners with a strategy for creating a grounding narrative that helps to stabilise their own identity while allowing the flexibility required by a ‘liquid’ and uncertain present. We explore this process of negotiation by examining the role of writing in identity formation from the perspective of a range of third space practitioners, in an international triple-site qualitative research study involving learning developers, learning designers, academic developers and writing specialists. Our findings reveal that writing, as an act of negotiation of identity in third space, has the potential to actuate the fluidity of the space, so that it can become a site of liberation and resistance that may transform the very act of scholarly writing. What our study shows is that writing offers third space practitioners an opportunity to establish a narrative thread that may stabilise their liquid roles in academia.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Grounded in liquidity: writing and identity in third space |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/LRE.22.1.26 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.22.1.26 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2024, Carina Buckley, Alicja Syska and Lindsay Heggie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | third space, writing, identity, academic, professional, resistance, liberatory, higher education, writing in higher education |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197806 |
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