We’ve been thinking about the connections between professional identity and writing in the context of third space for a few years now, and it seems ever more pertinent in these times of uncertainty, transition and change. We see colleagues change roles or leave academia, not always of their own volition, and we experience it ourselves. With change inevitably comes loss, but some of the things we have been thinking and writing about might be of use in this turbulent context. Writing for publication acts as an anchor for identity, a trail of breadcrumbs of our thoughts and of who we were when we committed them to posterity, and writing in third space in particular can be an act of resistance: to the crush of loss, to the absence of identity, to the fear of transition. By choosing what we write, how we write it, and where we publish, we create ourselves again and again in our writing. No matter our role or where change might take us, our writing remains a way for us to hold onto who, at heart, we are. 

The resources we mentioned

The Third Space Symposium

Our Slowposium padlet

And the article we talked about

Buckley, C., Syska, A. and Heggie, L. (2024) ‘Grounded in liquidity: writing and identity in third space’. London Review of Education, 22 (1), 26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.22.1.26.