Third space. It’s a concept most of us will have heard of before, and many of us will identify with it. But what does it actually mean in practice? For Natalia Veles, third space is a space for collaboration and the building of collaborative capital. When the focus of a project is on the learning and the people involved, rather than outputs alone, everybody wins. It involves having a global mindset and the ability to make connections across boundaries and disciplines, drawing colleagues from other disciplines in and being curious about their positioning, and above all learning, and creating and sharing new knowledge with others. It requires translational skills - a compassionate understanding of challenges and how our own knowledge and experience can be enjoined in overcoming them - and a sense of agency and legitimacy, underpinned by the twin and mutually reinforcing aids of confidence and competence. Natalia calls this ‘identity plasticity’, which is a concept, if not a term, that will carry a certain familiarity for all those who work in third space. 

And what about writing in third space? We do so in the same way that we work: by focussing on others and what we can bring to the situation. Write always for your reader, and make that reader a 10 year old child, just to make sure that you can explain your ideas as clearly as possible!

The resources we mentioned

Bakhtin, M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics. Trans. C. Emerson. University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. Harper and Row.

Eco, U. (2015) How to write a thesis. The MIT Press.

Hyland, K. (1998) Hedging in scientific research articles. John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.54 

Soja, E.W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Wiley-Blackwell.

Syska, A. and Buckley, C. (eds.) (2023) How to Be a Learning Developer in Higher Education: Critical Perspectives, Community and Practice. Routledge.

Thomson, P. and Kamler, B. (2013) Writing for peer reviewed journals: strategies for getting published. Routledge.

Tolstoy, L. (2007) War and peace. Penguin Classics.

Whitchurch, C. (2024) From ‘service’ to ‘partnership’: harnessing social capital in support of activity in third space environments. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2024.2344132 

And the book we talked about

Veles, N. (2023) Optimising the third space in higher education: Case studies of intercultural and cross-boundary collaboration. Routledge.