Identity, practice and becoming

This month, we’d like to invite you to reflect on something that might feel like a given. It’s something that’s integral to our work, but we might rarely spend time thinking about it, when we’re deep inside the our research. We’d like to ask you to consider: your researcher identity.

When you hear this term, key words and your field of study might come to mind first. Our research identity often situates us within our discipline, it can be part of how we signal to the world what we’re working on and what our interests are. These are really useful - we spend so much time with our research and there is often a great amount of care and connection wrapped up with this. There can also be a tendency to associate research identity with a title or a certain stage of the academic journey: whether this is ‘PhD student’, ‘doctoral candidate’, or ‘Doctor’. Maybe some of it comes from your institution or affiliation. These are the things we write down onto a conference name badge or in a scholarly bio. When we were PhD students, for example, there was a lot of pressure, too, on establishing a research profile through publications, conference papers and other tangible outputs. These are all really significant parts of a researcher’s identity. They’re often also incredibly complicated, fraught and come along with huge amounts of pressure.

We’re not here to tell you these things don’t matter. However, we also feel that there’s much more to this idea.

We want to invite you to think about the practice of being a researcher, and what this means for our work within academia. This develops slowly through the way you engage with questions, ideas, communities and conversations. It’s about the way we approach our work and how we move through ideas. It’s about the scholars we cite. The way we show up in scholarly spaces, how we collaborate, share knowledge, the ways that we support our students, and advocate for others. The research is as much about what we’re working on as it is about how we’re working; for us, it’s not just about producing a thesis, it’s about becoming the researcher you want to be along the way.

What kinds of values guide you as a researcher?

What sorts of practices will support those values?

When we offered these questions to the incredible PhD students that make up our community in PhDone, there were some really moving answers. We spoke about sharing knowledge, supporting ourselves and others, bringing joy into our work, acting as a bridge and opening doors for others. There was also talk about being persistent and stubborn. How to stand by or stand up for our values. These words stood out to us especially, in the ways they speak directly to Sara Ahmed’s work on being wilful subjects and feminist killjoys.1 Stubbornly sticking to our values and persisting with our practices, even when things feel difficult: these are the things that shape us.

You also don’t have to have everything figured out in order to begin this all. It can be something that you build gradually, through intentional choices each and every time you come to your work. Our research journey is made up of so many small moments and steps - and your researcher identity can be a part of each of these: for example, how do you treat yourself when things don’t go to plan? How do you engage with others? How do you define ‘progress’ or ‘success’ for yourself within (and against) a system that often pushes incredibly narrow and stressful goalposts?

A researcher’s identity doesn’t just form over night. It isn’t fixed to the terms we write in a bio, or big milestones. You get to decide what kind of researcher you want to be, again and again, in these small instances, and allow that to evolve over time.

These are the sorts of conversations we have within PhDone on a daily basis. If you’d like to learn more about PhDone or speak more about any of these ideas here, please feel free to leave a comment below, or email us at phdone@acceptedsociety.com - we’d love to hear from you.

With care,

Khalia Ii & Polly Hember

PhDone is a dissertation completion programme and a membership within Accepted Society. If you’d like to find out more about it, click here!