1st Edition

Identity Construction as a Spatiotemporal Phenomenon within Doctoral Students' Intellectual and Academic Identities Contradictions, Contestations and Convergences

By Rudo F. Hwami Copyright 2024

    Investigating the interplay between space, time and identity construction, this book brings to focus how spatiality and temporality have been largely overlooked in the study and theorisation of identity construction.

    Offering Gloria Anzaldúa concept of ‘conocimento’ as a theoretical tool for analysing identity construction, the book investigates how doctoral students hold varying assumptions about their intellectual identity, where the doctoral process enables them to deconstruct and reconstruct these identities. Chapters examine the implications for scholars who find themselves in the in-between space of transitional identities, advocating the need for innovative identity theorisation to strike a balance in the shifting dynamics between different presentations of identity and belief systems. Bringing together Lefebvre’s theorisation of the relationship between space and the body in rhythmanalysis and Anzaldua’s theorisation of the relationship between the body and identity construction, the book offers a transdisciplinary reading of space, body, and identity.

    Providing a space to continue and progress the foregrounding of narratives from marginalised voices and groups in higher education, the book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and academics in the fields of sociology of education, multicultural education, higher education, and philosophy of education.

    Chapter 1: Introduction: Fringe Identities: Hiding the Ugly, Unmasking the Hidden

    Chapter 2:  Space, Time and Conocimiento

    Chapter 3: Crisis as a Tool of Intellectual Awareness

    Chapter 4: Sandwiched Between Identities

    Chapter 5: Ontological Terror: The Struggle for Intellectual Authenticity

    Chapter 6: Re-envisioning Intellectual Identity

    Chapter 7: Constructing Academic Non-Belonging as an Expression of Intellectual Identity

    Chapter 8: Multiplicity and Interconnectedness of Identity

    Chapter 9: Identity borders as thresholds

    Chapter 10: Conclusion: An Ode to the Fringe

    Biography

    Rudo F. Hwami is Postdoctoral Fellow in Higher Education Studies, Center for Postgraduate Studies, Rhodes University, South Africa.