Snapshots of Selfhood: Curating Academic Identity through Visual Autoethnography

Abstract

Academic identity is fluid, slippery and uncertain; academic developer identity even more so. This paper explores the author’s use of photography as a medium through which to present, represent, and interpret her own practice and professional identity as a third space professional within Higher Education (Whitchurch, 2008). Drawing on existing literature on academic identity, the author explores the way in which she has attempted to negotiate her identity as an academic developer through photographs that represent milestones in the construction of this identity. As a methodological framework the discussion of these pictures draws on autoethnographic approaches to identify formation, combined with visual narratology, in the form of visual autoethnography.