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(2019) Academic writing and identity constructions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Territories and categories of academic writer

possibilizing through the act/art of writing

Louise M. Thomas

pp. 13-29

Working with ideas drawn from Foucault, I position academic writing as a tool, a technology of self, with which to hold together the limitations of and the necessity for categorizations in identity constructions as academic. I also draw on thinking of Deleuze to position identity constructions not as fixed forms but as becoming forces, a continual performance. Within this framework I engage in the practice of academic writing to work with and against categories and categorizations of academic. My focus is on asking questions which raise possibilities of multiplicity of academic being. I ask why and how such categorical requirements and impositions may contribute to and constrain constructions of the multiplicity of identities as academic. In this chapter, I consider ways in which the process of academic writing, can be used as a tool to engage multiple, fluid and uncertain identifications as academic, both outside and inside a university context. I unpack my academic-selves that have been territorialised, de-territorialised and re-territorialised in the processes of identity constructions in which identity is always, already constant becomings and never a fixed point of being.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-01674-6_2

Full citation:

Thomas, L. M. (2019)., Territories and categories of academic writer: possibilizing through the act/art of writing, in A. B. Reinertsen (ed.), Academic writing and identity constructions, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 13-29.

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