The PhD and me: A liminal space

In this chapter, I share the experience of how undertaking feminist auto/biographical research, for a doctoral thesis, has had an impact, not only on my professional identity as an emerging researcher, but most importantly on my personal identity as an academic from working-class origins. It is wrongly assumed that doctoral writing is by and large a lonely enterprise; in reality it is a complex undertaking for both the student and the supervisor(s). Using Axel Honneth’s work on recognition as a framework to analyze my experiences within the academy I show how studying for a PhD, using auto-diegetic narrative, enabled me to enter a third space (Bhabha, 1994, p.28) to bring about transformation, not only at an intellectual and cognitive level, but at a spiritual and emotional level as well.