Becoming a researcher: Re-inventing writing spaces

This paper draws on a three-year study of postgraduate women writers pursuing research degrees at a UK university to explore how they develop identities as academic researchers and writers. Using extracts from written texts, talk-and-text interview transcripts, and writing journals from four postgraduate students in a range of disciplines, I explore the material conditions under which postgraduate women write and the significance of such spaces for the re-invention of themselves as academic writers and researchers. Foregrounding the notion of place and space (Agnew, 2011), I present extracts from four ‘writing tales’ (after Lather, 1991) to explore academic writing at postgraduate level. The tales include ‘visible’ and ‘occluded’ (Swales, 1996) written genres in academia and document the ways in which these facilitate the enactment of postgraduate academic identity. The use of ‘tales’ as an analytical unit and as a form of representation provides a mechanism through which multiple data sources are drawn together to illuminate a highly contextualised, and potentially gendered, dimension of postgraduate academic writing.