When we write we not only produce text, we also produce ourselves as scholars. As we make textual decisions – what to write about, who to cite and who to leave out, what evidence to include, how we use language to craft our ‘voice’ – we are also writing ourselves as scholars. Writing is a form of scholarly action, a performance if you like, through which we take a particular position on something and argue for it, we become known for some things and not others, we find the place from which we speak in scholarly conversations. Authoring a text is also producing an author – one who speaks with authori-ity.
Doctoral researchers often feel the tangle of text work and identity work most acutely when they are working with literatures, as the task here is not simply to repeat or summarise what other people have said, but also to position yourself in relation to it, and to them. Barbara and I have written a lot about this in our books. We’ve also written the odd chapter or two, and I’ve recently put one – a chapter called Working with Literatures – onto my researchgate page. In this chapter we give two examples of actual doctoral writings to show what the struggle to do both text work and identity work can look like.
patter 
I saw the title of this post and was thinking how funny it was that I had read a book chapter on just this topic only yesterday, for one of my Masters units. Then, reading your post I had such a strong sense of deja vu that I went back and checked the names on the assigned chapter – “Writing the doctorate, writing the scholar” from Kamler and Thomson 2006!
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Yes we’ve used Calvin before, and while this kind of repetition was Ok at the time, it’s not something we’d do now! So not only the same message 😦
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[…] of this task. And I want the thesis to be a work that is totally mine. Maybe it’s because, as Pat Thomson wrote yesterday, and as I mused in this post about writing the discussion chapter, writing is more than writing a […]
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[…] we write we not only produce text, we also produce ourselves as scholars. […] Authoring a text is also producing an author – one who speaks with […]
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[…] it opens up conversation, in comments, on social media or in new blog posts. As Pat Thomson writes, writing can be identity work; it can be a way into being and into connection. And as author and self-publisher, a blogger is […]
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[…] argues that understanding text work /identity work (Barbara and my phrasing of this threshold concept) “foregrounds the need to approach writing not […]
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[…] developing identities and in the concerns that relate to that. If this interests you, you can read this post by Pat Thomson on writing as identity work. You might also find this review of an activity from Helen Sword’s […]
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