Space Invaders

Space invaders: the third space professional as academic gatecrasher

The writing about integrated practitioners abounds with ideas about space - of margins, liminality and boundary-spanning - as colleagues seek to explain the power and the reality of practice in this ‘third space’. The thinking about space informs my own reflections about the work that I do to support the third space practitioners who are variously referred to as dual professionals, pracademics, and/or practice-informed academics. Pracademics (a conflation of the words ‘practitioner’ and ‘academic’) are academic staff who have either entered HE following a career in a different profession or industry, or who maintain practice in both professions. Such staff often don’t have doctoral qualifications and may not have studied in HE for many years, but they have equivalent expertise and bring years of practical experience to universities.

Much of the research about the pracademic experience has focused on how such staff create and sustain their professional identities when moving from one practice or professional area into HE, and the idea of ‘imposter syndrome’ looms large in such work. Indeed, in meetings of the Supporting Professionals in(to) HE network that I chair, imposter syndrome is a ubiquitous topic of discussion. While such discussions often focus on strategies for overcoming imposter syndrome, or ways for managing its impact on the everyday working lives of pracademics, I have become interested in exploring the idea of imposterism more fully, particularly as it offers the potential for challenging or reinterpreting academic life and work.

However, the idea of the pracademic as the kind of imposter who, like The Talented Mr. Ripley, seeks to fool others, is flawed. As Vogel et al. point out in their book about imposters, imposter syndrome “renders the imposter status as unreal. It is the imposters themselves who are seen to be deceived” (2021: 6). Many pracademics report that their imposterism is reflected back at them by systems and people that don’t appear to recognise or reward their particular kind of expertise, even though such expertise formed the basis for their recruitment in the first place. It could be argued then, that they aren’t convincing imposters at all.

A more accurate analogy for the pracademic might be the idea of gatecrashing or  “entering a space even though you are not supposed to be there’” (Mora-Gámez 2021: 311). In this conceptualisation, the pracademic is recognised as an invader of space rather than as someone who pretends to belong. They have not entered via the traditional routes where gates are kept by established academic staff occupying roles like doctoral supervisor, principal investigator or peer reviewer. And yet, the issue is more complex than pracademics merely infiltrating space that they shouldn’t have access to because contemporary HE is a space in which such staff are paradoxically un/welcome.

Fredy Mora- Gámez notes that migrants often have to navigate the tension of being un/welcome. He explains that “states openly welcome people [as part of a] narrative [that] constitutes an implicit invitation to participate in the humanitarian project of modern states” but still require them to “engage with points of bureaucratic control as ‘periodic reminders’ (Vlachou, 2017: 141) that they are not entirely welcome” (2021: 310). I would argue that this idea of gatecrashing a space where they are un/welcome could shed light on the experiences of pracademics. Pracademics are actively recruited by institutions which see their value in advancing employability agendas, providing ‘educational gain’ and contributing to the effective delivery of apprenticeship and other professional or practice-based programmes. However, once recruited, they often find themselves on alien territory where established processes like induction and promotion can serve as reminders that their hybridity is not the norm.

If the conceptualisation of pracademics as gate crashers resonates, the question becomes how can they use their status to create comfortable homes in HE? Mora-Gámez sees the potential in gatecrashing in that, unlike imposterism, it “is not about playing, cheating or even changing the game; it is about finding ways of living within and outside it. These ways of living enact orders that simultaneously crash the ‘gates’ of in/exclusion by blurring their boundaries, softening their demarcation and forming alternative forms of existence”. (Mora-Gámez 2021: 312)

References:

Vogel, E., Moats, D., Woolgar, S., & Helgesson, C. (2021). "Thinking with Imposters: The Imposter as Analytic" in Woolgar, S., Vogel, E., Moats, D., & Helgesson, C. (Eds.). The Imposter as Social Theory. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Retrieved Jul 9, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529213102

Mora-Gámez, F. (2021). Thinking beyond the Imposter: Gatecrashing Un/Welcoming Borders in Woolgar, S., Vogel, E., Moats, D., & Helgesson, C. (Eds.). The Imposter as Social Theory. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press. Retrieved Jul 9, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529213102