Working within, without and between: identities, power/s and mis/recognitions of third space professionals in higher education

Contemporary universities in Australia and globally are experiencing accelerated change. Long impacted by the effects of neoliberal logics, and more recently by the fourth industrial revolution and the COVID-19 pandemic, they are under urgent pressure to be fluid and flexible competitors in the global knowledge production market. To achieve their goals in this context, the workforces universities require are also rapidly shifting. My project seeks to understand the professional identity formations of higher education workers who have emerged from this context and who have been called ‘third space professionals’. These university workers are marked by their hybridity as they traverse the traditional boundaries of the academic and professional classifications ubiquitous in the sector. My study is underpinned by feminist post-structuralist theory to conceptualise ‘identities’ as unfinished, relational and in flux, and intertwined with a circulatory dynamics of power. Partially autoethnographic, my study is informed by multiple research interactions with nine participants (including myself) from eight Australian universities over a period of two years. These interactions reveal the living experiences of third space professionals as they negotiate their professional identities in relation to the structures, micropolitics and disruptions of their workplaces and professional relations. Through my analysis, I conceptualise third space professionals as ambiguous subjects seeking survival and success through a crisis of ‘not being’, induced by the neoliberalised context of contemporary higher education and hegemonic discourses of gender, emotion and mis/recognition. I uncover the ways ambiguous subjects construct definitions for themselves by re/constituting discourse, and trace the effects of those re/constitutions as they play out in both pleasures and pains. I am interested in the productive potential of power in its relations with difference and offer theoretical possibilities for embracing and mobilising difference for political, structural and social change in universities. These possibilities provide a pathway for third space professionals to accept their ambiguous subjectivities and locate creative structural spaces for critique.