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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emergence of a “researcher” dimension in the academic professional identities of lecturers operating in the teaching‐focused Institute of Technology (IoT) sector of Irish higher education.

Using Margaret S. Archer's social realist conceptualisation of the reflexive formation of personal and social identities as a theoretical lens, life history data from ten research‐active lecturers working in one of Ireland's 13 IoTs were analysed. The research aimed to understand both the factors that influence the development of “researcher” identities in this context and the nature of the identities that develop.

The analysis suggests that sectoral location acts as an obstacle to researcher development but that the restrictions at sectoral level can be counteracted by positive intervention at institutional level. Challenges created by lecturers' involuntary placement in schools and departments that may be home to a range of disparate disciplines can be resolved. This generally occurs through voluntary alignment with alternative collectivities that provide individuals with coherent conceptual homes. Lecturers can and do develop researcher identities in this context but what it means to be a researcher can vary from one individual to the next.

The study provides a valuable insight into the process by which individuals operating in teaching‐focused higher education institutions develop the researcher dimension of their academic professional identities. It should be of benefit to individuals striving to become researchers in similar contexts. Its conclusions may also be of value to institutions striving to develop research cultures and to encourage staff to become research‐active.

The purpose of this paper is to provide readers with a deeper theoretical understanding of liminality, its utility in understanding the experiences of graduate student researchers and how being explicit about the liminal nature of the graduate student experience can be especially impactful for students from marginalized communities.

This conceptual paper examines liminality as an essential component of researcher identity development and how an awareness of this liminality relates to effective and inclusive librarian support of graduate student researchers. The authors explore the affective and academic implications of operating in this liminal state and how direct acknowledgment of this inbetweenness, especially within the spaces of classroom instruction and research consultations, can be leveraged as an inclusive practice. The authors ground this exploration in critical pedagogy.

Graduate student researchers often operate in an unacknowledged liminal state, which causes students to question the importance of their previous knowledge and life experiences and feel discouraged and uncertain about their potential place in academia. This is particularly damaging to students from communities that have been traditionally marginalized and excluded from higher education.

The authors are liaison librarians to education and health sciences at a large, minority-serving, urban research institution in the western USA and draw on their experience supporting students in disciplines that include many students returning to graduate studies after substantial professional experience. This work makes a contribution to library and information studies by focusing on the concept of liminality. The authors offer a conceptual perspective on liminality relative to librarians and their support role in the graduate student experience.

The study is an elaboration on how a graduate student discursively navigates a research identity through lived experiences as an Indigenous Sámi and writings on Indigenous, as well as other suitable research paradigms informing research on digital technologies in education. The guiding question is how a strategy of inquiry to be used in a PhD study on remote 1–9 Sámi language education can be informed by an Indigenous research paradigm. What philosophical guidelines are needed in navigating a sensitive field of investigation shaped by historical atrocities, discrimination and racist assumptions towards the Sámi people and other Indigenous, marginalised groups?

A dialogical approach has been used between readings of mainly Indigenous scholars' writings on the topic and anecdotes illustrating personal experiences from a lived life as Sámi.

Through this process, a researcher identity has developed, informed by the views from an Indigenous research paradigm that humans are ontologically equal to other entities, and epistemologically knowledge constitutes of relationships between different entities. This makes relationality a central feature of an Indigenous epistemology –not only between people but also including, for example, ideas, history, ancestors, future, artefacts and spirituality – which links epistemology to ontology. The axiological issue of accountability works holistically as “glue”.

Elucidating underlying arguments and motives behind both an Indigenous research paradigm and the development of researcher identity when designing and planning research is rarely done, which provides the originality of the present contribution.

This study aims to examine entry-level PhD students’ experiences with participating in Critical Friends, a peer review protocol, used to support learning the threshold concept of literature review. It also sought to determine if, and how, students used the peer review protocol electively during their first year of doctoral study.

The authors used a sequential, QUAL-qual mixed-method design to guide the study. Reflective learning journals, surveys and interviews were collected from three cohorts of PhD students (N = 18).

Thematic analysis revealed that giving and receiving writing critique was uncomfortable for these novice peer reviewers and many described emotional disciplining associated with vulnerability. Critical Friends offered a safe space to begin mastery of the literature review and begin transforming new researcher and writer identities. While Critical Friends was a positive experience for students, they struggled implementing the protocol on their own following the course.

These findings support the need for faculty to embed peer review opportunities in courses during the first year to facilitate role modeling and mentoring. The findings also demonstrate the need to engage students with peer review early in the program to increase comfort, cultivate student resiliency for accepting critical feedback and build capacity for students to learn with and from others.

This paper advocates for the use of peer review practices early in the doctoral study to promote the development of researcher identity and positioning within the research community.

The aims of this paper are to mobilize project management concepts in order to draw parallels with the doctoral project and to share the author’s experience and lessons learned.

This paper is based on a qualitative inquiry using an autoethnographic approach.

This paper contributes a self-reflexive examination of the doctoral project experience that incites current and future doctoral students and early-career researchers to take advantage of opportunities that make the experience satisfying, lay the foundations of an academic career and help ensure the thesis is completed in a timely and orderly manner.

Examining the doctoral project through the lens of one of the highest standards in project management, developed by the Project Management Institute (PMI), this paper enables PhD students in project management and other fields of study to understand the basics of a project and take action to structure their doctoral journey in a way that enhances both their experience and chances of success.

This study aims to examine how post-PhD researchers construct their identities through significant work experiences as they endeavour to develop their research independence and a distinct scholarly profile. The authors were especially interested in how they made meaning of their important work experiences, the ones that were emotionally salient.

Using a narrative approach, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from a large cross-national mixed-methods research project about early-career researchers’ identity development. The sample included 71 post-PhD researchers from the UK who completed an online survey. Ten of whom were also interviewed through a semi-structured protocol.

Post-PhD researchers considered work experiences to be significant when those experiences helped them to gauge whether their self-representation as researchers was coherent and a further research career was practicable. The same type of significant event (e.g. publishing in a prestigious journal) could hold different meanings depending on who experienced it. Positive experiences helped to maintain their motivation and made them feel that they were consolidating their identities. Negative experiences tended to challenge their sense of identity and their sense of belonging to academia. Whereas positive feelings towards a significant experience appeared to persist over time, negative feelings seemed to fade or evolve through self-reflection, but ultimately had greater saliency.

Few previous studies have been conducted on how emotionally powerful work experiences influence post-PhD researchers’ identity development. Besides highlighting how emotions and feelings, often-neglected aspects of identity development, influence the process, this study offers a constructive – and, in some ways, alternative – view of the impact that negative experiences have on their identity development.

This paper aims to describe how a Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate-guided EdD program has fostered the development of leadership and research skills and strong identities as learners, leaders and researching professionals (RPs) among its graduates. In doing so, the researchers explored students’ identities as learners, leaders and RPs and examined the development of those identities over a three-year period.

A mixed method approach was used, including pre- and post-program surveys and interviews.

The results showed students enhanced or developed these identities over time. In particular, there was substantial growth and change in the “RP” identity as compared to development of the “learner” and “leader” identities.

The possible-selves theory and the provisional-selves framework (P/PS) were helpful in accounting for these changes as the program requirements fostered students’ efforts in elaborating and developing their identity roles. Further, examination of P/PS and their influence on identity development is warranted. For example, examining outcomes about more explicit use of P/PS and reflections on P/PS is warranted. See next section.

There are implications for teaching of EdD students such as faculty members making more explicit the concept of P/PS during instruction and in the work required of students. Additionally, students could be required to engage in reflection on P/PS to make this process more concrete for them.

Using P/PS provides a way to understand and foster processes underlying doctoral students’ identity development.

Identity exploration is a central mechanism for identity formation that has been found to be associated with intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition, and meaningful learning. Moreover, identity exploration in school has been associated with adaptive motivation for learning the academic material. Particularly in the fast-changing environment of contemporary society, confidence and skills in identity exploration and self-construction seems to be increasingly important. Therefore, promoting students’ identity exploration in school within the curriculum and in relation to the academic content should be adopted as an important educational goal. The purpose of this paper is to describe a conceptual framework for interventions to promote students’ identity exploration within the curriculum. The framework involves the application of four interrelated principles: (1) promoting self-relevance; (2) triggering exploration; (3) facilitating a sense of safety; and (4) scaffolding exploratory actions.

We begin the paper with a conceptual review of identity exploration. We follow by specifying the conceptual framework for interventions. We then present a methodological-intervention approach for applying this framework and describe three such interventions in middle-school contexts, in the domains of environmental education, literature, and mathematics.

In each intervention, applying the principles contributed to students’ adaptive motivation and engagement in the academic material and also contributed to students’ identity exploration, though not among all students. The findings highlight the contextual, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of identity exploration among early adolescents in educational settings, and the utility of the conceptual framework and approach for conceptualizing and intervening to promote identity exploration among students.

This paper contributes to the conceptual understanding of identity exploration in educational settings, highlights the benefits and the challenges in intervening to promote identity exploration among students, and discusses the future directions in theory, research, and practice concerned with the promotion of identity exploration in educational settings.