Snapshots of selfhood: curating academic identity through visual autoethnography

Academic identity is fluid, slippery, and uncertain, academic developer identity even more so. This paper explores the author's use of photography as a medium through which to present, represent, and interpret her own practice and professional identity as a third space professional within higher education. Drawing on existing literature on academic identity, the author explores the ways in which she has attempted to negotiate her identity as an academic developer through photographs that represent milestones in the construction of this identity. The discussion of these pictures draws on autoethnographic approaches to identity formation combined with visual narratology and takes the form of a visual autoethnography.