2: Liminal Communities in Academia: From Research Education to Practice

Academia is a metacommunity encompassing a wide diversity of sub-communities. Emerging researchers often feel a sense of liminal belonging to such communities: not quite yet inside and at the same time not wholly outside of academia. This chapter uses autoethnographic vignettes (personal accounts) in which members of a fledging research group reflect on the dynamics of establishing a community of practice (CoP), as they transition out of a master's degree programme at a university in Sweden. The group began working together during coursework within the master's programme and continues to ‘hang together’ as a CoP, undertaking collective research projects. An analysis of the vignettes reflects the group members' individual and collective understandings of the notions of ‘community’ and ‘participation’ in research practice. The vignettes demonstrate: (a) that the group members, who felt they each had the agency to legitimately participate, have come to actively learn that educational research is an endeavour of mutual engagement (b) that sustaining a community involves navigating multiple identities, often with associated vulnerabilities and (c) that peripheral participation in research communities can be understood in terms of both responsibility (at the group level) and structure (in relation to academia as a metacommunity). Their experience flips the normative positionalities of ‘novices at the periphery’ and ‘experts at the nucleus’. Overarchingly, the authors encourage practices of ‘inviting in’ and supporting new researchers coming to academia.