My contribution is drawing from my personal experience of be-ing/be-coming a researcher in the field of Language Education in the context of British HE. I started a Doctorate in Education in 2017 following an internal drive to be “other”, to push myself outside my comfort zone and to explore new territories. This decision was also connected to a wish to step outside a marginal position. I have been a language educator for more than twenty years, working in various UK universities where language teachers occupy a position of marginality within academic discourse. I am also a psychoanalytical psychotherapist working in private practice. Within my Doctorate journey I wanted to cross boundaries between disciplines, to establish new encounters where my multiple identities could co-exists. In my research I investigate language teachers’ personal narratives in their journey of being/becoming language educators, including my own narrative, with a focus on the entanglement between personal and professional. I was looking for a theoretical background and a methodology that would accommodate this relationship and I grounded my research within Psychosocial Studies (Puntil, 2019), a discipline where Psychoanalysis meets Education and Social Studies, (Bainbridge & West, 2012; Britzman, 2009: Frosh, 2010), a territory where the heterogeneity of my personal and academic background could find a home. I also encountered Narrative and Auto-ethnographic methodologies where personal stories, small voices, can be explored (Adams, Holmes, Ellis, 2015). At a later stage of my research journey, I embraced Posthuman philosophy (Braidotti, 2013) and Post-qualitative methodology (Lather & St.Pierre, 2013) which challenged some of my assumptions as a researcher. Reshaping my thesis incorporating Posthumanism in dialogue with Psychosocial studies has been and still is a challenge. Posthumanism, building mainly from Feminism (Haraway, 1988) and from Post-structuralism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), in its various forms, decentres the human from the research landscape, allowing space for material objects (Bennett, 2010), other human-and-non-human-beings to have a voice. Relationality is at the centre of posthuman thinking and researching. Relationality is also at the centre of Psychosocial Studies. Doing research differently, writing in academia differently (Richardson & St.Pierre, 2005), is also a common trait to both disciplines, as it is challenging assumptions, decentring power dynamics, allowing space for small stories to emerge. There are also many differences to be discussed, many challenges within my journey of be-ing a scholar, a journey yet to be finished, always in its be-coming.

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