The Liminal Self
‘Liminal Self’ - Dum Dum, NSW Australia by Alexander Hayes, 2016
There are a myriad of issues that come from writing in first person for PhD examiners and supervisors alike. This often poses issues for students who struggle with correlative, summative or extrapolative composition of data from multiple sources, often reducing these to a single interpretation written form the egoic perspective of self reflection alone.
It is not customary in scientific writing to use the first person register especially in an engineering and information sciences PhD thesis. Therefore, the term ‘the researcher’ was used throughout the thesis to describe behaviours as a participant observer in events and communities from which empirical and related findings of the research are derived.
“... Think about the habits and traditions in your field, think about the nature of your field and do not hesitate to take responsibility for your own (possibly not that great) ideas.” (Jannson 2014)
As Deegan and Hill (1991) elucidate in their seminal paper titled ‘Doctoral Dissertations as Liminal Journeys of the Self’ the research journey is the backbone for the dissertation whilst the thesis is an autobiographical account of the researchers learning journey. To ensure thesis accuracy and impartiality as a steward of information (Ohio Dominican University Library 2016), the liminal transformation of the researcher will be published as short articles with persistent URLs in a separate research journal.
Additional secondary data such as research notes, manuscripts, photos and audio recordings will be securely stored and made citable with persistent digital object identifiers (DOI) within scientifically verifiable data management systems.
“… The methodological framework adopted here is experiential (Reinharz 1983,1984) and thus combines autobiography with theoretical analysis to (un)cover and (dis)cover reality.” (Deegan and Hill 1991)
