Tuesday 17 March 2009

My complex professional identities


We all have complex identities. I am a wife, a daughter, a sister, Irish, from Northern Ireland and more.
But I also have a complex professional identity with several different parts to my job. And sometimes when I come across a paper, a publication, a presentation or a conversation I am not sure which part of my identity is responding. For example, my friend presented about her use of audio-diaries as a method of collecting data for qualitative research this afternoon. I found myself responding to this as a practitioner of medical education, more than as a researcher. The different parts of my professional identity are also valued more or less by colleagues who have more singular identities.
Just some thoughts......

4 comments:

  1. Multiple identities really resonate with me because I blog on Medical Education, K-12 education and the prairie environment. I find twitter especially confusing because the lines between my identities are very blurred there.

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  2. i think we should embrace our complexities rather than attempt to divorce them. each different facet makes the other richer, more valuable and with varied insights because of their existence and interactions.

    different parts may express themselves at different times but we can no more distil out our upbringing than we can remove clinical knowledge when just chatting. how we let those parts be evidenced is what makes us who wer are at different places and at different times.

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  3. Always the Doctor! You want to categorise and structure identity into a hierarchical tree structure. Embrace the miscellaneous!

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  4. Is this behaviour really typical of a doctor?? :)

    I do embrace miscellany I can assure you, but I guess I was trying to help myself understand why I sometimes get confused.

    It's complicated!!!!!

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