ABSTRACT
Professional doctorate students usually study part time whilst working full time in a profession and/or workplace, with their workplace generating the focus of their study. This means that such students may be particularly compromised by the insider nature of their research, and in managing their location as ‘insiders’, they may necessarily change position, sometimes frequently, along axes with respect to both their research and their professional practice. Humphrey (2007) makes the torque implied by insider-outsider status explicit by drawing attention to the hyphen. She suggests that researchers can lose their sense of self if they are pulled one way or the other by being seen alternately as an insider or as an outsider (depending on whether they are colleague and/or researcher).
