ABSTRACT
In this chapter we draw on the encounters of the authors and their contemporaries during doctoral candidature to explore the experience second-careering – understood here as the situated project of ‘doing’ a career that traverses two or more sectors or professional identities. Specifically, we focus on the ambivalent spaces of disturbance in which institutions seek to simultaneously benefit from and undermine second-careering within normative academic systems surrounding valuation, power and positioning. In reflecting on two apocryphal accounts of second-careering and doctoral study, we identify three modes of disturbance that characterise the experience of thinking about second-careers in doctoral study: relating; appropriating and betraying or biting back. These episodes and the resulting practices reflect how doctoral education in the Business School holds particular implications for pluriversal career trajectories.
