There is a super-imposition of worldviews that may feel disconcerting, and certainly, unsettling, when one returns to school much later in life for a terminal degree. Reading fulltime professional academics talk about the way their assumptions and viewpoints are disturbed made me realize I don’t experience the same because I haven’t spent the past 30 years being conditioned by the formal academic structures of ‘how to think’ and ‘how to make knowledge’ they way they have. There’s nothing long-settled to be destabilized. I’m a novice. I haven’t been conditioned to think in a certain way nor the outputs of my creative spark carefully ‘disciplined’ for peer review.
This has its pros and cons. On one hand, it has taken me far more time to arrive at the framing of my thesis since I had to learn the established before I could confront it. On the other hand, I do not have to grapple with the discomfort generated by going ‘against the grain’. I’m ‘dancing in between’ the legacy infrastructures of knowledge-making and the blindspots it generates (see Konadu-Osei et al. 2023). For those of us who can discern the multi-coloured landscape of knowledge rendered invisible by the hegemonic knowledge production systems, there is a freedom in not having to overcome conditioning in order to reach out and collaborate.