ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on Trude’s messy rather than linear PhD thesis planning and her unstable rather than unitary and coherent pre-academic, postgraduate student, and postdoctoral shifting identities. In this context, the tensions between made and found realities are critically explored. Readers are invited to reflect on the need to trouble contemporary academic assumptions and practices in postgraduate higher education. A further chapter aim is to show how developed academic friendships which go against the grain of the normative and orthodox in the neoliberal academy can be of vital importance in scholarship and research.
