Inside, outside, upside down: the fluidity of academic researcher ‘identity’ in working with/in school

Educational researchers are concerned about the ways in which researcher identity can influence practice and findings for better or worse effect. However, writings which offer narratives, intended to instruct others in the ways in which the positioning and reflexivity of the researcher operates for better or worse, often present a view of identity as singular, fixed and stable. In this paper we trouble this view of identity as represented in the notion of inside/outside researchers. We reconsider a project in which we worked with a group of pupil researchers to investigate bullying in their school. We show how our identities multiplied and shifted throughout the project in ways that we can see more clearly in hindsight. We mobilize Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘fluid identities’ and argue that the inside/outside binary may be politically helpful but also limiting of understandings of the real politic and experience of messy research practice in and with schools.