As recent research into metaphors for research degree candidature and academic careers shows, metaphor choices can influence thought and affect in ways that matter significantly for personal wellbeing and scholarly outcomes. Journey metaphors are widely observed as among the most common metaphors in current use. Studies indicate that, while helpful for some people at some moments, these dominant metaphors are in many cases inappropriate or even actively detrimental. Drawing on queer-feminist theory, disability studies, anticolonial theory, and fat studies, this article shows how the journey metaphors tend to more readily fit the experiences of researchers who are intersectionally privileged by race, gender, culture, sexuality, social class, body size, and neurotypicality than those who experience marginalisation across one or more axes of social experience. Additionally, journey metaphors belie the non-linear, messily surprising processes of creative research. The journey's dominance thus reinforces social and epistemic inequities. To counter this, we argue the benefits of researchers creating fresh metaphors for their own bespoke experiences. As illustration, we present and discuss a suite of metaphors we produced in a transgeographic creative critical collaboration.
Booij et al. (Wed,) studied this question.