Becoming a researcher: Re-inventing writing spaces Jennifer McMullan 1 The Open University, UK/Australian Catholic University, Sydney, Australia article info Article history: Available online xxx Keywords: Academic writing practices Critical realism Gender Place Space Writing tale abstract This paper draws on a three-year study of postgraduate women writers pursuing research degrees at a UK university to explore how they develop identities as academic researchers and writers. Using extracts from written texts, talk-and-text interview transcripts, and writing journals from four postgraduate students in a range of disciplines, I explore the material conditions under which postgraduate women write and the significance of such spaces for the re-invention of themselves as academic writers and researchers. Fore- grounding the notion of place and space (Agnew, 2011), I present extracts from four ‘writing tales’ (after Lather, 1991) to explore academic writing at postgraduate level. The tales include ‘visible’ and ‘occluded’ (Swales, 1996) written genres in academia and document the ways in which these facilitate the enactment of postgraduate academic identity. The use of ‘tales’ as an analytical unit and as a form of representation provides a mechanism through which multiple data sources are drawn together to illuminate a highly contextualised, and potentially gendered, dimension of postgraduate academic writing. © 2018 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 1. Introduction Jane Austen—wrote only in secret on sheets small enough to be concealed in a book in case someone interrupted. And interruptions were frequent, because she wrote in the family living room. These circumstances were not only a result of the family's relative poverty and the presence in the house of an invalid mother, whose care fell to Jane as an unmarried daughter; daughters were also denied the luxury of the ‘room of one's own’ that Virginia Wolf considered so essential to a writer. Jane Austen thus depended on the squeaky living room door to keep her from being surprised at her guilty endeavour. To the puzzlement of other family members, she always objected when anyone proposed oiling the hinges. (Dulong, 1992, p. 413) The research presented in this article is intended to contribute to work which seeks to understand the ways in which postgraduate women students engage with writing in the early stages of their academic careers. The larger research study involves 16 participants and focuses on writing carried out during the initial two years of students’ postgraduate research study. The research questions were designed to generate insights into the nature of writing for women at this formative stage of their academic trajectories and to consider how their writing of a range of genres afforded spaces for taking on an academic writer and researcher identity. The research questions were as follows: E-mail address: Jennifer.McMullan@acu.edu.au. 1 Address: Australian Catholic University, Level 10, 33 Berry St, North Sydney, 2060 PO Box 968, North Sydney, NSW, 2059. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of English for Academic Purposes journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jeap https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.03.005 1475-1585/© 2018 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4. 0/). Journal of English for Academic Purposes xxx (2018) 1e11 Please cite this article in press as: McMullan, J., Becoming a researcher: Re-inventing writing spaces, Journal of English for Ac- ademic Purposes (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.03.005