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indigenous identity altogether or be read as culturally ‘Other’. Invoked to describe
the point at which first and second space cultural identities rub uncomfortably
together, Bhabha’s third space of hybridity offers another alternative. Deemed to be
a ‘split-space of enunciation’ (Bhabha, 1994 , p. 56), the third space is the in-between
space of hybridity in which it is possible ‘to live on the cusp, to deal with two con-
tradictory [identities] at the same time without either transcending or repressing that
contradiction’ (Bhabha as cited in Mitchell, 1995 , np). Within the third space, new
knowledges and new cultural expressions and identities emerge, which are traceable
neither to the first nor to the second space but instead are the unique product of
hybridity.
Significantly, Bhabha’s third space of ‘cultural and historical hybridity’ ( 1994 ,
p. 31) is not something we choose to create or enter. It is, rather, a way of under-
standing the in-between experience of cultural difference that acknowledges, with-
out seeking to unite, multiple and sometimes contradictory identities, knowledges
and cultures. As ‘the margin of hybridity, where cultural differences “contingently”
and conflictually touch’ (Bhabha, 1994 , p. 296), the third space can produce both
anxious and agentic social actors. With this dual focus on the discomfort and the
possibilities of contingent, hybrid identities, Bhabha’s conceptualisation of the third
space offers a useful way in which to theorise the tensions in identity and knowl-
edge construction that can arise for preservice teachers, teacher educators and
school-based personnel as they negotiate their roles and identities within profes-
sional experience partnerships.
Soja’s Thirdspace and Thirding-as-Othering
The ‘Thirdspace’ introduced in Soja ( 1996 ) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles
and other real-and-imagined places draws conceptually not from Bhabha’s post-
colonial third space theorisation of cultural hybridity but from French philosopher
Henri Lefebvre’s various philosophies of trialectic reasoning and social spatiality.
According to Soja ( 1996 ), ‘[w]ithout ever using the specific term, Lefebvre was
probably the first to discover, describe, and insightfully explore Thirdspace as a
radically different way of looking at, interpreting, and acting to change the embrac-
ing spatiality of human life’ (p. 29). The ‘spatiality of human life’ to which Soja
refers is both literal and metaphorical. A postmodern geographer, Soja is concerned
with both revaluing the significance of the ‘spatial dimension of our lives’ (p. 1) and
with the theoretical and philosophical insights opened up through the expansion of
our ‘spatial and geographical imaginations’ (p. 1).
Soja’s Thirdspace offers what he describes as a ‘recombinatorial and radically
open perspective’ that uses the critical strategy of ‘thirding-as-Othering’ in order to
‘open up our spatial imaginaries to ways of thinking and acting politically that
respond to all binarisms, to any attempt to confine thought and political action to
only two alternatives, by interjecting an-Other set of choices’ (p. 5). The technique
of ‘thirding-as-Othering’ has its roots in Lefebvre’s philosophical resistance to
R. Forgasz et al.