Inventing a researcher’s culture in the semi-periphery, borderlands, and boundaries (not just disciplines

In my paper, I attempt to describe and interpret my own academic identity by focusing on my (auto)biographical and auto-ethnographic trajectory as a researcher and participant in academic culture, shaped at the boundaries of disciplines and academic institutions in a semi-peripheral country such as Poland. In the first part of the text, referring to Wallerstein’s concept of worlds-systems, I present the paradigmatic changes taking place in the discipline I practice – cultural anthropology – since the 1990s to the present day in conjunction with the pressures on the academia of non-English‑speaking peripheral and semi-peripheral countries from English-speaking core countries, in order to reveal the biographical experience of the place of my own academic enculturation in a traditional university (ethnology at AMU), shaping the academic culture of which I am a user/bearer. In the following part of the paper, I analyse the relevance for the shift in my biography as a researcher and academic teacher of taking up a position in a specific academic environment and institution – in a Wrocław-based non-public university with academic aspirations (ULS) and the importance of the experience of being part of the research networks of the ESREA organization. In the final section of the essay, I focus on reconstructing how educational work with so-called non‑traditional students, focused on their undertaking explorations within their own culture through various techniques of the ethnographic method, redefines my research and teaching practices and shapes my current academic identity.