Book excerpt: Through their search to achieve a sense of academic identity the authors in this volume have brought us new textures and ideas from their research to help us all in our creation and location of spaces we can claim as our own. Working within the traditions of academic scholarship, we are reformulating what we see and presenting it in a previously unexplored perspective of connections and possibilities. Through our presentation of this view, we are asserting a new location for the academic identity negotiation that will challenge and reinforce our positioning within scholarly endeavors. The articles contained in these pages are themselves markers of identity produced within and created to define the academic culture. From this base of academic tradition, the essays contained in this volume share grounding in the exploration of culturally produced markers of identity pulling from various academic disciplines. Through the examination of the performance of identity markers, each scholar develops and reveals connections that we may utilize in our ever-expanding perspective of scholarly subjects and approaches.