It might not be Imposter Syndrome... We need to talk about Trespasser Syndrome

Back in 2014 I wrote on this blog that Imposter Syndrome ran through librarianship like a vein. Writing now in 2025, I consider that a misdiagnosis.

Imposter Syndrome is defined as a psychological condition, characterised, as Miriam-Webster has it, by ‘persistent doubt concerning one's abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one's ongoing success.’

The insidious thing about Imposter Syndrome is it individualises suffering. It’s not something being done to you; it’s something you ‘have’, a personal flaw that comes from within. And because the concept of Imposter Syndrome is so wide-spread, it’s easy not to question that the blame is yours.

It reminds me of the concept of ‘resilience’ as it is applied in Higher Education - the onus is on us as staff to simply become strong enough (or numb enough) to deal with any amount of stress or disruption, rather than on the institutions to try and reduce the imposition of harsher and harsher conditions.

Back in 2014, and indeed now, I was surrounded by brilliant colleagues in the profession who doubted themselves, who thought they were only ever a slip away from the big reveal that they Didn’t Belong Here, despite the evidence to the contrary. It was their ‘condition’ which meant they couldn’t see the truth of their excellence. Right?

Then in 2020, I read a brilliant article on In the Library With the Lead Pipe (consistently the most readable and through-provoking peer-reviewed journal I’ve come across), by Nicola Andrews, entitled It’s Not Imposter Syndrome: Resisting Self-Doubt as Normal For Library Workers.

I’d recommend reading the whole thing but this is the paragraph that really stuck with me:

“As a Māori, takatāpui, immigrant, person of colour, and first-generation scholar, I know that libraries and academia were not constructed for my benefit; and that systems of colonization, white supremacy, misogyny, and hatred continue to operate within them and wider society. The lack of belonging I felt did not stem from a lack of self-esteem, but from the knowledge that libraries and academia as institutions never intended I belong.”

— Nicola Andrews

I feel embarrassed now, that someone needed to point this out to me. I had credited my own lack of Imposter Syndrome as basically being down to a) the sense of self instilled in my by my parents and b) the fact I’d chosen the right profession for me. But of course, it has infinitely more to do with privilege: with the fact that as a white middle-class male my profession and my industry - librarianship and higher education - didn’t treat me like an imposter.

If you’re an ethnically minoritised member of staff in a University and you feel doubt concerning your abilities and whether you truly belong, I’d wager that there’s a good chance it is not the apparently capricious ‘condition’ of Imposter Syndrome - I’d wager you’ve been made to feel like an imposter. If you’re female, or from a working class background, or disabled, or are part of any other underrepresented group, and you feel like an imposter, there’s a good chance you’ve been treated like an imposter. This comes from without, not from within. And that’s not Imposter Syndrome.

(Sidenote: if you’re a white middle class man who feels doubt concerning your abilities and whether you truly belong, it’s not impossible you’ve been promoted beyond your abilities. That’s not Imposter Syndrome either, that’s actually being an imposter…)

How many cases of Imposter Syndrome are actually misdiagnosed? This matters because the term becomes pernicious when it is widely used for groups it was never intended to describe. As Dr Raquel Martin notes, the original 1970s study ‘focused on high-achieving, middle to upper-class European American women, observing how they attributed success to luck rather than their own abilities… the concept was never designed to capture the experiences of marginalised groups like black people, who face additional systemic barriers.’

Trespasser Syndrome

I’ve been working with a brilliant colleague at York, Raj Mann, on a project centred on inclusion and belonging in the library, and I’m indebted to her for introducing me to the term ‘Trespasser Syndrome’. If you’ve read this far and you agree with most or all of what I’ve said above, you’re probably already nodding your head in recognition at how much this new framing improves upon the old framing. It’s not that Imposter Syndrome doesn’t exist - it’s that in so many cases, it is misapplied: in fact the person is made to feel like they’re trespassing in a space simply not intended for them.

I believe the term ‘Trespasser Syndrome’ was coined by Dr Arin N. Reeves, in 2022. I’d recommend reading all of her article Is It Imposter Syndrome or Is It Trespasser Syndrome? - here’s a key quote:

“People from underrepresented groups are not afraid that they are imposters; they are afraid that the majority groups won’t see them for who they are and won’t welcome them if they do see them. These fears are not the fears of imposters; they are the fears of trespassers.

A trespasser is someone who enters spaces they are not supposed to be, where they do not belong. A trespasser isn’t afraid of being discovered for who they really are; they are afraid of being treated like they don’t belong where they are.”

— Dr Arin N. Reeves

What we do about it?

Language and nuance matter, so let’s stop misapplying the term Imposter Syndrome to situations where individuals and groups are being treated like imposters. It’s never good perpetuate harmful language, whether intentionally or not. Reeves advises us to ‘Use “imposter syndrome” when it’s relevant. Differentiate it from “trespasser syndrome” to honor the realities of succeeding in spite of not belonging.’

More than that though, we need to interrogate examples of Imposter Syndrome. If someone you work with says they have it, or describes its symptoms, we need to do more than nod and smile and say ‘I know how you feel’ - we need to work out why they’ve been made to feel like an imposter, and whether we can do anything to change that. How can we create environments that support under underrepresented groups, and dismantle the systems which tell people they don’t belong?

I’ll leave the last word on this to someone much more qualified to talk about it than me. Raj has in fact organised the first ever Trespasser’s Conference as part of her role at YCEDE (the Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education) and during her keynote address she said this:

“For those of you here today who support racially minoritised staff and students, ask yourselves: have I provided people with the tools they need to be able to thrive in the space? If not, what else do I need to be doing? Instead of helping underrepresented groups to walk past the metaphorical ‘no entry or ‘no trespassing signs,’ instead pull down the sign before they get there, have a comfortable seat ready for them: don’t just applaud the courage and grit on getting there.”

— Raj Mann

Embedding Ethnography Part 5: Understanding Academics with UX

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This is the 5th post in a series about using UX and ethnography as regular tools at the University of York. We're treating these techniques as 'business as usual' - in other words part of a selection of tools we'd call upon regularly in appropriate situations, rather than a stand-alone or siloed special project. If you're interested you can read Part 1: Long term UX, and two guest posts from our UX Interns in Part 2 and Part 4, plus my take on planning and delivering a UX-led project in Part 3.

Having focused our first two uses of UX on students - specifically postgraduates - the third time we've used it in earnest has been with the academic community.

One of the consent forms from the project

The Understanding Academics Project

The project to better understand the lives and needs of our academics was an existing one in the Library: we knew we wanted to tweak our services to suit them better.  After finding the UX techniques so useful we decided to apply them here and make them the driving force behind the project. All other useful sources of info have been considered too - for example feedback to Academic Liaison Librarians, comments from the LibQual+ survey etc - but the body of the project would involve using ethnography to increase our understanding.

We've used five main ethnographic techniques at York (six if you count the feedback wall we now have near the exit of the library) but decided to limit ourselves to two of them for this project: cognitive maps, and semi-structured interviews. We aimed to meet 4 academics per Department, and ask them to draw a cognitive map of either their research process or the process for designing a new module - so unlike our previous UX projects which involved maps of physical spaces, this was literally 'mapping' the way they worked. Some interpreted this very visually, others in a more straightforward textual way. In all cases though, it proved an absolutely fascinating insight in to how things really work in academia, and provided a brilliant jumping off point for the interviews themselves.

These interviews were semi-structured rather than structured or unstructured; in other words they were based largely on the map and a natural flow of conversation rather than having any pre-set questions, but there were areas which we'd bring up at the end of they didn't come in the conversation without prompting. So for example most people in drawing the teaching-related map mentioned our reading list system, either in the map or in conversation - if after 50 minutes of chat it hadn't come up at all, we'd ask as open a question as possible to prompt some insight into their thoughts on it.

Vanya Gallimore has written a great overview of the project on the Lib-Innovation Blog, which we set up in the library to document our UX work among other things. In it she writes about the background to the project, the methods used, staffing it (in other words, who was doing the interviews) and then briefly about processing the data. It's the most popular post on our new blog and I'd recommend giving it a read.

For now I want to focus on something that post doesn't cover so much: actually doing the ethnography.

Ethnography fieldwork in practice

What is the verb for ethnography? Is it just 'doing' ethnography, or performing ethnography? Ehtnographising? Whatever it is, I hadn't done it in earnest until this project. In the two previous projects I'd been involved in setting things up, helping with the direction, interpreting the data and few other things, but we'd had interns out in the field, talking to people and asking them to draw maps etc. For Understanding Academics, it was agreed that the Academic Liaison Librarians (of which I am one) should be doing the fieldwork, for various reasons described by Vanya in her post linked above - ultimately it came down to two things: the need for a proper familiarity of the HE context and our systems in the Library in order to understand everything the academics were saying; and the sheer opportunity of talking in amazing depth with people in our departments.

One of the most common quesitons about the project is: how did you get the academics to take part? The answer is, we asked them all individually, by email. No mass emails to the whole department, but no incentives either (we've offered post-graduates cake vouchers and the like, in previous UX projects) - just an email to a person selected with care, often in conjunction with the Library Rep and / or Head of Department, explaining what we were doing, why we were doing it, and our reasons for approaching them specifically. We asked around 110 academics this way, and 97 said yes: the other 13 either didn't want to do it or couldn't make time within the duration of the project.

There was a roughly even split of research focused and teaching focused conversations (although in either case there were no limits to the conversation, so some interviews ended up mentioning both). I look after three Departments from the Library: I interviewed three academics from one, and four from each of the other two, plus I did two of the three 'warm-up' interviews.

Prep

The warm up interviews were just like the regular interviews, and their data included in the project, but they were with partners of library staff who happened to be academics... The idea was to refine our processes and see how things worked in practice, on an audience who wouldn't mind being subject to our first attempts at ethnographic fieldwork. This was really useful, and we changed things as a result - for example the message written on the top of the piece of paper assigned to draw cognitive maps on was made clearer, and we extended the time we'd set aside for each interview after the try-outs used their 60 minute slots before the conversations had reached a natural conclusion. 

For the remainder of my interviews the prep consisted of reading up on each academic on their staff profile page, printing out the various bits of paper required, and charging devices. 

Accoutrements

There were a lot of things we had to bring with us to each interview.

• a device to audio-record the whole thing on (my phone);
• a device to write on (ipad with keyboard, or laptop); 
• the paper with the map explanation on; 
• the paper with the areas to cover if they didn't arise naturally listed; 
• two copies of the consent form - one for us to keep and one for the subject to keep
• a set of four pens (we ask users to draw cognitive maps over a period of 6 minutes, giving them a different colour of pen every 2 minutes)

Of the above, the cognitive map, conversation topics and consent forms were all either teaching specific or research specific - largely the same but with subtly different wording in places. 

The Map

Each session began with an explanation of what we were doing here. The emails sent to invite each academic had covered some of that, but it's always good to talk it over. We discussed what the library wanted to do (change things for the better) but that we didn't have specific things in mind - we wanted to be led by the data. Then we talked about the format of the interview, the fact it would be recorded, and went through the consent forms. I particularly stressed the fact they could withdraw at any time - in other words, an academic could decide now, several months later, that they wished they hadn't been so candid, and we'd take all their data out of the study.

Finally we explained the map, the use of the different colours of pen, the fact it didn't have to be remotely artistic. None of my interviewees seemed particularly put off or phased by drawing the map. Then there was a period of silence as they drew the map (not everyone needed all six minutes; if people took longer than six minutes I didn't hurry them), after which I turned on the recorder and said 'Now if you can talk me through what you've drawn...' 

The Interview

Once the subject had described their map - with me trying not to interrupt unless I didn't understand something, but jotting down potential questions as they talked - the interview commenced. I can't recommend highly enough using either a cognitive map or another ethnographic technique such as a love/break-up letter or touchstone tour as a jumping off point for an interview. It means you instantly have context, you're in their world, and there's no shortage of meaningful ideas to talk about. 

I have to say that during the main body of the interview, I didn't actively try and think about what the project was trying to achieve, I just asked questions I was interested in. Sometimes this meant spending a long time discussing things which weren't library related at all - but that's part of what this project is all about, to understand the academic world more holistically rather than in a library-centric way. 

Some interviews came to a natural end after around 40 minutes; others I felt like we could have gone much longer but I didn't want to take up more of their time than I said I would.

Writing up

One of the changes we made after the initial interviews was to just listen and not try and write notes whilst the protagonists described their map. We didn't have time to transcribe each interview (that would mean we'd have spent more than 500 hours on the project before a single piece of analysis) but we did feel the map description was key, so we listened without writing during that bit and transcribed it fully later. We then wrote notes as we conducted the interview, using the recording to go back and fill any holes or make clear anything from our notes that didn't make sense. Sometimes during a particularly long and involved answer I'd just write go back and listen to this in my notes and stop writing until the next question. 

We blocked out time after each interview to write it up immediately while it was fresh in our minds - so in my case this was mainly going through and correcting all the mistakes from my high-speed typing, then referring to the recording where necessary, then noting down any immediate conclusions I could draw outside of the project framework - things I could learn from and change the way I worked because of. I didn't write these down as part of the notes from the interview because I didn't want to bias the analysis in any way - I just wrote ideas down elsewhere for my own use. 

Conclusions

I absolutely loved doing the fieldwork for this project. It was fantastic. I learned so much, I deepened existing relationships, and I got to know staff really well who I'd barely met before. Every time I came away from an interview I was absolutely buzzing. 

I don't think everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. Some people felt like they didn't know enough about a subject's research project to be able to ask intelligent questions about it - personally I just asked unintelligent questions until I got it - and there was the odd instance of the conversation being stilted or awkward. For me and a lot of my colleagues, though, it was eye-opening and actually really exciting. 

The question of what we do next - how we process all the data, and then act on what we learn - is covered in the following post.

Can you use Twitter for Academic teaching? Yes, here are some examples

I have read, and contributed to, an awful lot of writing online about Twitter in HE. Social networks in general and Twitter in particular are increasingly accepted as a valuable part of the academic world. If you want to know about how to use Twitter for communication, for building reputation, for research, then Google will provide you with endless hours of reading. However, using Twitter in teaching seems to be far more tricky and ambiguous. There are a lot more people asking 'Can we use Twitter in academic teaching, and if so, how?' then answering that question. Interestingly, there's a lot more info out there in using it in the school classroom than on using it in the University seminar room, lab, or lecture theatre.

With that in mind, and to make the most of a real edtech zietgeist happening at the University of York at the moment, I put together a 1.5 hour workshop for academics, as part of a series I'm doing for the Learning & Teaching Forum. I really enjoyed putting this together because I learnt a lot, and spoke to a lot of academics doing really interesting things with tweets.

The biggest issue in this area seems to be that you can't make students sign up for the platform, so how do you make sure no one is excluded if you're providing key info via Twitter (without you having to duplicate everything)? The first answer is embedding a Twitter stream in the VLE - there is a full guide on how to do that (with BlackBoard) in the handout which accompanied the session (embedded below). The second answer is projecting a hashtag onto the walls during teaching. Chemistry at York is, for some reason, always at the front of the curve with social media, and one of the things Simon Lancaster does is have a back-channel running on big screens during lab-sessions, using Tweetbeam, so that students who don't wish to sign up for Twitter can still get the benefit of seeing other students' tweets (and also pictures shared by Simon). I really liked this idea - I liked the ceding of control, the high risk of it, and I like the fact that the students don't abuse the trust, and take the opportunity instead to contribute enthusiastically and productively.

Anyhow, here are the slides from the workshop - I hope if you're reading this you find them useful. If you're an academic and want to chip in via the comments with how you utilise Twitter, that would be great; if you're an information professional and you also run these sorts of workshops, I'd love to hear from you too.

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching from University of York Library

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching by University of York Information

Becoming a Networked Researcher: a suite useful of presentations

Web 2.0 tools have finally moved firmly beyond the 'potential fad' stage, to gaining widespread acceptance as valuable weapons in the Researcher's arsenal. Statistics about social media are almost meaningless because a: there's so many of them and b: the information becomes outdated quickly, but at the time of writing it's thought that around 70% of academics use social media for personal use, and in my view we've most definitely reached the tipping point where social media's utility for professional use is properly understood. This is directly linked to the 'impact agenda' - the research shows that blogging about and tweeting about research results in more citations for that research, and pretty much everyone wants more citations. But becoming a networked researcher is about more than the REF-related bottom line, it's about being part of a mutually beneficial, supportive, and intellectually engaging community.

With all that in mind, I ran a suite of hands-on workshops at my institution, the University of York, on behalf of the Researcher Development Team. The suite was entitled 'Becoming a Networked Researcher' and it covered firstly blogs and blogging, then collaboration and dissemination, and finally Twitter. Rather than divide these up into three blog posts I thought the most useful thing to do would be to have them all here - so below you'll find various links to, or embedded versions of, presentations and handouts for the course. I've tried to make it so they work without me there to talk over the top of them...

The workshops themselves were really enjoyable and the researchers themselves very enthusiastic and engaged - a whole bunch of blogs and twitter accounts have already sprang up since they ran!  But I'd like to improve them for next time around (we'll be running them twice a year from now on); whether you're a Masters / PhD researcher, an academic, or an information professional reading this, I'd be interested in your views on how useful these materials are, and any advice or tips or, particularly, examples, I should be referring to in future sessions.

The workshop materials

The three parts of the suite were designed to work together and separately - if you're only interested in one aspect of becoming a networked researcher, you don't need to look at the materials from the other sessions.

Part 1: Blogs and Blogging

Blogs and Blogging was the most successful session. The advice here is slightly York-centric in that we all have Google accounts, so we all automatically have Blogger blogs; if you're reading this at another insitution it's definitely worth considering Wordpress.com as your blogging platform. Better still, Wordpress.org, although that requires some technical knowledge.

Here's the Prezi presentation:

And here's the handout which goes with it:

Blogs for researchers: workshop handout by University of York Information

Part 2: Dissemination and Collaboration

I've decided against embedding the materials for this one - there was a lot more group and collaborative work and the session was slightly shorter, so my presentation doesn't cover as much ground. But you can view the Dissemination and Collaboration Prezi here (the handout doesn't really add anything); it covers LinkedIn, Academia.edu, Prezi itself, and Slideshare.

Interestingly, I really struggled to convince people as to the value of LinkedIn. I'm suspect of the value of LinkedIn myself, but I've heard countless researchers talk about how important it is, so I flagged it up as a key resource anyway...

Part 3: Twitter for Researchers

I really enjoyed this as I think Twitter is such a vital tool for modern scholarship and communication - you can see the Slides from the session here:

Twitter for Researchers from Ned Potter

And the handout is here:

Twitter for academics: workshop handout by University of York Information

Any questions, comments or queries, leave them below.

#EdTech: 9 useful online tools to share with the academic community

A while back I blogged about a session I'd run for academics on the academic skills and digital literacy we teach at York. The point of blogging was to say that what the academics were really interested in was not what we taught the students, but how they themselves could become digitally literate. With that in mind I decided to put on a session for academics on exactly that. It was to be a taster menu on 9 different EdTech tools that they might find useful in the Higher Education environment, for engaging students, boosting reputation, and their own research.

Importantly it wasn't to be a library session - I wanted people to actually show up, after all... I asked the central Learning & Teaching Forum if I could deliver it as part of their workshop schedule - it just happened to be delivered by a librarian. Recent experiences suggested York was completely ready for this sort of thing (and indeed we had to move the room to a bigger venue as nearly 60 academics signed up for the session) - if you don't read any more of this post my message would be, if you think you could run a Web 2.0 type session for lecturers and / or researchers, do it! They're really enthusiastic about it - it's no longer seen as a fad or a waste of time.

Anyhow, here's the presentation I used:

For anyone really enthusiastic, the full hour and a half session was recorded too; here's where you can watch the presentation and hear my talk at the same time.

So, how did it go? The answer is really well - the group were very enthusiastic, and the feedback forms were extremely positive with only one exception. One lecturer I really like actually left the room almost in a daze, backing away saying 'Ned, I think you've solved something I've been trying to sort for ages, one of these tools is what we need...' and ran off to investigate there and then! :)

What worked

• The focus was on tools that helped solve existing problems - some Web 2.0 stuff seems to create its own problems which it then solves... This was based on tools that already fitted into the fabric of academic life
• It wasn't a hands-on session but I encouraged as much discussion as possible, questions and sharing of experiences, so that it wasn't just me banging on about stuff at the front
• The What, Why, How, Tips type format I use in a lot of my training also worked well here - it's really important to tell people why they'd find a tool useful BEFORE you tell them how to use it
• It was the right thing at the right time - lots of the feedback comments were things like 'This is exactly what I wanted!' - had I tried to do this when I first got to York 2 years ago, for example, I'm not sure that would have been the case
• It was matter of fact and practical. One academic said they'd been attracted by the lack of 'platitudes and concepts' which he said dominated most courses and workshops they were offered... The whole point of the session was to give people things they could DO right away which helped them in their actual real lives .

What didn't

• I think 9 was probably too many tools for the time. I should have done 7 perhaps - I felt like I was really galloping through everything. It was meant to be a taster-menu, but still
• As with every training session ever, a couple of people found some of it too simplistic and a couple of other people found some of it too complicated - I'm not sure there's a silver bullet for this issue, really, I'd love to know if anyone's cracked it
• A couple of people commented that they found Part 2 more useful than Part 1, but Part 1 was the more substantial section. If I run it again (and I probably will) I'll try and put greater emphasis on the teaching tools rather than the social media side of things
• I should have used more academic examples. (I told myself I'd be using loads of examples in the Becoming a Networked Researcher hands-on workshops I'm running at the moment - but much of the audience is different for these, so it's really not relevant to tell myself that!) .

Incidentally, there was a really interesting conversation (which I didn't feel qualified to contribute much to) about the nonsense female academics have to put up with online; or indeed any prominent females have to endure. It seems that as soon as your level of exposure reaches a certain point - my unscientific guess is, when you've been on TV just once - there will be some idiots who will take advantage of the net's relative anonymity to say unpleasant or creepy things. If this is a subject you're interested in, I'd highly recommend reading about Sara Perry's Gender and Digital Culture project, which is looking to tackle the issue.

So as you can probably guess by now, I'm really pleased that we've reached a tipping point and there's enthusiasm in the academic community for the potential applications of Web 2.0 tools. This is an area lots of librarians are interested in, so I really think it's a great time to offer up your knowledge and expertise to a grateful audience in HE. There are a few institutions doing this, and it seems to be working for all of us.