Having incorporated a digital aspect to our academic literacy course, and (Clark & Ivanič, 1997).

This paper explores shifts in students' writer identities in a tumultuous South African higher education context. Within the Humanities Extended Curriculum Programme, our transformation agenda triggers tensions between assimilationist and disruptive approaches to teaching writing. On our course, attempts are made to ease student's acquisition of discipline-specific writing norms, while encouraging them to draw on their brought-along resources, a negotiation causing discomfort. We invite such discomfort as productive, and ask: How do discomforting spaces inflect on our understanding of writing and writer identities? We invite students to write reflectively about how the course may or may not have influenced their identities and worldviews. Drawing on Foucault, we see the reflective essay as confessional writing, and an enactment of our writing pedagogies in discomforting spaces. We argue that in such spaces, writing can create possibilities for change, particularly as students adopt an ethical stand in their writing, calling us to reconceptualise writer identities. We apply Biko's (2017) 'envisioned self' concept to capture the ethical dimension in students' writing, by introducing a new layer of Clark and Ivanic's (1997) clover model of writer identity. Our paper contributes conceptually to existing views of writer identities, with implications for writing pedagogies in the current context.

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