The name comes from Homi Bhabha’s third space — a concept from cultural theory describing what emerges when people, ideas, and identities exist across worlds rather than within one. Bhabha was interested in hybridity, translation, and the productive ambiguity of not-quite-belonging. We took the term because it names where the work actually happens: with people whose lives, work, or thinking sit across categories that don’t reconcile.
The concept has roots in un-colonial theory but also carries resonances in psychoanalysis, theology, and existential philosophy. In each, the third space points to something that emerges from the tension between positions that don’t collapse into each other. It isn’t a midpoint or a compromise. It’s where something new can take shape because the existing categories don’t quite fit.
For us, the third space isn’t only conceptual. It describes our actual working terrain: across institutions, across cultures, across the languages of clinical and political life. It’s where the practice has done its sharpest thinking — not by claiming a neutral position above the contradictions, but by working from inside them.
We’re wary of the softer uses of “third space” — as a synonym for openness, liminality, or in-between-ness in general. The frame is more specific than that. It asks what ethical work looks like when the rules no longer apply cleanly, where power sits in every encounter, and what can be built from positions that institutions tend to flatten. The work is always temporary and never finished.
The name comes from Homi Bhabha’s third space — a concept from cultural theory describing what emerges when people, ideas, and identities exist across worlds rather than within one. Bhabha was interested in hybridity, translation, and the productive ambiguity of not-quite-belonging. We took the term because it names where the work actually happens: with people whose lives, work, or thinking sit across categories that don’t reconcile.
The concept has roots in un-colonial theory but also carries resonances in psychoanalysis, theology, and existential philosophy. In each, the third space points to something that emerges from the tension between positions that don’t collapse into each other. It isn’t a midpoint or a compromise. It’s where something new can take shape because the existing categories don’t quite fit.
For us, the third space isn’t only conceptual. It describes our actual working terrain: across institutions, across cultures, across the languages of clinical and political life. It’s where the practice has done its sharpest thinking — not by claiming a neutral position above the contradictions, but by working from inside them.
We’re wary of the softer uses of “third space” — as a synonym for openness, liminality, or in-between-ness in general. The frame is more specific than that. It asks what ethical work looks like when the rules no longer apply cleanly, where power sits in every encounter, and what can be built from positions that institutions tend to flatten. The work is always temporary and never finished. That’s part of the point.