Not a place, but a posture. The third space is where binaries break down and complexity breathes. It’s where we work: between disciplines, across cultures, inside rupture. We draw on postcolonial, psychoanalytic, and existential thought to shape spaces that are grounded, reflective, and politically awake. This isn’t about neutrality. It’s about presence, power, and staying with what resists tidy solutions.  

The concept of a third space emerges from postcolonial theory, notably the work of Homi Bhabha, but it also carries deeper resonances across psychoanalysis, theology, and existential philosophy. It refers to a generative in-between — not a compromise or halfway point, but a space where something new can be formed from the tension of irreconcilable parts. It is a space of encounter, contradiction, and possibility.

For us, the third space is not merely conceptual. It is lived. It reflects our own transnational lives, our work across conflicted systems, and our refusal to collapse difference into easy narratives. It is where our most radical thinking has taken place: not within institutions, but between them. Not in fixed identities, but in movement. Not in mastery, but in a deliberate unknowing.

We resist the sanitised language of “diversity” and the tick-box performance of inclusion. Instead, we orient toward something slower and more difficult: witnessing, unlearning, relational repair. The third space invites us to ask what it means to be ethical when the rules no longer apply, and where power is both visible and hidden in every encounter.

This space is always temporary, always unfinished. It asks of us humility, rigour, and imagination. And it reminds us – as both psychoanalysis and decolonial thought insist – that identity, like healing, is never an individual endeavour.