Re-thinking “I”dentity in medical education: genealogy and the possibilities of being and becoming

Professional identity formation has emerged as a key topic for medical education research, with contributions from perspectives of psychological development and socialization opening up needed conversations in the field. Yet mainstream training practices may have the unintended effects of educating for a physician typology that may be too narrow to account for the complexity of learners’ personal identities. Alternative approaches, such as Foucauldian genealogy, offer ways to empirically investigate how the legitimate contours of being and becoming have come to be as they are, how they shape professional identities, and to which degree their borders may be made more inclusive. Drawing upon an example of the contemporary practice of competency-based medical education in the Canadian context, this paper considers how genealogy’s methodological tools of critical distancing, the dispositif , and problematization may help reveal how educational practices shape the identities of physicians-in-training in ways both intended and unintended. From this perspective it becomes apparent that any attempt to explore professional identity is incomplete without also considering that a trainee’s evolving sense of self is inexorably bound up with forces of knowledge, power, and ethics that shape them into becoming certain kinds of physician subjects rather than others. In mapping this terrain, a genealogical approach determines how we reached the now in which we find ourselves and how we might transform it, such that we may shift the possibilities afforded to health professionals to establish professional identities aligned with their personal identities in ways that maximize inclusivity and minimize marginalization.