Abstract
How does encounter with genuine difference transform professional identity? Identity work scholarship has richly theorised transformation through social validation — recognition, narrative acceptance, audience affirmation. This paper proposes a complementary mechanism: that the embodied labour of articulating expertise across epistemic boundaries constitutes Deweyan inquiry that reconstructs not only professional knowledge but the practitioner's sense of who they are — independent of audience response. The paper is the second in a PhD project studying researchers at a national security institute. Drawing on 50 preliminary narrative interviews and planned follow-up interviews targeting the embodied process of articulation, it develops a theoretical framework positioning alterity — the irreducible difference of the Other — as a motor of professional identity transformation that operates alongside but independently of social validation. Four preliminary empirical patterns illustrate the mechanism and identify questions for development prior to the conference.