Heidi Safia Mirza, Penny Jane Burke, Jennifer Lavia, Gloria Gordon, Helen Gunter and Barbara Ann Cole each tells her story of completing doctoral studies at a particular personal and professional stage in her life. Their narratives reveal their experience of the resultant life changes and will speak to people who are at different stages in their own careers and studies. By locating her story in the context in which she undertook her study, each author gives readers her reasons for embarking on such demanding study and also the historical setting which shaped her decision. This raises issues about social movements, not least post colonial thinking and gender identity in a changing world as well as their personal and professional vulnerabilities. The interplay between personal life and living the life of academia makes these stories essential reading for anyone about to embark on academic study or who has completed it. "Changing Lives" will support research activity, particularly doctoral research, and is essential reading for active researchers and professionals engaged in higher studies to consider how to locate the self productively within their projects. Contents include eight chapters: (1) New Beginnings--Ongoing Lives (Barbara Ann Cole and Helen M. Gunter); (2) Accessing Doctoral Education: processes of becoming an academic (Penny Jane Burke); (3) Good vibrations: good girls, good wives, good mothers and ...good heavens a PhD! (Barbara Anne Cole); (4) Researching Life Itself: human centred passionate appreciation (Gloria Gordon); (5) Dusting off my doctorate (Helen M. Gunter); (6) Teachers, Postcoloniality and the PhD (Jennifer Lavia); (7) Love in the cupboard: a conversation about success and sadness when class, race and gender collide in the making of an academic career (Heidi Safia Mirza and Kate Hoskins); and (8) Beginnings and Ends (Helen M. Gunter and Barbara Ann Cole).