This article discusses the Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective and describes how it came out of a symposium called "Liminality, identity, and hybridity: On the promise of new conceptual frameworks for theorising academic/faculty development." The CAD Collective is and represents a space where people can open up their contexts and practices to ongoing theoretical investigation and possibility and have it be accepted as an essential part of their intellectual and professional responsibility as developers. Since the outset, one of the CAD Collective's goals has been to draw explicitly and purposefully on the strength of the disciplinary variation--to enable a person to critique, or think against, a number of the hegemonic ideas that frame his or her practice. Together with those who have backgrounds in education, the collective is fortunate to have aroused the curiosity of developers with scholarly inclinations in English literature, history, cultural studies, languages, queer theory, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. It was only formed in late 2004, it is relatively small in number, but it includes developers from New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the UK. ["The Challenging Academic Development (CAD) Collective" was written with Margaret Hicks, Trevor Holmes, Catherine Manathunga, Kathryn Sutherland, and Susan Wilcox.]