This article explores the importance of place within doctoral research. It considers place as localised, experiential, interactional, embedded in history and discourses, and often multi-faceted and fluid. With a focus on the field of education, it argues that doctoral students need to navigate between the university, the place of study and the local context which is the field of their research, and that such navigation will enable them to explore the tension between the usefulness of global, critically developed (and sometimes homogenising) scholarship and the situated realities and needs of their local context. Drawing on the work of five doctoral students, it examines how they have contextualised their projects in the values, social and economic conditions, histories and aspirations of the sites of their fieldwork. It argues that such identification, exploration and description of place allow the students to lift the smudge of sameness, and allows the reader to better understand the meaning of the research.