In recent years, the pressure to publish has increasingly been filtering down into doctoral education. Under a regime of increased performativity, publishing in peer-reviewed journals during candidature has gradually become a minimum requirement for any newly minted doctoral-holder seeking to secure an academic position. In this paper, we analyse in-depth interviews with two mid-programme students in the field of Education to explore the nature of academic identity work in relation to publishing during their studies. Our analysis explicitly uses Stuart Hall's theorisation of identity to examine how these students -- one international, one local -- show their emergent academic identities in talking about publishing during their candidature. On the basis of this exploration, we propose that developmental or even transformational metaphors of identity work do not adequately suggest the intrinsic chaos of the process, nor its fundamental idiosyncrasy and politics.