Inspiring desire: A new materialist bent to doctoral education in Arts and Humanities

Abstract

Doctoral learning entails transition from experienced student to stance-defending researcher, exposed to international critique: a disorientation and reorientation into a new identity. Arts and Humanities candidates typically navigate these moves without much of a map, choosing their own topics, avoiding the more externally defined approach available to STEM students, and mapping out their own research routes. They are often driven by desire and passion for their topic. Much of each candidate’s core identity will be inflected by this transition of emergence, a transition that involves their embodiment, emotion and social persona. With intense and sometimes uncomfortable transition in mind, and desire as driver, new materialism, namely nomadic feminism and queer theory, can inform doctoral pedagogy in Arts and Humanities. The destabilization of normativity opens the potentials and challenges of inhabited and performed identity. Queer theory’s longstanding negotiation of social and personal tensions gives a heuristic model for understanding doctoral identity transition.

Understanding doctoral progress assessment in the arts and humanities

“…More important is the student-driven, rather than project-driven, model of doctoral research. The latter favours a directive approach to planning and task allocation from the principal investigator (PI)/supervisor found in many STEMM subjects but is much rarer in the arts and humanities (Carter and Gunn, 2019). This may result in candidates taking longer to refine their research questions and methodology.…”

“My Supervisors Never Cease to Believe in Me”: A Reflection of an Intercultural Doctoral Supervision Relationship

“…My experience of our intercultural pedagogical space may have some implications for international doctoral students and their supervisors. It can be argued that working with supervisors is one is the first stage of international doctoral students’ being exposed to international critique, leading to a possible disorientation and reorientation into a new identity (Carter & Gunn, 2017) and the re-examination of their existing identities. Therefore, supervisors’ patience and empathy is critical in allowing these processes to happen.…”

Working in the borderlands: critical perspectives on doctoral education

“…We raised questions in our invitation to researchers that intended to provoke critical and theoretical consideration. Some of these questions related to doctoral education's central purpose: how might the multiple understandings of doctorateness be contested (Carter and Gunn 2019;Jones 2009); are doctoral examination systems fit-for-purpose (Kumar and Sanderson 2020); what about institutional responsibility for employability within a globalised higher education market (Young, Kelder, and Crawford 2020)? Doctoral education sits at the heart of the purpose of academic research.…”