Troubling talk: assembling the PhD candidate

Mewburn, Inger

doi:10.1080/0158037x.2011.585151

Cited by 38 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Whatever the particulars, the award of a doctoral degree commonly involves an original contribution to one's discipline (House, 2010), and often come about through struggles and great efforts (Mewburn, 2011).…”

Section: Framing Doctoral Liminalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Experiencing doctoral liminality as a conceptual threshold and how supervisors can use it

Keefer

2015

Innovations in Education and Teaching International

119

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Doctoral students face numerous challenges along the path toward achieving a doctorate. With the experience likened to a rite of passage, many face periods of confusion and disorientation, liminal periods of being betwixt and between. Threshold concept theory, reconceived as conceptual thresholds when experienced on the doctoral level, can inform how they are understood. The aim of this research is to explore liminal experiences during the doctoral journey and offer suggestions for how supervisors can better support their learners. This qualitative narrative inquiry explored doctoral liminality amongst 23 participants coming from five countries and 19 different disciplines. Findings cut across the diversity of the participants, with their liminal experiences comprising a sense of isolation, lack of confidence and impostor syndrome, and research misalignment. Periods of liminality were rarely discussed, even after long periods of time. Findings are offered to provide guidance for supervisors to help support and scaffold their learners.

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Section: Framing Doctoral Liminalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Experiencing doctoral liminality as a conceptual threshold and how supervisors can use it

Keefer

2015

Innovations in Education and Teaching International

119

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“…While the 'encouragement' of family might be interpreted as family expectations of high levels of educational achievement, this was not stated explicitly in the current research. It is reasonable to assume, too, that HDRs are likely to require some measure of emotional, practical and perhaps financial support from family and friends during this lengthy undertaking, so that the decision occurs in a social context (Johnson et al, 2000;Mewburn, 2011). There will probably be a significant impact on one's spouse and dependent children, for example.…”

Section: Factor 1: Family and Friendsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why start a higher degree by research? An exploratory factor analysis of motivations to undertake doctoral studies

Guerin

Jayatilaka

Ranasinghe

2014

Higher Education Research & Development

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The AM is defined by the National Information Standards Organization as: "The version of a journal article that has been accepted for publication in a journal."This means the version that has been through peer review and been accepted by a journal editor. When you receive the acceptance email from the Editorial Office we recommend that you retain this article for future posting.Embargoes apply if you are posting the AM to an institutional or subject repository, or to academic social networks such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, or Academia.edu. give for undertaking a PhD; here we extend the discussion to explore research degree candidates' motivations across all faculties. The aim of our study was to identify the factors that motivate students to undertake HDRs, and also to attempt to establish what role undergraduate experiences of research might play in this decision-making.A handful of recent studies have focused on motivations to undertake HDRs in specific disciplines, with a particular emphasis in the areas of Education and Business (see Table 1). university, but it is likely that there will also be other motivating factors for different subsets in the STEM fields. While we might think we know why students decide to embark on an HDR, there is little systematically gathered, empirical evidence to determine whether or not these assumptions are in fact correct for students in recent years from a broader range of disciplines.• Entry to academia • Professional development • Professional advancement • Entry to new career • Self-enrichment Business (Professional Doctorate) USA Stiber (2000) • Personal satisfaction • Preparation for teaching • Marketability for consulting •Unlike the studies listed above, our research was conducted across all faculties in a comprehensive Australian research-intensive university. The results of our study are reflective of the HDR candidate population across all faculties, rather than being focussed mainly on Education or Business as in existing studies. We did not distinguish between types of HDR in the current study. The Survey Questionnaire DevelopmentTo the best of our knowledge, there is no relevant questionnaire readily available aimed at identifying motivations behind students pursuing postgraduate research.Therefore, we used a deductive approach, sometimes described as logical partitioning (Hinkin, 1998), to generate the initial set of questions. In a deductive approach it is assumed that the theoretical foundation provides enough information to generate the initial set of questions. For this, firstly a literature review (summarized in Table 1) was executed in order to identify the main domains which motivated postgraduate research students to become researchers, initially categorized as general motivations and undergraduate experiences. However, it was not expected that these domains would necessarily emerge as distinct factors in the data analysis. Questionnaire items were based primarily on the literature review; then, in order to assure content validity and face validity, i...

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“…As Mewburn andThomson (2013, 1106) found in their study of academic blogs, academics online "most commonly write about academic work conditions and policy contexts, share information, and provide advice." Such bloggers combine research and teaching posts with broader discussions of work practices.…”

Section: Feeling Like "Shit" In the Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (Combined PDF of all articles)

Allmer¹,

Bulut

2018

tripleC

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Modern universities have always been part of and embedded into capitalism in political, economic and cultural terms. In 1971, at the culmination of the Vietnam War, the Chomsky-Foucault debate reminded us of this fact when a student asked: "How can you, with your very courageous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?" (Chomsky and Foucault 2006, 63). Chomsky responded dialectically, but also had to admit that the academic institution he is working for is a major organisation of war research and thereby strengthens the political contradictions and inequalities in capitalist societies.Edward P. Thompson (1970), one of the central figures in the early years of British cultural studies, edited Warwick University Ltd in the 1970s. Thompson was working at the University of Warwick then and published together with colleagues and students a manuscript that discovered, as the title suggests, the close relationship of their university with industrial capitalism. The book also revealed some evidence of secret political surveillance of staff and students by the university, which was uncovered by students occupying the Registry at Warwick at that time.In a more recent context, the renowned Marxist geographer David Harvey faced an interview question about managerialism and the pressure to raise external funding at his university, City University of New York: "I had a dean saying to me that I wasn't bringing in any money. You're worthless, he said, as far as we're concerned. So I asked what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to set up an Institute of Marxist Studies funded by General Motors? And the dean said, 'Yes, that's a good idea. I'll support you if you can do that'" (Taylor 2010).The relationship between state control and global capitalism has intensified in the last decades. With the collapse of the welfare state and the drop of public funds, universities are positioning themselves as active agents of global capital, transforming urban spaces into venues for capital accumulation and competing for profits derived from international student populations. In this environment, students have to pay significant amounts of tuition for precarious futures. Similarly, teaching and research faculty across the globe have to negotiate their roles that are often strictly defined in entrepreneurial terms. Increasingly, the value of academic labour is subject to new forms of control, surveillance and productivity. As the recent cases of Steven Salaita (USA), Academics for Peace (Turkey) and the crackdown against students in India reveal, academic labour and academics in general are also facing immense challenges in terms of state control and freedom of speech.Situated in this economic and political context, the overall task of this special issue of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique is to gather critical contributions examining universities, academic labour, digital media, and capitalism. The artic...

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Troubling talk: assembling the PhD candidate

Cited by 38 publications

References 18 publications

Experiencing doctoral liminality as a conceptual threshold and how supervisors can use it

Experiencing doctoral liminality as a conceptual threshold and how supervisors can use it

Why start a higher degree by research? An exploratory factor analysis of motivations to undertake doctoral studies

Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (Combined PDF of all articles)

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