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This paper aims to examine how doctoral students in education and applied linguistics fields successfully navigated graduate writing demands by participating in a support community that catalyzed writing productivity, peer mentoring and feedback. Guiding graduate students’ writing processes based on scholarly interests and providing peer support are vital to scholarly productivity and transition into academia.

Following a collaborative analytic autoethnographic case study design (Adams et al., 2022; Chang et al., 2013), the authors narrated major events that impacted their writing and publication experiences. The authors visualized their entire doctoral writing experience based on the frequency of writing events that contributed to writing productivity. In data triangulation discussions, the authors reflected on writing experiences.

Findings show that the support community alleviated individual struggles associated with writing a dissertation and high-quality papers. Key factors contributing to scholarly growth included nonevaluative peer support, feedback and shared academic resources. Writing within the periphery of faculty research and predominantly focusing on doctoral milestones led to individual scholarly interests being overshadowed. Without structured guidance, doctoral writers may develop initiatives to alleviate individual struggles and meet academic writing demands in the disciplines.

The authors recommend including structured guidance on developing writing productivity and a personal research agenda in the early stages of the doctorate.

This study offers unique examples of how a student group supported writing productivity and socialization into the academic community. It illustrates the multifaceted nature of academic writing influenced by faculty–student relationships, peers and individual initiatives. This paper provides doctoral writers and graduate programs with examples of accomplishing academic publishing goals.

This chapter investigates the experiences of doctoral students and supervisors in the doctoral process, focusing on the potential impact of imbalances in the distribution of power. In this respect, there are troublesome manifestations of excessive faculty entitlement that appear to be a source of inequality and injustice. These phenomena call into question the crucial relationship of support expected of doctoral students, as thesis supervisors have a fundamental role to play in guiding them towards the doctorate and ensuring their successful entry into the research community. Looking at the issue from the angle of the theory of social fields, I examine instances of dysfunction in supervisory experiences. Such problematic practices tend to conform to the relationships and traditions that sustain and (re)produce the practices of the academy, constraining the establishment of what Bakhtin describes as a dialogical relationship, between doctoral students and supervisors. I examine this problem from my own experience, both as a doctoral student and as a supervisor. I approach the question by combining self-study and narrative inquiry to make use of the data from my experience to analyse the issues raised during the supervision of doctoral programmes. I connect accounts drawn from literature, real-life testimonies and a corpus of discussions and notes to explore the manifestations of excessive faculty entitlement in the form of asymmetries and difficulties that can negatively impact the quality of supervision.

Institutional framings of doctoral education mostly do not recognize the existential dimension of doctoral experience. This paper aims to offer an expanded understanding of experiences of doctoral researchers in the humanities with the concept of entangled becoming. This concept is developed through an existential lens by using Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy – particularly his emphasis on emotions such as passion, anxiety and despair – and Denise Batchelor’s derived concept of vulnerable voices.

The conceptual framing is used for an empirical study based on ethnographic interviews with 10 doctoral researchers and supplementary observational notes from fieldwork at a university in Denmark. Two of the interview cases were selected to showcase variation across lived experiences and how doctoral researchers voice their entangled becoming.

Common experiences such as loneliness, insecurity(ies), vulnerability(ies) or passion for one’s research were identified across the interviews. On the other hand, this study shows that each doctoral journey in the humanities envelops a distinct web of entanglements, entailing distinct navigation, that makes each case a unique story and each doctoral voice a specific one.

Combining an existential philosophical perspective with a qualitative study, the paper offers an alternative perspective for doctoral education. It connects the humanities doctoral experience to the broader condition of human existence and the sophisticated uniqueness of each researcher’s becoming.

This study aims to reflect on “good practices” in doctoral research supervision and transfer the author’s experience to other academics. The author explains the sources of his approach to doctoral research supervision drawing on traditional practice in adult learning and some reference to phenomenology as a “meeting of minds” between academic and industry mindsets.

This is a reflective paper condensing many years of practical experience advising industry managers doing doctoral research. It is not an empirical study as such but draws on extensive practitioner experience based on many successful PhD completions in the business and management domain.

There are no empirical findings as such, but ample practical experience of doctoral research process and outcomes over 40 years of supervision in both the UK and Australian Universities.

Generalisation is limited to the number of doctoral research completions (between 70 and 80).

The paper concludes with indicators of what the author regards as “good practices” in doctoral research supervision.

None is directly applicable, but academe-industry working partnerships might be improved with the author’s learner- and customer-centred approach to doctoral research with adults in senior positions in the industry wanting to do research.

This paper is based entirely on the author’s own working experience as a senior academic in UK and Australian Universities.

Empirical evidence on how supervisors have perceived the changes and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on their supervision is scarce. This paper aims to examine how the changing landscape of doctoral education has affected supervision from the supervisors’ perspective.

This survey addressed change, challenges and impact in supervisory responsibilities due to COVID-19 pandemic. The survey was completed by 561 doctoral supervisors from a large multi-field research-intensive university in Finland.

Results show that supervisors estimated that their supervision had been negatively affected by the pandemic, but to a lesser extent than their doctoral candidates’ progress and well-being. In the changed landscape of supervision, the supervisors grappled with challenges related to recognising doctoral candidates’ need of help. Supervisors’ experiences of the challenges and the impact of changed circumstances varied depending on the field and the position of the supervisor, whether they supervised part- or full-time candidates, and the organisation of supervision.

The slowed-down progression and diminishing well-being of doctoral candidates reported by supervisors is likely to influence supervision in a delayed way. Supervisors may be anticipating some issues with stalled studying and stress, but the question is the extent to which they are prepared to handle these as they emerge in supervision encounters. The fact that the experiences varied across field, position, organisation of supervision and the type of candidates (full or part time) suggests that support provided for supervisors to overcome challenges needs to be tailored and engineered.

This study contributes to the literature on doctoral supervision by exploring the impact of transitioning to online supervision and the rapid changes in doctoral supervision as a consequence of the recent global pandemic.

Although doctoral education has experienced substantial development in recent decades, it remains an elite, hence fragile, dimension of university policy and practice. This study aims to articulate perspectives to guide the next phase of strengthening and growth.

Working from theoretical and empirical research conducted in China, including scholarship on workforce ecosystems, education design and the student experience, this study contributes a framework with qualitative insights which clarify the goals and experiences of doctoral education in ways that will render it more relevant, effective and contributing.

The paper identifies areas for doctoral reform to ensure career readiness, including three distinctive outcomes and four indispensable experiences.

This study advances a doctoral design framework which can render transparent the substance of programs and prompt program coordinators to develop and ensure career relevance.

Studies have shown that doctoral students are at risk of mental health issues that result from the demands and workload in doctoral programs, poor work relationships with supervisors, and delays in graduation. Research also shows that savoring good moments can help individuals maintain and foster their wellbeing. Drawing on data from a larger phenomenological research study (Al Makhamreh, 2019), this chapter presents a discussion of the importance of savoring for wellbeing based on findings from 19 doctoral students in Canadian universities. Findings demonstrate that numerous students were able to face the challenges in their doctoral programs by savoring happy moments that benefited their wellbeing and fueled their energy to keep going to achieve their goals. Recommendations for universities include offering students courses, training, interventions, and workshops on savoring and positive psychology in general. Additionally, providing savoring outlets and opportunities (e.g., gardens and gardening activities) could help students maximize their program experiences and satisfaction.

While higher education has been encouraging interdisciplinary research, few studies have been conducted to understand how interdisciplinarity shapes the identity construction of scholars, especially doctoral students who may already strive to socialize into academia.

Therefore, this study adopts the approach of autoethnography to analyze my lived experience of developing disciplinary literacy and constructing interdisciplinary identity as a Chinese international doctoral student at a North American university. Communication theory of identity (CTI) is the theoretical framework through which I understand the negotiation among my personal, enacted, relational and communal identities while communicating my research through diverse literacy practices.

This autoethnography reveals that interdisciplinary doctoral students can flexibly use discursive resources from different disciplines and literacy practices in both English and their first language to dynamically create interdisciplinary identities communicable to different discourse communities. Their identities in different disciplines can develop simultaneously, rather than suppressing one for the development of the other as they do interdisciplinary research.

This study first extends current scholarly discussion of disciplinary literacy to a less-investigated setting, i.e. doctoral education in higher education. Second, it adds an additive and current layer of interdisciplinarity to the existing understanding of international doctoral students’ identity construction. Third, it helps to understand how the development of disciplinary literacy can facilitate disciplinary identity construction and how disciplinary identity construction can facilitate the development of disciplinary literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role an intentional and cohesive research group for doctoral researchers and supervisors can play in surfacing and de-mystifying many of the implicit doctoral literacy practices involved in doctoral study.

This participatory, collaborative project, involving 11 doctoral researchers and three supervisors, was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, doctoral researchers and supervisors engaged in a discussion which resulted in a shared concept map. The concept map was then used as a prompt for stimulated recall interviews in which the participants reflected on the connections and peer learning afforded by the research group.

Drawing on ideas from Communities of Practice theory, the data revealed that the research group, including both supervisors and doctoral students, developed knowledge, relational connections and an awareness of a range of doctoral literacies.

This paper makes suggestions for how those in doctoral education can develop and embed research groups into institutional practices.

This study demonstrates the significant role a research group which is structured, intentional and guided plays in supervisors’ and doctoral students’ development of doctoral literacies and the fundamental intellectual and relational connections afforded by participating in such communities.