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The higher education sector in Sweden has, over decades, faced increasing demands in terms of efficiency rates in research, as well as increasing demands in the international competition for external revenue. These demands have influenced academic career trajectories and postdoctoral tracks as well as the everyday work of doctoral students. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how doctoral students express and challenge subjectivity in the present context of research education.

The authors depart from the overall understanding that doctoral students’ lines of actions in research education depend on and form assemblages and, thus, define an academic institution. By re-analysing eight in-depth interviews, they illustrate how doctoral students from different milieus not only comply but also challenge, use border-crossings and change directions in research education.

The results show that some of these doctoral students try to act as loyal and satisfied, especially in regard to their supervisors, whereas others use coping strategies and resistance. It is illustrated that when some of the students use “unsecure” molecular lines, they appear more open to redefining possibilities and change, in comparison with those on more stable molar lines. Those acting on molar lines sometimes express a lack of emotional (productive) engagement, even though this particular group tend to more often get access to rewarded assemblages. These patterns are partly gender-related.

The tension between finding more stable lines and spaces for change is apparent in doctoral students’ subjectivity, but also how this tension is related to gender. The women doctoral students appear not only more mobile but also in a sense more alert than their men peers. This offers insights in how actions define and redefine not only academic institutions but also different subjectivities.

In the present, given the manifold demands on academic institutions, new insights and methodological approaches are necessary to illustrate how contemporary changes affect research education and the everyday life of doctoral students.

In this paper, we take up an autoethnographic review of literature on doctoral programs in order to engage notions of doctoral subjects. While the paper basically proceeds by taking up and entwining these methods, it is neither/both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review. Rather, this work – like many spaces of a doctoral seminar – emerges as an uncontainable, unpredictable monster. We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading of what this “I” might be. We search for a preconfigured “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of doctoral experiences that never quite exists and yet moves and haunts us. We take up a tentative (post-)monstrous position that recognizes our cruel attachment to the “good” doctoral student, a subject that remains the inevitable (im)possibility of graduate school. Reviewing literature as an ethnographic practice and looking at ethnography as textual helps us smash these methods together. Yet, at any moment, we defy our methods – ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move intends to focus on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well defined “researchers.” We hope our project provides space to question the very categories and credentials built into doctoral studies by decentering the “doctoral student” subject.

This paper aims to explore doctoral candidates’ ethical work in writing the acknowledgements section of their theses. With interest in the formation of academic identities/subjectivities, the authors explore acknowledgements writing as always potentially a form of parrhesia or risky truth-telling, through which the candidate places themselves in their relations to others rather than in their claims to knowledge (Luxon, 2008).

Doctoral candidates from all faculties in one Japanese and one Aotearoa New Zealand university participated in focus groups where they discussed the genre of thesis acknowledgements, drafted their own version and wrote a reflective commentary/backstory.

Viewing the backstories through the lens of parrhesia (with its entangled matters of frankness, truth, risk, criticism and duty) showed candidates engaged in complex ethical decision-making processes with, at best, “ambiguous ethical resources” (Luxon, 2008, p. 381) arising from their academic and personal lives. Candidates used these resources to try and position themselves as both properly academic and more than academic – as knowing selves and relational selves.

This study bares the ethical riskiness of writing doctoral acknowledgements, as doctoral candidates navigate the tensions between situating themselves “truthfully” in their relations with others while striking the necessary pose of intellectual independence (originality). In a context where there is evidence that examiners not only read acknowledgements to ascertain independence, student and/or supervisor quality and the “human being behind the thesis” (Kumar and Sanderson, 2020, p. 285) but also show bias in those readings, this study advises reader caution about drawing inferences from acknowledgements texts. They are not simply transparent. As examiners and other readers make sense, judgments even, of these tiny, often fascinating, glimpses into a candidate’s doctoral experience, they need to understand that a host of unpredictable tensions with myriad ambiguous effects are present on the page.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an experiment in a non-credit bearing series of social philosophy workshops offered to social science and humanities disciplines in an Australian university.

The paper outlines the design rationale and learning objectives for the workshop series. The data set includes qualitative student responses to 501 post-workshop questionnaires and 14 in-depth qualitative responses to a follow-up online questionnaire.

The data suggest that social philosophy methodology curriculum offered within a multi-discipline peer context can facilitate an appreciation among students of the centrality of theory and the value of diverse discipline approaches in research. The last part of the paper explores what underpins this – a kind of un-learning or uncertainty regarding the veracity of different philosophical approaches to research, tied to a de-centring of research subjectivity that allows for the co-existence of multiple voices. Language learning, the inclusion of post-modern perspectives and an unbiased presentation of a wide range of thinkers within a challenging intellectual context are central to this.

The emerging trend towards university-wide doctoral training offers opportunities for useful innovations in research education. University-wide social philosophy curriculum can play a role in facilitating constructive negotiation of theoretical complexity both within and across social science and humanities disciplines.

The contemporary social science and humanities research context is a challenging space, characterised by intra-discipline methodological plurality, and the risk of marginalisation by more dominant instrumentalist, end-user and science-driven perspectives. The trend towards bringing different methodological perspectives together within inter-disciplinary research and team supervision of doctoral students can lead to conceptual misunderstanding and research delays. The capacity to negotiate and translate conceptual perspectives, often within complex research relationships, has then become an increasingly important academic skill. Within this context, university-wide doctoral training has emerged, but there has been little discussion of doctoral curricula beyond that devised for professional doctorates within the discipline in the non-US higher education literature. This paper contributes to emerging scholarship on research education by describing the sorts of relational, textual and conceptual processes that might be created in the multi-discipline social science and humanities context to produce an appreciation for the different philosophical foundations of research knowledge.

As an international PhD student studying the internationalization of higher education, my personal experience was inherently related to the circumstances that I was researching. The personal and the cognitive encouraged each other. This chapter discusses the interrelated nature of the affective and productive aspects of my PhD experience by focusing on three major influences on that experience. It further explains how those affective drivers defined not only the subjective experience of my PhD but also the direction and structure of the PhD itself. As such, I intend to make explicit what it means to complete a PhD as an international student in Australia – at least, what it meant for me.

Evaluation of research is a core function of academic work, yet there has been very little theoretical development about what it means to ‘know’ in relation to judgements made in examination of doctoral research. This chapter addresses the issue by reflecting on findings from three projects aimed at enhancing understanding of doctoral examination. In order to progress understanding about knowledge judgements in the doctoral research context, the chapter draws on two key contributions in the field of knowledge and knowing, namely, Habermas’ cognitive interests and Chinn, Buckland and Samarapungavan’s notion of epistemic cognition. It examines the common ground between the two bodies of theory, drawing illustratively on empirical work in the field of doctoral examination. The comparison of the Habermasian theory of cognitive interests with Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition led to the conclusion that there were areas of overlap between the two conceptual schemas that could be utilised to advance research into doctoral examination in higher education. Habermas’ cognitive interests (which underpin his ways of knowing theory) offer a conceptual lens that facilitates analysis of the interaction of ontological and epistemic components of knowledge production. Chinn et al.’s notion of epistemic cognition allows for finer grained analysis of aspects of the cognitive work involved in knowledge rendition. This work is particularly pertinent in an era that sees the boundaries of the disciplines being challenged by the need for new perspectives and cross-disciplinary approaches to solving complex problems.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on pedagogy as a crucial element in postgraduate research undertakings, implying active involvement of both student and supervisor in process of teaching and learning.

Drawing on Australian higher degree research supervision practice to illustrate their argument, the authors take issue with reliance on traditional Oxbridge conventions as informing dominant practices of supervision of postgraduate research studies and suggest pedagogy as intentional and systematic intervention that acknowledges the problematic natures of relationships between teaching, learning, and knowledge production as integral to supervision and research studies.

The authors examine issues of discursive practice and the problematic nature of power differentials in supervisor‐supervisee relationships, and the taken‐for‐grantedness of discursive practice of such relationships. The authors do this from the perspective of the student involved in higher degree research programs, a departure from the bulk of the literature that has as its focus the perspective of the supervisor and/or the institution.

The paper examines the perspective of the student involved in higher degree research programs, a departure from the bulk of the literature that has as its focus the perspective of the supervisor and/or the institution.

Doctoral degrees are generally the highest level of education provided by educational institutions in Western countries. Nevertheless, doctoral degree holders – i.e. Philosophiae Doctors (PhDs) – struggle to find a job that matches their knowledge and expertise. This article investigates the effects that PhDs' satisfaction with different attributes of educational services has on their ability to obtain employment either in academia or outside it.

Secondary data were accessed from a nationwide survey performed in Italy between February and July 2014. More than 16,000 people who achieved a doctoral degree between January 2008 and December 2010 were involved in the analysis. The four-years' time-span was justified by the need to avoid potential biases produced by a short time lapse between data collection and the awarding of the respondents' doctoral degree. A logistic regression model was designed to shed light on the relationship between doctoral degree holders' satisfaction and their ability to find employment.

This study results suggested that the attributes of educational services had varying effects on the doctoral degree holders' ability to obtain work. More specifically, the perceived quality of research and methodological courses delivered by educational institutions and the quality of the technologies and digital resources available at the host university were found to positively affect the ability of doctoral degree holders to get a job in academia. Conversely, the satisfaction with the quality of the teaching activities was positively related to the doctoral degree holders' employability outside academia.

The quality of educational services provided to students attending a doctoral degree course affects their ability to find work. Enhancing the quality of educational services may reduce the risk of unemployment amongst doctoral degree holders.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, few attempts have been made to investigate the interplay between the quality of educational services and doctoral degree holders' employability.

Little is known about the impact external Viva examiners coming from the international community of scholars have on the quality of PhD research. This study aims to argue that the encounter between local and international examiners (IEs) is subject to various complexities, raising doubts about whether IEs’ participation and approval of the Viva may indicate for the quality of PhD research, and, therefore, serve to promote a university’s prestige.

A qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with IEs who served as examiners in six European countries, two African countries, two South American countries and one in the Commonwealth of Australia.

Findings show that structural features, cultural qualities and personal contacts restrict IEs’ ability to introduce significant changes in students’ research, turning the Viva into a ritual with confined academic significance.

The findings reveal that the Viva is mostly a ritual confined by structural and cultural barriers. While rituals are considered significant due to their consolidating and socializing functions, it appears that a Viva is mostly a ceremonial event that has little impact on the quality of PhD research or on shaping the research culture of the hosting universities according to international standards. Implications are further discussed.

This paper aims to offer an innovative approach to reflecting on research and practice around doctoral study and supervision. In the opening section of the paper, the authors discuss the idea that academic development as a doctoral candidate is concerned with how researchers write themselves into being as certain kinds of researchers, and how, in doing so, they become a character, like their supervisors, in the “figured world” of their research. This process of “becoming” can, the authors argue, be nurtured or hindered by different kinds of supervision practices.

With regard to the authors’ own experiences of doctoral supervision, the paper explores how their use of post-qualitative practices and methodologies encouraged new forms of intersubjectivity and academic development as their supervisory relationship advanced alongside the thesis itself.

The authors present the script of an ethnodrama (Saldana, 2111) which they wrote and performed on a number of occasions, as an alternative way of expressing their experiences of being in a relationship as doctoral supervisor and supervisor.

This choice of ethnodrama emerged out of a frustration with what the authors felt were increasingly predictable ways of discussing and reflecting upon the philosophy, content and assessment methods of postgraduate research and supervision across the educational disciplines.

The authors hope that their exploration of the imaginative spaces created through doctoral supervision will encourage other postgraduates and their supervisors to experiment with working creatively across interdisciplinary spaces and creating radical and even risky ways of mediating and sharing postgraduate teaching and learning relationships.