Curating care-full spaces: doctoral students negotiating study from home

ABSTRACT

This article explores how care and space shape doctoral becoming. We extend previous higher education research that has critically examined the spatial arrangements of postgraduate study to explore how doctoral students negotiate both study from home and care-work responsibilities. The article draws on collaborative autoethnographic texts created by the authors to understand the ways in which care shaped their decisions about study spaces. We identify both exclusions and disadvantage in these accounts, at the same time as we discern wilfulness in the ways the contradictory positions of postgraduate student and caregiver were negotiated. We conclude the article by arguing that educational spaces are involved in the maintenance of academic norms that position care-work as invisible and out-of-place/space. Despite this, the creation of productive home spaces that facilitate both care and doctoral work remain possible.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic writing
• autoethnography
• care
• doctoral education
• home
• space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

James Burford http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0707-7401

Genine Hook http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2562-0911

Notes

1 We would also like to note at the outset that our autoethnographic accounts have been written in the third person in order to give the authors some critical distance, and to enable the other author to act as co-analyst of the account.

2 Interestingly, men of a certain social status have often had private spaces of retreat, such as the den, shed or ‘man cave’, whereas the idea of women retreating from familial spaces is often deemed improper.