Theorising a connectivity mindset in doctoral candidates – using critical mobilities as a point of departure

ABSTRACT

This conceptual paper considers doctoral candidate mindset and effective doctoral supervision. I explore mindset through a Critical Mobilities lens to posit two mindsets that candidates inhabit on their doctoral journey: transit and connectivity (Kesselring, (2006). Pioneering mobilities: New patterns of movement and motility in a mobile world. Environment & Planning A, 38(2), 269–279. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37279). I suggest management of doctoral research in the UK and internationally predisposes doctoral candidates and their supervisors to a ‘transit mindset’ which focuses on completion. On the other hand, a ‘connectivity mindset’ of exploration better enables critical and creative thinking. While both mindsets are necessary for the production of a high-quality thesis, a connectivity mindset can be more uncomfortable for both supervisors and doctoral candidates in the context of the neoliberal performance management culture. With the aim of supporting better doctoral research and doctoral experience, the paper theorises three manifestations of connectivity mindset that supervisors may encounter. These are: ‘rhizomic thinking’ which the supervisory team can identify and support in their supervisee; the ‘nomadic space’ which is created between supervisor and supervisee when they share a connectivity mindset; and a ‘third space’ that is entered into by supervisors and supervisees, when a shared connectivity mindset incorporates personal experiences, feelings and needs. The paper concludes with six areas of focus for development of supervisory practice.

KEYWORDS:

• New mobilities paradigm
• doctoral supervision
• mindset

Introduction

Concern for the mental health and wellbeing of doctoral candidates has catalysed many activities and initiatives which are designed to help candidates to navigate the stressors and tensions of doing a doctorate in the context of a culture of performativity in research. These stressors include, in many national contexts: a drive for timely completion; a focus on quality of thesis; expectations to publish during the PhD; and requirements to engage with training and development in order to optimise doctoral employability. The limited research on doctoral mental health and wellbeing to date focuses mostly on assessing these additive interventions which are designed to be external aids to candidates in managing stress and developing resilience. In this paper, by contrast, I focus on the internal world of the doctoral candidate and aim to enhance supervisor support for supervisees by theorising three manifestations of supervisee mindset that supervisors may encounter. I will use this as the basis to elaborate six recommendations for supervisors.

My starting point is that mindset can shape how we respond to our environment (Dweck, 2006). It can affect candidate motivation, commitment and engagement and supervisors have a role to play in influencing the type of mindset that candidates adopt (Bowden & Green, 2019). I introduce the common metaphor of doctorate as journey (Kiley & Wisker, 2010; Hughes & Tight, 2013; Chiappa & Nerad, 2020) which leads me to look at mindsets that have been theorised in the context of mobility. I draw on theoretical understandings from the New Mobilities Paradigm, in particular two different ways that mobile professionals construct the inner logic of their own mobility practice (Kesselring, 2006) – that is, how they, as individuals, mentally engage with their physical journeys through time and space. From this, I sketch two mobility mindsets: transit and connectivity. A transit mindset centres exclusively on the destination. In the context of a doctoral candidate, this mindset focuses on thesis submission, examination and what comes next. A connectivity mindset has a focus on the journey rather than its endpoint. It is more open and exploratory, maximising engagement with every opportunity and pursuing multiple lines of enquiry.

I acknowledge that mindsets are themselves mobile and that doctoral candidates will move between mindsets during their doctoral journey. I argue that the neoliberal forces at play within the university predispose doctoral candidates to spend more time in a transit mindset, even though a connectivity mindset is equally necessary if doctoral candidates are to make an original contribution to knowledge.

I use notions of rhizomic thinking, nomadic space and third space to theorise manifestations of a connectivity mindset. The paper goes on to highlight how supervisors can support and enable doctoral candidates to spend time in a connectivity space. I then explore a number of initial areas of focus for development of supervisory practice with the aim of supporting better research, better mental health and well-being and better outcomes for doctoral candidates. I propose this as a tentative framework for empirical work on doctoral candidate mindset and effective doctoral supervision.

Doctoral candidate mental health and mindset

Concern for the mental health and wellbeing of doctoral candidates is a key trend in policy and practice in doctoral education across a number of countries and regions. Posselt (2021) identifies common experiences within doctoral communities in the United States and Canada during their doctorates including isolation, high levels of competition, long work hours and discrimination. These experiences are highlighted also in a 2020 mental health survey of 13,000 junior researchers (Cerejo et al., 2020), a 2017 study of 3659 doctoral candidates in Belgium (Levecque et al., 2017) and in a Nature 2019 survey of more than 6000 doctoral candidates. The culture of performativity in research is often highlighted as a major stressor; particularly the inherent tensions between timely completion of doctoral projects, quality requirements to make a contribution to knowledge in the thesis and policy drivers which focus on graduate employability through participation in expansive programmes of training and development. Chiappa and Perez Mejias (2019) point out that the desire to admit candidates from more diverse backgrounds onto doctoral programmes could potentially amplify the need for support to ensure well-being, high-quality research outcomes and timely doctoral completions.

Watson and Turnpenny’s (2022) review of published work on doctoral candidate wellbeing and related interventions and practices suggest a greater focus to date on understanding the value and impact of a range of additional initiatives and extra resources, provided by universities to doctoral candidates in order to support good mental health in the context of the inherent tension described above. These include assessments of interventions to develop community (Janson & Howard, 2004), to improve the research environment (Guthrie et al., 2017); coaching and mentoring (Lane & De Wilde, 2018; Mason & Hickman, 2019) and the provision of psychological and emotional resources (Waight & Giordano, 2018). The purpose of this paper by contrast is to move away from well-being initiative overload in the doctoral context and instead to theorise a model that focuses on the individual doctoral candidate, how they respond to their doctoral journey through their mindset and how supervisors might identify and support them to spend time in a connectivity mindset that can be uncomfortable in the context of a research performance culture.

Mindset is defined by Dweck as a belief that orients one’s responses to situations (Dweck, 2006, p. 570). Her work has had profound implications for the field of education because it highlights how individual students’ mindset can affect their motivation and achievement in school. In the doctoral context, Bowden and Green (2019) suggests that mindsets can be shaped through supervision to affect candidate motivation, commitment and engagement. The emotional space between supervisory team and doctoral candidate provides the link between mindset and the context for doctoral work (p. 77). Bowden and Green considers specifically how a shared ‘completion mindset’ between supervisors and doctoral candidates in Australia might enable effective progress, research integrity and candidate wellbeing in the context of the systemic pressures endured by both groups in a ‘complete or retreat’ working environment (p. 84). For Bowden and Green, a completion mindset is cultivated by clear, early and frequent discussions in supervision meetings, of plans and practicalities, and a focus on goals and meeting demands. He suggests that in this mindset, completion is deemed to be of such importance that all ‘distractions’ are cast aside as far as possible.

Through my own experience of supervision and holding director roles in doctoral schools over several years, I see the impact of candidate mindset on doctoral experience, candidate well-being and their ability to make progress. I see the value and effectiveness of a shared completion mindset, at times, during individual PhD projects. However, I take the position that in general, candidates will generate ideas and make their contribution to knowledge in a different kind of mindset; one which aligns much more closely with the kind of ‘nonlinear progress, unaccounted for time (…) unknowing-ness and even incomprehension’ that Bengtsen and Barnett (2017, p. 129) set out as important characteristics of undertaking research. This, of course, has the potential to sit uneasily within management practices that use fixed frameworks of expectation for consistent progress and prescribed outputs.

In order to begin to theorise this other mindset, I will start with the metaphor of doctorate as journey.

Doctorate as journey

The doctorate is described in higher education sector press, peer-support blogs, university guidance and the scholarly literature as a journey, route, pathway and sometimes rollercoaster (Hughes & Tight, 2013; Winstone & Moore, 2017; Breier, Herman, & Towers, 2020). Carter, Smith and Harrison’s (2021) editorial on a special edition of the journal of Teaching in Higher Education (2021) focuses on the ‘borderland journeys’ that doctoral education opens up (p. 284). Moreover, the metaphor of journey is applied to a number of specific aspects of research into the doctorate, including, for example to frame discussion about change and development of identities over the course of the doctorate (Amundsen & McAlpine, 2009; McAlpine, 2012), to explore how candidates navigate dual landscapes of research and doctoral development (Elliot, 2022) and to examine international doctoral candidates’ passage across languages and cultures (Li, 2021).

Building on my previous work which also used the metaphor of doctorate as journey (Smith McGloin, 2021), I apply theoretical concepts from the New Mobilities Paradigm (described below) first to theorise two types of mobility mindset that are present in the doctoral journey.

New mobilities paradigm

New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP) is also referred to as ‘critical mobilities research’ (Sheller, 2013, p. 45). NMP emerged within social science as a way of understanding the social world which included movement and fixed infrastructure in ordering social relations. This conceptual shift defined movement in the new paradigm as spatial. It focused on movement of goods and services, flows of information and people’s journeys through ‘physical movement such as walking and climbing, bikes and buses, cars and trains, ships and planes’ (Sheller & Urry, 2006, p. 212). Fixed infrastructure, or ‘moorings’ (Hannam et al., 2006, p. 3) are the motorways, garages and airports that facilitate physical movement.

The ‘spatial turn’ in education research (Taylor, 2009) has so far seen a critical mobilities perspective applied to understanding the experiences of distance learners (Bayne et al., 2014; Edwards & Usher, 2007). In this work, the distance is spatial – becoming a student at a university on a different continent – but the movement is virtual and emotional, because the course is taught online. This paper takes one more step, away from physical movement between geographical locations, and towards a metaphorical understanding of doctorate as journey and an emotional engagement with the metaphorical journey through personal mindset; that is, the belief that orients a doctoral candidate’s experience of that journey.

I define mobility as the movement through the doctorate from enrolment to conferment and the infrastructure to include progression monitoring processes and deadlines, funder requirements, regulations, research degree governance committees and supervision record forms. This infrastructure can act to enable movement (that is, progression through the doctorate) as part of a ‘complex, interlocking system’ of ‘mobility and moorings’ (Urry, 2007, p. 5) or it can be deeply frustrating and anxiety-inducing in moments when the ways in which universities seek to ‘manage’ the doctorate are seen as ‘immobile infrastructure’ (Urry, 2007, p. 19).

Transit and connectivity space

I begin with a consideration of Kesselring’s notion of ‘transit space’ and ‘connectivity space’. These are theorised by Kesselring (2006) in his study of ‘mobility pioneers’ (Kesselring, 2006, p. 269), who he defines as professional workers who have constructed a life that is highly mobile. The Mobility Pioneers Project (Bonss & Kesselring, 2001) investigated how mobile people orientated themselves under conditions of uncertainty, insecurity, and the ongoing shrinkage of time and space in the context of globalisation. Kesselring acknowledged that mobility practice is structured by external forces such as contextual situations, economic and social conditions, and power relations. He explored how the inner logic of participants’ mobility practice functioned in this context. He focused on how individual actors influenced time and space by the way in which they understood and responded to their own mobility. I take a similar Bourdieusian position to look at a middle ground between exogenous forces (social laws and structures) and individual minds through a focus on the ability of actors (doctoral candidates) to adopt different mobility mindsets which influence how they orient themselves to moving through the doctoral journey.

Kesselring describes two ‘modes of being in the world’ (Kesselring, 2006, p. 278) which I am describing as mobility mindsets: one of moving through space with the least interaction, as the individual already has a sense that they are at their destination; and the other of interacting in intense relationship to others. Transit mindset has an absolute focus on end point. In Kesselring’s study, this mindset is characterised by a mobility pioneer who shapes and controls mobility in order to manage and minimise problems in the journey. ‘Connectivity mindset’ is a view of life that is less structured and more comfortable with contingency. In the same study, connectivity mindset was characterised by ‘living a life beyond (local) fixations’ and ‘develop(ing) an individual culture and practice of “uprooting and regrounding”' (Ahmed et al., 2003; cited in Kesselring, 2006, p. 273). It is described as a space that ‘demands competence, discipline, concentration, and mental strength’ (Kesselring, 2006, p. 273).

A doctoral candidate most deeply in a transit mindset might be more likely to be at the beginning of the doctorate where the breadth and depth of the work is not yet uncovered or they might be near the end, at a point where it has become clear what actions are remaining to complete the thesis. For those near the beginning they may have entered into the doctoral journey as an expert practitioner in their field and intend to engage with the doctorate as a means to an end for career advancement. They may find it particularly difficult to engage with broad-based discipline training without understanding the direct relevance to their project. Although they may generate drafts frequently, they may struggle to engage critically. They may openly or tacitly miss the certainty and signposting provided by measurable objectives in the workplace or by explicit undergraduate or taught postgraduate learning outcomes. Conversely, a doctoral candidate most deeply in a connectivity mindset might present in a supervision meeting as actively engaging with a wide range of literature and be potentially uncomfortable with narrowing the field or approach. They may be well-engaged with training and development and actively building multiple networks. They may avoid fixing their arguments at a moment in time, in a draft. Drawing conclusions in their writing may be particularly challenging for them. Kesselring, in his study, highlights the need for a prerequisite set of competencies and skills for what he terms this ‘complex juggling with different places, social belongings, identities, and social, material and virtual networks’ (Kesselring, 2006, p. 274) in the connectivity mindset. These would enable the individual to act as a node in the context of multiplex physical and virtual connected networks and to practice mobility ‘without (…) origin, direction, and destination’ (Kesselring, 2006, p. 274). Kesselring characterises this type of mobility mindset as decentred and having a non-directional logic.

To use transit and connectivity mindsets to theorise the doctoral experience of the doctoral journey, we need to acknowledge not only external forces – as Kesselring did – which in our context might be summarised as access to funding, social and economic situation and current life circumstances, previous experiences, information received through induction and training, supervisors’ knowledge and support and the research culture at group, department and institutional level. More recent work on mental health and wellbeing also reminds us that internal forces such as the doctoral candidates’ personality, overall health and wellbeing, feelings of identity, individual understanding of the research process and sense of belonging in the university are at play (Schmidt & Hansson, 2018). The Mobility Pioneers Project sought to develop typologies of personal mobility strategies over a short period of time in the lives of its participants. Kesselring connects personal mobility strategies to the individual competencies and skills of the mobility pioneers. I argue that using mobility mindsets to theorise the doctoral journey requires us to consider how mobility mindsets are themselves mobile and that doctoral candidates’ shift between mindsets to accommodate changes in internal and external forces; and in response to the supervision they receive.

Predisposition towards a transit mindset

The focus on completions, characterised by Hill (2015) as doctoral programmes as part of ‘industrial training centres suited to the requirements of the neoliberal economy’ (2015, p. 1) provides a context where external forces within the university predispose doctoral candidates and their supervisors to a transit mindset. Even when doctoral candidates – through internal forces such as personality, identity and a developed sense of belonging to an academic community – achieve a connectivity mindset, the ticking clock to thesis submission can create an uncomfortable space which has a negative impact on the doctoral experience, candidate well-being and their ability to make progress. The annual progression-monitoring points that are required in many UK universities are common events which will push doctoral candidates towards a transit mindset. Ultimately a transit mindset is required for submission of the thesis, acceptance that the research question has been answered, the project completed and the destination reached.

However, the journey through time towards autonomy, critical and creative thinking and innovation (Baptista et al., 2015; Bitzer & Bergh, 2014; Brodin, 2016) requires the cultivation of a connectivity mindset which enables periods of exploration through reading and thinking to build new knowledge. I draw on the work of Shurmer-Smith and Hannam (1995) and Roy (2003), based on Deleuze and Guattari (1988) and Wang (2004), to theorise three manifestations of connectivity mindset that may present in supervision meetings and to explore ways in which supervisors can support, enable and benefit from doctoral candidate time spent in this mindset. These are rhizomic thinking, nomadic space and third space. They work at the level of the individual – with the supervisors supporting from the outside – the space in between the supervisors and the doctoral candidate, and the space beyond the known, that is previous literature and previous patterns of thinking.

Manifestations of connectivity mindset in supervision

Rhizomic thinking

Rhizomic thinking derives from the philosophical conception of rhizome which combines ‘lines of flight, movement, deterritorialization and destratification’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 3). Rhizome has been used variously to consider co-authorship between supervisors and doctoral candidates (Fullagar, 2017), the supervisory assemblage (Done, 2014) in relation to doctoral education and also to explore approaches to being a researcher (Clarke & Parsons, 2013). However, I use it here to characterise a mode of thinking that occurs in an individual doctoral candidate. In this framing, rhizomic thinking is observed by the supervisors as a messy, de-centred expression of a connectivity mindset which has the potential to expose supervisees to distractions. Although this mode of deep thinking is fundamental to the quality of the thesis and the contribution to knowledge, the supervisors may feel the pressure of time very keenly when the doctoral candidate is engaged with rhizomic thinking and may have to manage anxiety from two directions. The first is their own anxiety in a working context which is shaped by neoliberal performance management culture and what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘arborescent’ (binary, dualist) fixed pathways of learning and the construction of knowledge (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 15). The second is their supervisee’s anxiety where external forces such as access to funding, submission deadlines and engaging with training and development intrude on the freedom to think deeply in non-linear, generative ways.

Next, I will move from theorising a way of thinking for the doctoral candidate in a connectivity mindset to explore a way of supervisee and supervisor sharing a connectivity mindset. To this end, I shift the focus from the individual doctoral candidate and how the supervisors might observe and support them, to consider how supervisors might create, together with their supervisee, a new mobility space which they both inhabit. I draw on Kaustuv Roy’s exploration of the lives of teachers in public schools and his re-conceptualisation of educational encounters within the discipline of curriculum theory here.

Nomadic space

Roy developed a notion of ‘teachers in nomadic spaces’ (Roy, 2003). Borrowing most heavily from the Deleuzian concepts of nomad and rhizome, Roy’s nomadic space is a conceptual space in which teachers in American public schools negotiate between their own desires for personal and professional agency and the forces of institutional domination. The struggles he depicts in nomadic space map to those encountered by supervisors and doctoral candidates who must balance the inherent tensions between quality, that is research developed through deep, rhizomic thinking, and timely and efficient completion of the thesis.

In Roy’s nomadic space, there is a possibility for teachers to create new collaborative places of meaning-making by disengaging from representationalism and engaging with ‘rhizomic practices’. That is, for Roy, teachers should refuse fixed conceptions of their roles as teachers (possessors of knowledge), the roles they give their students (those who need to be taught) and the labels they give their students (high-performer, at-risk) and activities (school reports, tests) which sort and code thought to ‘maintain “correctness” of existing ideals’ (Roy, 2003, p. 23). Roy suggests that the ‘continuous variation’ (Roy, 2003, p. 72) in nomadic space where roles are not fixed has the potential to re-frame the educational encounter and to calm resistant students by removing category-bound hierarchies. In the doctoral context, supervisors would create nomadic space by enabling doctoral candidates’ rhizomic thinking to extend beyond the individual to encompass themselves also. In this scenario, the supervisors would support the supervisee in their connectivity mindset by joining them in deep, generative thought and leaving the ‘Outside’ (Roy, 2003, p. 70) – that is, the context of a culture of performativity in research – deliberately beyond the de-territorialised nomadic space that they have created at that moment within the supervision. For Roy, by creating nomadic space, teachers can disrupt the external forces of ‘standardization regimes, (and) attempts to de-professionalize and instrumentalize teachers’. In the doctoral context, the rhizomic practices he describes map to supervisory practices which include: affording the doctoral candidate’s life experience the same importance in the doctoral process as their structured accumulation of knowledge from books and articles; ‘experience-orientated supervision’ which encourages ‘messiness and inconsistencies’; and collaborative conversations which do not frame the supervisors as experts and the supervisee as deficient, but encapsulate an ongoing process of becoming for all.

Roy argues that a central cause of disharmony – teacher stress and student disaffection – occurs when teachers attempt to regulate the scope of legitimate becomings in a classroom setting; that is, when they attempt to deploy an idealised understanding of order and management and ‘the pedagogic encounter is an over-coding of the (student), creating a supplementary dimension in which are inserted various transcendental and powerful unifying images of identity, conformity, nationalism, work, achievement, competition, success/failure’ (Roy, 2003, p. 29). In doctoral supervision, this could be manifest in an approach to the doctoral project which reveals the supervisors’ own assumptions about the candidate, based on their former experience, candidate educational track record and previous work, or suppositions about career trajectory. Disharmony can also occur when supervisors attempt to bring the candidate prematurely back into a transit mindset in order that progression milestones can be achieved in the preordained time and order. Nomadic space requires supervisors to rid themselves of these coding shortcuts accumulated over years of practice so that any future is possible for the supervisee, the supervisory relationship and the project. This way of being enables supervisee and supervisors to become ‘rhizome researchers’ (Clarke & Parsons, 2013) together who can: (1) be inclusive, by being more aware of and attentive to ‘all’ those being researched and ‘all’ the information being gathered, including disparate and peripheral elements; (2) be disruptive, by problematising the status quo in their research topic, discipline or university; (3) be highly flexible, by adapting to unanticipated turns; (4) be bold, pursuing new areas of research; (5) be brave, by releasing preconceptions and allowing pre-personal intensities – the affect – to be part of the research. Therefore, creating nomadic space between supervisors and supervisees within a shared connectivity mindset creates the potential for supervisees and supervisors to bring their whole selves and experiences at that moment into the doctorate without fear of categorisation, competition, friction or responsibility for time taken and time to come. As such, nomadic space has the potential to ‘perhaps (ignite) the joy of research (as) the responsibility to make things happen is let go’ (Clarke & Parsons, 2013, p. 42), temporarily, for those in the connectivity mindset.

Finally, I move from considering thinking and being in a connectivity mindset to explore ways of leaving, drawing on Wang’s conception of a ‘third space’ (Wang, 2004, p. 16). Wang brings her experiences as a woman of ethnic Chinese descent working in the United States to bear on curriculum theory by developing the idea of third space from a conceptual origin in Foucault’s concept of creativity, Confucian relationality and Kristeva’s theorising of gender (Wang, 2007, pp. 389–390). At the practical level Wang looks at the complexity of intercultural understanding in the classroom (Wang, 2006, p. 114), and at the personal level her work provides a framework to understand the experience of intellectual exile (Wang, 2006, p. 112).

Third space

Wang describes a position of defamiliarisation of the everyday which resonates with the majority of doctoral candidates I have worked with, who at some point, feel keenly their loss – partly or wholly – of the familiar; for example, the structure of jobs and/or undergraduate programmes, the security of salaries or the esteem of career positions. Even full-time workers who undertake a doctorate part-time will likely experience the strong contrast between their familiarity with the structure of their ‘day job’ and the newness and unfamiliar nature of their doctoral journey. Wang’s description is particularly evocative of the experience of international candidates who have moved countries and education systems to pursue their doctorate in strange new cultural and educational contexts. The unfamiliar nature of everyday practice in doctoral studies also has a special relevance for doctoral candidates from under-represented groups. I do not explore these dimensions here but suggest that they may be further extensions of this work.

For Wang, third space is ‘ever-changing, open-ended, and unpredictable, playing with the unknown – (…) – but never able to contain (it)’ (Wang, 2007, p. 391). Wang’s experience of this space suggests that the unfamiliared and the defamiliarised provides critical distance which enables her to think creatively, in the Foucauldian sense of creating space within the constraints of social forms to impose a new framework of understanding that hides elements of what was previously known and allows new knowledge to appear. For Wang (2004), this can occur when ‘the stranger calls one out of oneself’ (Wang, 2004, p. 5) and the ‘stranger inside oneself emerges’ (Wang, 2004, p. 5). Embracing otherness enables the individual to leave behind an old self and move towards a new self yet to be created, in a process of ‘discontinuous becoming’ (Wang, 2004, p. 5).

Unlike Roy’s nomadic space, where the focus is the educational encounter, Wang’s use of third space theorises the individual; for our purpose the doctoral candidate. Her work looks at interdependence with multiple identities and how this constant interplay can generate independence of thinking and being, in a new subjective space where boundaries are seen but can be transgressed. The doctoral candidate in a third space embraces hybridity and the multiplicities of their own social, cultural and political identities which provide them with the means to generate a singular voice, which they express through the thesis.

Wang calls for an engaged and provocative pedagogy in third space (Wang, 2006, p. 121) through engagement and distance. For teachers and supervisors, this approach requires them to be vulnerable, to share their own journeys with their students, to open themselves to communal inquiry but, at the same time to challenge their students to cross boundaries, to make new meaning and to go beyond. In supervision, the presence of co-supervisors, and the often near-peer relationship with supervisees has the potential to make vulnerability challenging; particularly in professional doctorates where the career professional is often the expert in their area of inquiry. Yet, applying Wang’s work to theorise the supervisory space suggests that if supervisors are able to disclose the ordinarily unseen, such as their own failures and struggles, this can surface the semiotic (personal) in the doctoral candidate, in a way that allows it to interplay with the symbolic (structural) and to double-interact and transform each. In so doing, the symbolic forces of research performance culture which shape the experiences of many doctoral candidates are acknowledged and met in the third space by personal experiences, feelings and needs. Doctoral candidates are fully engaged with and distanced from both and can learn to leave the interstitial space between the two to participate in a perpetual process of new thinking and becoming.

Conclusion

I have used critical mobilities theory as a point of departure to theorise two doctoral mindsets – that is, two ways in which doctoral candidates might orient their responses to the doctoral journey in the context of the stressors of the drive for timely completion, the focus on quality of thesis, the expectations to publish and the requirements to attend comprehensive training and development to optimise their employability.

I argue that supervision is key to a positive doctoral experience and to doctoral candidates being able to develop resilient ways of thinking, working and being in a university context that can be experienced as ‘dehumanized, functional’; where ‘students are (sometimes) regarded more as purveyors of outcomes than people with feelings and genuine intellectual aspirations’ (Brabazon, 2016, p. 175). Despite an operating context which favours a transit mindset focused on completion, the development of autonomy, critical thinking and innovation – characteristic of a connectivity mindset – are as fundamental to meeting the requirements of a doctorate as handing the thesis in on time. However, time spent in a connectivity mindset can feel uncomfortable, undirected and disorientating. External forces such as funding worries, previous experiences, quality of induction, supervisors’ knowledge and internal forces such as personality, health, feelings of identity and belonging in the university can influence the ease with which a connectivity mindset can be maintained. Supervisors’ ability to recognise and support this mindset is critically important. I have used the concepts of rhizomic thinking, nomadic space and third space to attempt to theorise how doctoral candidates and supervisors can experience a connectivity mindset in their thinking, in creating collaborative supervisory spaces and in their ways of becoming. I propose this as a tentative framework for empirical work on doctoral candidate mindset and doctoral supervision to support better doctoral research and a better doctoral experience.

I suggest that my preliminary theorising has highlighted six initial areas of focus where supervisors could ourselves be challenged to go beyond, in an engaged and provocative exploration of the pedagogy of how we supervise. These are: (1) where possible, managing our own anxiety in a working context which is shaped by neoliberal performance management culture in order to facilitate deep, non-linear thinking in doctoral candidates who feel keenly their own performance pressures with high-risk personal and financial stakes; (2) consciously removing assumptions which impose patterns and identities on doctoral candidates that are based on previous experiences of doctoral supervision; (3) cultivating open-ness and deliberate attention to disparate and peripheral elements that disrupt expectations in the research topic, discipline area or university; (4) challenging ourselves to be courageous in the approach to research and giving space for the doctoral candidate’s project to lead itself; (5) opening ourselves up to be vulnerable to share personal experiences of academic practice with doctoral candidates; and (6) actively participating in communal inquiry as a partner in the research process, allowing critique of our own ideas and acting as critic.

Further work in this area would consider manifestations of connectivity mindsets in specific groups who are under-represented in doctoral education to explore how differences, for example, in educational track record, access to funding and additional caring responsibilities amplify feelings of risk and affect doctoral candidates’ ability and willingness to enter a connectivity mode of being in the world. Equally, where doctoral candidates sense of belonging is eroded by systemic and structural barriers, further work is required to understand how perpetual becoming in a third space is experienced and how this can be supported.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).