Disrupting the doctoral journey: re-imagining doctoral pedagogies and temporal practices in higher education

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders narratives of the doctoral journey. It aims to contribute to a small but growing body of work which offers an irruption to widely accepted notions of learning as a linear pathway with a fixed end-point. The article engages two of Deleuze and Guattari’s many generative concepts: rhizome and becoming. In doing so, it explores the value of attending to the multiple and messy becomings that researchers experience, as they evolve throughout a doctorate and beyond. It focuses on how such an unsettling may be foregrounded by the increasing prevalence of new forms and possibilities for doctoral study, and it explores the textual implications of disrupting assumptions regarding doctoral writing. The article closes with considering what such a re-theorising might offer for our understanding of doctoral study and doctoral writing, as well as for the broader concepts of time, learning and change within higher education.

Introduction

The literature on doctoral education is rich with metaphors. Often, a doctorate is described as a pathway, journey or trajectory (e.g. Batchelor and Di Napoli 2006; Barnacle and Mewburn 2010; Brook et al. 2010; Wisker et al. 2010; Wisker 2018; Prøitz and Wittek 2020), a rite of passage (Kiley 2009; Humphrey and Simpson 2012) or a liminal space (Wisker et al. 2010; Winstone and Moore 2017; Håkansson Lindqvist 2018; Breier, Herman, and Towers 2020). Doctoral students have also been conceptualised as undertaking a crossing or boundary zone (Prøitz and Wittek 2020), and this special issue explores doctoral education via the trope of a ‘borderlands’ zone (Andzaldúa 1987). And yet, what do spatial narratives do? What possibilities exists beyond those spaces? Are depictions of linear journeys, or pathways from student to academic, from novice to expert, still fit for purpose?

In offering an alternative perspective, I engage with the work of theorists Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and in particular two of their many generative concepts: rhizome and becoming. I examine how these concepts can be put to work to develop our understanding of the irregular, fluid, and messy experiences of doctoral study. I suggest that rather than a linear journey towards a fixed endpoint, doctoral students can be understood as experiencing multiple and ongoing becomings, evolving and changing throughout a doctorate and beyond. I contend that such a re-imagining of the doctoral journey becomes even more appropriate when considering the increasing prevalence of alternative forms of doctoral study, which can offer irruptions to traditional conceptions of a linear doctoral journey, leading towards becoming an academic, and which can even disrupt the thesis genre itself. Finally, I conclude with a consideration of what such a re-imagining can do: I explore the openings that exist when doctoral journeys are disrupted, and consider the value of the emergent, irregular, and rhizomatic micro-moments of research.

Doctoral journeys and journeyings

There is a broad and rich literature exploring doctoral education. Within this literature, often metaphors of pathways, journeys, voyages or crossings have been employed (Batchelor and Di Napoli 2006; Barnacle and Mewburn 2010; Brook et al. 2010; Wisker et al. 2010; Wisker 2018) in order to depict researchers’ developing growth and increasing progression along their doctoral trajectory. Such concepts abound in texts offering advice for doctoral students and can also be found in institutional regulations and guidelines. As Batchelor and Di Napoli (2006, 18) explain ‘traditionally, the experience of doctoral studies has been reified as a fairly compact process characterised by a set of aims, rules and expectations.’ The assumption underpinning such a framing, is that the doctorate is a homogeneous, linear, process, defined by transparent and fixed rules and expectations, and with submission of the thesis signifying a distinct end-point. Traditionally this end-point was also understood as the ‘arrival’ of the researcher as a member of the academy (Keefer 2015). This conception has implications for both researcher and supervisor; as Petersen (2007) explains, as a result, the supervisor becomes ‘the all powerful category boundary maintainer, the gatekeeper, the judging eye: she judges is it competent, is it beautifully written, is it inconsistent, is it there yet?’ Here, the spatial conception of a distinct end point of the doctoral journey, as well as the idea of a boundary maintainer, is represented by the ultimate deciding question regarding the researcher’s thesis: ‘is it there yet?’

However, such spatial narratives have also been problematised. Hughes and Tight (2013, 771) examine the implications of the use of metaphors within doctoral education and contend that the trope of a journey is limiting in its individualist narrative: ‘its message of travailing against all obstacles, through the strength of inner spirit, speaks strongly to neo-liberal values of individualism, where personal motivation is all that is required to succeed.’ Such narratives of personal success and ‘inner spirit’ reference damaging discourses of competitive neoliberalism and individualism that pervade the landscape of contemporary higher education. Neoliberal ideologies and practices have been widely criticised (e.g. Morley 2016; Acker and Wagner 2019; Bottrell and Manathunga 2019; Taylor 2020), and the landscape of higher education has been described as being characterised by ‘accountability, competition, efficiency, individualism and managerialism,’ which deepens ‘the disadvantages of women and ethnic minority academics in pursuing research, as well as those in small universities or in countries on the periphery’ (Acker and Wagner 2019, 64). Taylor explains that neoliberal discourses enable the commodification of doctoral study, depicting a journey entailing ‘skills acquisition’ within an ‘increasingly performative policy context, in which the value of research skills to stakeholders is promoted as the most important outcome’ (2011, 443). And Taylor and Adams (2019) also examine how instruments employed to measure doctoral programmes, for example the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES), can be understood as tools in the production of such dominant discourses. Petersen (2007, 476) also explores doctoral study against this backdrop, surfacing the ‘neo-liberal or economic rationalist discourses of effectiveness and completion’ and questioning, ‘how those discourses may be operative and regulatory, what they make possible and impossible, and how they compete with other available discourses about the course and purpose of postgraduate research.’

However, as Petersen identifies, there are other, competing, discourses about the course and purpose of research, and alternative conceptions of doctoral study have been put forward to re-invigorate our understanding and to offer a more nuanced reading of both doctoral study and the nature of learning and change. Taylor (2011, 443) identifies that linear narratives of research progression sit in tension with alternative perspectives of doctoral study that imagine ‘an opportunity for deep immersion in a topic, an opportunity to follow up leads that may turn out to be red herrings, and a source of personal fulfilment’. Similarly, Taylor and Adams (2019, 13) adopt the more heterogeneous journeyings, in order to encourage ‘a shift away from prevailing discourses which privilege the measurement of satisfaction and the metrics of participation and performance’ and to ‘contest dominant, singularised and often linear notions of “the” doctoral student journey’ (2019, 1). Likewise, Batchelor and Di Napoli (2006, 14) adopt the metaphor of the journey in their vision of doctoral research, however, they also examine fractures which occur during the ‘voyage’, considering how ‘you begin to be pulled in different and sometimes conflicting directions by currents of thought that contradict each other and that are hard to combine.’ Such contradictions and conflicting ‘currents of thought’ evoke a more nuanced and mobile understanding of learning and progression - as fluid, evolving, and multi-directional.

Interconnected to concepts of learning and change are dominant discourses surrounding the concept of time in higher education. In recent literature, the way time has been conceptualised in higher education discourse and pedagogy has been exposed as problematic. In her work on doctoral education, Manathunga (2019) examines the interweaving themes of doctoral timescapes and temporal equity. Engaging Adam’s (1998) concept of timescapes, Manathunga explains that hegemonic, neoliberal agendas of efficiency, profitability and managerialism mean that time is often measured in ways that fail to acknowledge how time is experienced differently by candidates from diverse backgrounds such as different genders, classes and ethnicities (2019, 1227–30). Manathunga writes that often what counts is ‘how fast candidates can be churned through the doctoral education system, rather than the depth and sophistication of the original knowledge they produce or the ways in which unexpected events or issues may impede a candidate’s progress’ (1229-1230). Her research found that some supervisors focused on the present time of getting candidates through their doctoral studies, while other more effective supervisors focused on past, present and future time in supervision (2019, 1231). Ultimately, Manathunga argues for a reconceptualisation of rigid doctoral timescapes in order to create space for individuals’ epistemic, lived and eternal temporal rhythms: ‘multidirectional flows of time rather than a one-way linear, chronological progression of time so associated with the clock time of modernity’ (2019, 1232).

Common linear conceptualisations of time in Western higher education have also been unsettled by Bennett and Burke (2018), who argue for the need to attend to the relational aspects of time, and the different study trajectories individuals may experience. Bennett and Burke (2018, 922) contend that: ‘as socio-political, economic and cultural contexts change over time, and institutions and students’ lives change … the measurement and construction of time-lines that are more responsive and flexible should be attempted’. Similarly, Bosanquet, Mantai, and Fredericks (2020) explore how time can be understood as political. Their research reports that whilst doctoral researchers strongly echoed critiques of accelerated work, an individualistic culture in the academy that favours productivity above all was found to be pervasive (2020, 745). Drawing upon Derrida’s (1994) concept of deferred time, Bosanquet, Mantai and Fredericks explore the anxiety experienced by researchers who ‘as political subjects of the neoliberal university, whose temporality is externally driven’ often exist in a ‘deferred state’, waiting for the promise of what the completion of their PhD may achieve - for example a secure academic contract (2020, 746). Likewise, Pearson et al. (2011, 530) identify that ‘pressures for efficiency, for which the usual proxy is timely completions, can reduce doctoral students to objects in a throughput model of inputs and outputs’. And Araújo’s work (2005) offers an interesting departure from hegemonic treatments of the concept of time, instead exploring the circularity of doctoral time and how processes of ‘uncertainty and becoming’, constitute experiences of time (2005, 197). Taken together, these new possibilities for critiquing and reconceptualising doctoral research put forward in the literature offer exciting openings in which to re-orientate our understandings of doctoral study, as well as the broader concepts of time, learning and change.

In earlier reconceptualisations of doctoral research, Taylor et al. (2011) also engage concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to reimagine doctoral research journeys and conceptions of time, learning and change. In the following extract, Taylor et al. (2011) examine the utility of two key concepts, rhizome and assemblage, suggesting that the rhizome provides:

a useful concept with which to explore the ways in which the doctoral journey opens its participants to multiple, iterative and heterogeneous ways of knowing, becoming and telling. In doing so, we see the rhizome as a means to contest academic accounts which construct the doctoral journey as a linear process (2011, 194).

Conceptually, then, the botanical concept of the rhizome offers something new to educational researchers: an opening, an irruption, that can be used to reconsider learning and change. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) contrast the possibilities of arboreal and rhizomatic knowledge structures. For Deleuze and Guattari, traditional knowledge structures are depicted as arboreal. These structures are hierarchical, uni-directional and lead to linear progress. In contrast, the rhizome spreads horizontally in all directions. ‘There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 8). A rhizome, they suggest, ‘has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing’ (1987, 26). A rhizome spreads in multiple directions, and underpinning rhizomatic knowledge are ‘principles of connection and heterogeneity; any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). The rhizome serves therefore as a meaningful metaphor for understanding systems, structures or processes that are non-linear, and that are continuously evolving and making new connections.

Indeed, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is rich in concepts that can unsettle our thinking about taken-for-granted aspects of higher education research, policy and practice, and another idea that offers potential for educators is the concept of becoming. For Deleuze and Guattari: ‘a line of becoming has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival origin nor destination’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 341–342). Becomings are nebulous, fluid, evolving. Deleuze and Guattari describe becoming as ongoing, indicating the permanent nature of change. This conceptual tool offers rich potential for higher education researchers to think differently about areas of practice and about learning and change. Learning does not lead to a fixed end-point; rather becomings have ‘neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival origin nor destination’. In the following sections, I therefore continue the work in the sector that has begun to disrupt linear narratives of time, learning and research, and I explore how we might build further upon this, putting new concepts to work in order to create openings for thinking differently about doctoral pedagogies.

A changing sector

In recent years, what it is to be a PhD student and what it means to do a PhD has begun to evolve, as new, more diverse, approaches to doctoral education have become more prevalent internationally (Pearson et al. 2011; Gardner et al. 2012; Guerin 2013; Wildy, Peden, and Chan 2015). In 2011, Pearson et al. (2011) explored the increasing diversity of doctoral students. Traditional stereotypes, they suggest, of young, full-time, funded, and predominantly male students, have undergone a ‘refurbishment’ (2011, 528). More recently, Prøitz and Wittek (2020) consider what new doctoral programmes in education provide to strengthen the link between educational researchers and practitioners and their development of research-based knowledge. In 2019, Taylor and Adams’ examine the experiences of students undertaking a Doctorate in Education, explaining that ‘the professional doctorate student experience is under-explored’ (2019, 1). Crucially, Taylor and Adams contend that their participants’ experiences of the professional doctorate – with its different structure and participant group of professionals who typically work full-time – serves to ‘contest the assumptions of “satisfaction” discourses and make what doctoral education might mean and become … in an era of intensifying performativity more complicated’ (2019, 2).

Another increasingly prevalent, and under explored, doctoral approach is the publication-led doctorate. Unlike a conventional monographic based thesis, the PhD by Publication is a model that incorporates articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and which includes an overarching synthesis. Increasingly, this approach might include journal articles from research conducted during the doctoral candidature, as opposed to being comprised of prior research publications. This route has begun to capture some recent attention in the literature, internationally (Mason and Merga 2018; Merga, Mason, and Morris 2019; Håkansson Lindqvist 2018; O’Keeffe 2020). The popularity of this approach may be driven by the inherent opportunities for researchers to develop publication skills - and valuable publication outputs - during the doctoral process, and/or by the increasing diversity of students undertaking doctoral research, who may seek new ways to study. However, importantly, as with the professional doctorate, there is interesting ‘potential for this approach to change what it is to be a PhD student, and what it is to complete PhD research’ (O’Keeffe 2020, 288). As this was the route of my own doctorate, I am also interested in the potential of this approach for enriching our understanding of what doctoral education might become. As a result, I draw upon my own experiences of doctoral study, writing with an understanding of the generative possibilities of exploring the intersection of ‘where the personal and public meet’ (Palmer 2007, 18), and of the need for academics to be willing to draw upon their own stories (Badley 2016, 377).

Implications for doctoral researchers and doctoral pedagogies

In his auto-ethnography, O’Keeffe (2020, 294-299) describes his experiences of the PhD by publication route:

The flexibility of this approach enabled me to draw upon new ideas and theoretical approaches as these have emerged throughout the course of this research. I was able to use the individual articles to draw on different fields of literature and theory, which could be applied to these articles, without causing a substantial shift in the methodology and conceptual framework.

The PhD by Publication format made it possible to adapt the research programme to take better advantage of these kinds of emergent insights that always form a key dimension of doctoral research...However, the PhD by Publication can also be used creatively, allowing the PhD candidate to reflect on their publications as a body of work, with the potential for deeper findings to emerge from this analysis.

The concept of rhizome and becoming can be usefully applied in order to disrupt linear narratives of learning, and to enhance our understanding of the nuances, fluidity and heterogeneity of all routes of doctoral research. However newer forms of the doctorate, such as the PhD by publication, with its space for a more heterogeneous, non-hierarchical, collation of work on multiple research projects, offers particularly rich potential to surface the fluidity of doctoral study that a rhizomatic conception of knowledge represents. Here, O’Keeffe describes the potential of being able ‘to draw on different fields of literature and theory,’ as well as ‘new ideas and theoretical approaches,’ as they emerged throughout the doctoral process. His progression was not linear. Instead, ‘emergent insights’ offered openings on an ongoing basis. As Kuby et al. explain: a ‘rhizomatic pedagogy embraces uncertainties and departures’ (Kuby et al. 2016, 141). Whilst, these rhizomatic, emergent, insights are described as forming ‘a key part of all doctoral research’, O’Keeffe explains that the PhD by publication enables the researcher to take ‘better advantage’ of a multiplicity of directions.

Such a rhizomatic approach to conceptualising learning resonates with Haraway (2016, 30) who champions the value of interconnections, via the powerful and memorable phrase: ‘tentacular thinking’. And this notion of the value of tentacular, rhizomatic, multiplicities also echoes Taylor’s (2011, 443) conception of ‘an opportunity for deep immersion in a topic, an opportunity to follow up leads that may turn out to be red herrings’. Notably, O’ Keeffe also reflects upon how the PhD by Publication can also be used ‘creatively, allowing the PhD candidate to reflect on their publications as a body of work, with the potential for deeper findings to emerge from this analysis’. Again, the interrelated nature of the publications, ‘as a body of work’, enable reflections to be drawn across the work in rhizomatic, a-centred, directions.

A rhizomatic perspective is also adopted by Guerin who champions ‘rhizomatic research cultures’ (2013). Guerin explains that in a thesis by publication, ‘what is of interest is how various forms of knowledge can inform each other’ (139). Here, these words remind us that underpinning rhizomatic knowledge are ‘principles of connection and heterogeneity; any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). For O’Keeffe and Guerin, then, there is power in the opportunities for tentacular thinking that a doctorate can generate. In my own thesis too, I found both the idea of the rhizome and of tentacular thinking useful in enabling me to reflect upon what interconnections could be drawn from the interweaving of a collection of publications through the doctoral thesis (Gravett 2020). However, the value of conceptualising doctoral study as rhizomatic and tentacular, with twists and turns, dead ends, and red herrings can offer value to all forms of the doctorate. For example, Manathunga (2019, 1236) offers a vision of:

a slower, more careful rhythm than that desired by neoliberalism where the desire for improvement is endless and where the idea of stopping a particular trajectory of thought or action or slowing it down or adopting an entirely new line of inquiry is an anathema … [involving] knowing when supervisors need to allow candidates to make mistakes or follow dead-ends so that their learning will be more powerful.

Here a slower, rhizomatic, perspective is contrasted to a neoliberal approach where ‘the idea of stopping a particular trajectory of thought or action or slowing it down or adopting an entirely new line of inquiry is an anathema.’

Textual disruptions

Reconceptualising doctoral study as rhizomatic also has implications for the doctoral text itself. Honan and Bright (2016) explore the value of re-imagining doctoral writing in order to produce both knowledge and texts differently. In doing so, Honan and Bright contribute to a growing field of post-qualitative research, where researchers attempt to ‘imagine and accomplish an inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently’ (Lather and St. Pierre 2013, 653). Citing the work of St. Pierre (2011), Honan and Bright (2016, 613) contend that ‘our suspicion, shared with St. Pierre (2011), that a “conventional, reductionist, hegemonic, and sometimes oppressive” orthodoxy of qualitative educational research has infiltrated the writing of the thesis’. Instead, they suggest that the very genre of thesis writing is open for regeneration:

our aim is not to reject academic writing but to interfere with normativities of practice … Working within a Deleuzean field includes unsettling and disrupting assumptions about method and writing, and straining against the boundaries of “acceptable” practices and approaches (Honan and Bright 2016, 732–738).

Here, Honan and Bright examine the value of interfering with normativities of practice and ‘straining against the boundaries of “acceptable” practices’. They warn against the danger of textual structures ‘being repeated to the point of orthodoxy, stifling creativity from the outset, determining what can be written and directing doctoral students away from thinking and writing differently’ (2016, 732). Instead, they contend that it is through the ongoing deterritorializing of the boundaries of the acceptable that the thesis text can be renewed (2016, 735). This notion of deterritorializing the text suggests the potential break down of prescribed boundaries that constrain thinking and writing practices, creating space for new, emergent, ideas and practices.

Arguably, the interweaving of publications through the writing of a doctoral text offers new opportunities for intertextuality and connection - for thinking and writing differently. In my own thesis, I explored how:

Through building on, and evolving around, the work of my published papers, this PhD by published works introduces interesting opportunities to intertwine the theories I have employed across my publications, creating a rhizomatic text where connections can be explored in a non-linear, non-hierarchical fashion. As a result, I aim to explore the interconnections between my published works, publications which are literally ‘intermezzo’ within this thesis, and I explore how my ideas may ‘be connected to anything other and must be’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). (Gravett 2020)

Within a PhD by publication, the very text is rhizomatic, a-centred, non-linear and non-hierarchical, and offers a challenge to the traditional doctoral text. This may mean increased opportunities exist to potentially disrupt a process/product tension inherent in traditional monograph-based doctorates, repositioning the thesis as an object of learning and development as opposed to solely an end-product (Kandiko and Kinchin 2012). Notably, incorporating a publishing process, with its lengthy delays, set-backs and likely rejections, into a doctoral journey, will also most likely pose a challenge to the conventional rhythms of a doctorate, instead leading to doctoral experiences that are ‘non-linear, liminal and highly individual’ Håkansson Lindqvist (2018, 1405).

Becomings

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming also enables us to think differently. Traditional conceptions of the doctorate suggest that a major purpose of doctoral education is the cumulative acquisition of knowledge, and, crucially, the development of an academic identity (Jazvac-Martek 2009; Keefer 2015). However, for Deleuze and Guattari, becomings are ongoing – with no end-point. This concept is therefore antithetical to the notion of a linear pathway; instead, the researcher’s identity is always in flux, always evolving in rhizomatic, irregular, directions. This concept also has implications for the supervisory relationship. We have seen how normative conceptions of the supervisory relationship rely on dualities and binaries: master/apprentice, expert/novice; academic/student. However, a reconceptualization of learning as ongoing refuses hierarchical binaries and unsettles the constructions of discrete and fixed researcher and academic identities. Instead, both researcher and supervisor are viewed as always evolving, always becoming. Adopting such a perspective offers space to rethink the supervisory relationship: as learners together is there scope to become more collaborative, more collegial, to research together differently?

Certainly, recent years have witnessed calls for more fluid conceptualisations that question the traditional hierarchical positioning of supervisor and student. Fullagar, Pavlidis, and Stadler (2017) reframe doctoral supervision as a ‘learning alliance’, where both supervisor and student experience ‘learn and unlearn, engage in knowing and importantly unknowing as an on-going process’ (Fullagar, Pavlidis, and Stadler 2017, 28). Such conceptions of the supervisory relationship, where hierarchies are destabilised, may be particularly appropriate for non-traditional forms of the doctorate, as explored by Gravett, Kinchin and Winstone (in prep). Likewise, Guerin (2013) examines a new space for supervisory relationships as ‘rhizomatic academic networks’. Importantly, Guerin (2013, 138) contends that ‘the principles of connection, heterogeneity, and multiplicity encountered in today’s rhizomatic academic networks are central to understanding what kinds of research and researchers will be needed by the academy’, suggesting that less hierarchical relations may lead to the creation of research and researchers that are likely to be valued by the complex and diverse research environments of the contemporary academy. Another possible further implication may be that less hierarchical relationships offer spaces to be more joyful, affirmative and creative.

Micro-moments and doctoral timescapes

We can see therefore that linear processes of research where doctoral students occupy a model of inputs and outputs (Pearson et al. 2011, 530) offer an entirely different way of thinking about research from a vision of learning that values the rhizomatic, messy, irregular, becomings of research and learning. As Koro-Ljungberg (2012, 808) explains:

I challenge qualitative researchers to ask questions such as, “Are my research processes creative or innovative in ways that they push me off to other direction and toward the unthought?” “How often do I get surprised when conducting research studies?” “How often does my research surprise others?” “How do my methodological approaches create analytical surprises?”

Here, Koro-Ljungberg celebrates the power of those moments of creativity, surprise and delight. Such a reconceptualization of doctoral research invites us to attend to the power of the micro-moments of learning. Those new directions, irruptions, and micro-moments that can take place within research and that speak back to conceptions of accelerated time encouraging us to pause, slow down, and change direction. Manathunga (2019, 1236-7) reminds us that such a re-visioning of a new form of timescape is significant not just for championing the joy of research, or for more suitably representing its messy realities, but for fostering more equitable research landscapes:

If we are to work towards a politics of temporal equity in doctoral education, then we need university policy documents and doctoral education managers to acknowledge the varying rhythms of the everyday that shape the varied lived experience of doctoral timescapes... It also involves recognising that the ways doctoral candidates experience time will often be shaped by their gender, class, ethnicity and relationships to power...In these ways, university managers and governments will need to acknowledge that universities are not only businesses. They operate according to much more complex, multiple, contradictory and antagonistic temporalities.

Here, Manathunga contends that disrupting linear narratives of homogeneous researcher experiences is important if we are to offer space for a more inclusive research landscape, and to challenge the inequities which pervade our higher education institutions. She offers practical suggestions for institutions to work towards deconstructing such dominant discourses, for example within policy documents. Crucially, she contends that ‘university managers and governments will need to acknowledge that universities are not only businesses’. Likewise, Taylor (2020, 1) explains that ‘the contemporary university privileges speed, precarity, competition, and performativity; it operates through modes of accelerationism, work intensification and productivity.’ Instead we must find ways to enact ‘decelerated forms of being’ such as attending to ‘slow singularities’ and ‘the micro-relational level of educational practice’ (Taylor 2020, 14). By acknowledging openly and more often the value of the rhizomatic, of the evolving becomings of researchers, those red herrings, dead ends and tentacular connections of learning, we can practice an alternative model of what it means to do and write doctoral research, as well as what it means to learn and work within higher education more generally. By exploring these ideas, through writing, in university policy documents, or via dialogue with researchers, we can potentially disrupt normative doctoral journeys and timescapes, and revisit the pleasure and surprise of doctoral research.

Conclusions

In this article I have put theory to work in order to rethink what we mean by doctoral study, what it might involve, what doctoral texts might look like, as well as researcher and supervisor identities. In employing the interweaving concepts of rhizome and becoming, I have sought to highlight the value of reconceptualising wider conceptions of time, change and learning in higher education, and to foreground the tentacular, immersive, and rhizomatic nature of doctoral study. Changes within the doctoral landscape, such as an increasing variety of routes to achieving a doctorate, reflect a rapidly changing sector, and I suggest that such new approaches offer opportunities to question further the constraining limits of linear narratives that perpetuate performative, neoliberal, competitive discourses and practices. Indeed, some researchers have argued that the implications of reconceptualising research culture as rhizomatic are that we can move towards developing the researcher identities most valued within contemporary academic environments, as well as creating opportunities to break the boundaries of normativities of textual practice.

However, a clear tension remains between the neoliberal ideologies of the sector, the pressures of marketisation, precarity and accelerationism, and a more transformative vision underpinned by conceptions of collegiality and multiplicity. Manathunga (2019, 1236) writes that ‘there is a need for the fast-paced contemporary world, demanding of outcomes but not allowing any intellectual nourishment to be input, to recede into the background of doctoral candidates lives’. Nonetheless, as Grellier (2013, 93) warns: a chasm exists ‘between the university’s regulatory environment and rhizomatic structures – students will not achieve certification by starting in the middle and following their own paths, and almost all teachers would agree with this position’. Researchers’ experiences are political: durable systemic factors and injustices continue to constrain individuals’ experiences of research and work in the academy. And yet, there remains a need to unsettle normativities of practice, creating openings (however small) for the micro, for the relational, and for creativity, surprise, and emergence, within the fast-paced world of successful outcomes and linear pathways.

For supervisors, practical examples of such openings might include seeking opportunities to disrupt power hierarchies through learning together, collaboration and co-authorship. It might also include working with students towards reconceptualising what is understood by, and what is valued within, doctoral study through fostering opportunities for play and experimentation, through creating safe spaces for researchers to make mistakes, and through encouraging the use of creative methodologies and experiments with theory. It might include supervisors and examiners asking new questions of doctoral students which disrupt the normative rhythms of higher education: what has surprised you? What have you most enjoyed? What dead ends have you experienced, and how were these valuable to you? Crucially, such disruptions may also lead to greater temporal equity and social justice - where what counts is not the smoothness of the path, or the speed in which candidates are able to ‘complete’ their learning, but the opportunities for joy, connection, creativity and learning.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.