Re-imagining Doctoral Writing

What imaginings of the doctoral writer circulate in the talk of doctoral researchers and their supervisors? How do institutional policies and the conventions of particular disciplines shape the ways in which doctoral writing is imagined? Why, and in what ways, has doctoral writing been re-imagined in the twenty-first century? What future imaginings of doctoral writing may be hovering on the horizon? This edited collection has gathered a diverse group of authors—from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the US—to consider these challenging questions during a time in which doctoral education is undergoing enormous transformation. Together, the contributors to this collection explore how the practice of doctoral writing is entangled with broader concerns within doctoral education, including attrition, timeliness, the quality of supervision, the transferability of knowledge and skills to industry settings, research impact, research integrity, and the decolonization of the doctorate.

Cecile Badenhorst is a Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada. She teaches courses in the post-secondary undergraduate and graduate programs on university teaching and learning, as well as courses in the faculty's doctoral program. As a researcher, she has conducted research and published in the areas of doctoral education, doctoral writing, graduate writing, thesis/publication writing pedagogies, academic literacies and faculty writing. She has a YouTube channel on writing for Masters and doctoral students. She has also written three books in the area of graduate student writing: Research Writing, Dissertation Writing  and Productive Writing. She is a coeditor of Research Literacies and Writing Pedagogies for Masters and Doctoral Writers. In 2018, she co-edited with, Brittany Amell, a special issue of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie on play, visual strategies & innovative approaches to graduate writing.

Brittany Amell  is a doctoral candidate at Carleton University in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. She teaches, mentors, and coaches others on the research, theory, and pedagogy of academic writing. Her Ph.D. research considers the writing that she and other doctoral students do for their degrees and was awarded a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC, 2017-2020). In 2018, she coedited with, Cecile Badenhorst, a special issue of the Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie on play, visual strategies & innovative approaches to graduate writing.

James Burford is Lecturer in Research Education and Development in the Graduate Research School, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. James is a critical university studies researcher, and he is particularly interested in space, place, affect, and politics in the academic profession and doctoral education. James' doctoral thesis received the 2017 NZARE Sutton-Smith Award. James has taught in the areas of comparative education, educational equity, and academic literacies. His recent projects have focused on academic mobilities (both short and longer term), as well as the spatialities of graduate education. With Emily Henderson, James edits Conference Inference, an academic blog on conferences.