Deconstructing Doctoral Discourses: Stories and Strategies for Success

This book identifies and challenges assumptions about the doctorate and the discourses associated with it. The editors and contributors subvert and transform the de facto assumptions that frame the ways in which ’the doctorate’ is spoken and written, and thus underpin approaches to planning, conducting and evaluating doctoral research. Giving voice to doctoral students and supervisors, the book opens a pathway for their own stories: why students entered doctoral study, the understandings and experiences they gleaned from it, and the implications for their own character. The book questions what kinds of discourses help to construct contemporary doctoral research, and how these might be de- and reconstructed, and asks what doctoral study might look like in the future. Academics, students and practitioners alike will find an avenue into rigorous research design from reflective and insightful scholars who provide a voice for doctoral strategies for success.

Deborah L. Mulligan is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Naomi Ryan is Lecturer within the USQ College at the Toowoomba Campus of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Patrick Alan Danaher is Professor of Educational Research in the School of Education at the Toowoomba Campus of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. He is also currently Adjunct Professor at Central Queensland University and James Cook University, both in Australia, and Docent in Social Justice and Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland.