Uneasy feelings: Queer(y)ing the affective-politics of doctoral education

Abstract

In this thesis I recognise doctoral education as an international practice that is under pressure and experiencing significant change. Over recent decades public interest in the doctorate has expanded as it has become re-framed as a key component of national success in the global knowledge economy. Accompanying this increasing interest has been a series of changes to the doctorate itself that have produced a climate of increased regulation, intensified responsibility, and growing surveillance. While researchers have explored recent transformations to the practice of doctoral education (Aitchison & Mowbray, 2015; Lee & Aitchison, 2009), often such work is motivated to develop pedagogies to support students to meet the new expectations that have arisen. At this point, there has been limited attention to what broad changes to the meanings and practices of doctoral education feel like for students, and a wider conceptualisation of the affective-political dimensions of doctoral education remains undeveloped. It is into this gap that my thesis enters. In order to offer richer accounts of the felt experience of doctoral education, I analyse an eccentric collection of texts, each of which offers a contextually different angle. The texts I have selected include images from an online photo blog, autoethnographic self-reflection, as well as a qualitative study conducted with 10 doctoral researchers in faculties of Arts and Education at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand. The empirical study involved diary-interview method, and a residential writing retreat that produced verbal and visual data. A key contribution this thesis makes is to bring conceptual resources associated with queer cultural studies (Berlant, 2011a; Halberstam, 2011, Jagose, 2010; Pausé, Wykes & Murray, 2014) into play with empirical accounts of doctoral education. I deploy queer conceptual figurations in order to interrogate normative accounts of the intersections between doctoral education, affect, and the political. The significance of this queer theoretical analysis is that it troubles common sense modes of recognising which affective or political practices may be constraining, and which might open onto possibility for action in the present.