This article employs an interpretive autoethnographic approach to explore how the author navigates the paradigmatic contradictions between poststructuralism as a theoretical framework and his personal religious beliefs. It narrates and analyzes how the researcher arrives at specific understandings of reality, knowledge, and the self. The author…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) has been suggested as a potentially beneficial addition to modern doctoral education. However, there is little research outlining the specificities of WIL aimed at PhD students. This paper explores the range of WIL opportunities available to PhD students through a review of secondary data. The findings indicate that…

Academic writing is an important skill in the development of researcher identity yet remains a hurdle to many. In this study, we examine the ways in which the exchange of social capital occurs in a writing group in Australia. We use Bourdieu's theoretical concepts to examine data obtained from open-ended questions in an online survey that asked…

Traditionally, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is predicated on a supervisor as teacher/expert -- candidate as learner/novice model. But what becomes possible when the materialities of this power dynamic are destabilised and reimagined? This article draws from emerging feminist ontologies to introduce the concept of velo-onto-epistemology…

Objective-Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are a valuable source of assessment for students' practical clinical and professional skills throughout their medical careers due to the OSCEs' capability to test multiple competencies in a standardized manner. Over the years, OSCEs have increasingly been integrated across medical programs to…

This article considers issues that continue to shape doctoral education in Australia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of relevant issue, and to identify opportunities for future research. It describes examples of responses taken at an institutional level, and their implications for the norms and…

Research educators, scholars, and employers often debate the nature and purpose of doctoral training. Should doctoral degrees exist only to make new knowledge and replenish the academic workforce or are they part of broader societal-enhancement and employment agendas? Or both? This study aimed to identify and analyse tensions in Australian…

This paper focuses on Vietnamese PhD students' imaginative geographies of their destination countries. Using the data collected from in-depth semi-structured interviews with 18 Vietnamese PhD students, the study examines the participants' preparation for their sojourn before their departure, as well as their first multi-sensory experiences of the…

In Australia, much like other colonized locations such as Canada, New Zealand, and the USA, the colonial legacies embedded within higher education institutions, including the history of exclusion and the privileging of Western epistemologies, continue to make universities challenging places for Indigenous PhD scholars. Despite this, and while the…

Doctoral education and supervision have changed in recent decades. The increasing prevalence of co-supervision has been a notable aspect of this, but change also includes stricter accountability and quality assurance measures, such as the quantification of workload allocations in supervision as well as of academic work more broadly. This paper…

Doctoral supervision has been deemed as a site of power, knowledge production, and an effort in career progression, mediated by doctoral students and their supervisors. Extensive studies have looked at these interactions from multiple angles. Although research into doctoral supervision has been extensively documented, there lies a paucity of…

This study investigates doctoral students' perceptions of themselves as academic writers and the factors contributing to this perception. Adopting content analysis and narrative inquiry, we conducted a survey with 121 responses from candidates at ten universities across Australia and semi-structured interviews with 12 candidates. The survey shows…

Although there has been considerable "post hoc" research on student views of supervisors, there is little on how candidate expectations are constituted at or close to the point of commencement. This study reads students' commentary about the 'ideal supervisor' at the point of institutional induction to examine commencing candidate…

The world faces complex and entangled environmental, health and social problems that can only be effectively grappled with if the research sector harnesses the knowledges and understandings of diverse cultures. Research education is a key site where more democratic and equitable processes of knowledge creation can take place. Drawing on de Sousa…

This paper's second author is a doctoral student, based in Erbil, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, whose study focuses on peer education in refugee camps in that region. The other three co-authors are her supervisors, whom, to date, she has not physically met. Yet, we have created and sustained a productive 'learning community' from a distance. In…