Deconstructing Doctoral Discourses

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.

The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research challenges normative philosophies that have frequently neglected the body’s place in research and then illustrates how the body is essential for all meaning making. By ‘voicing the body’, the first part of this rebellious book problematizes how the body is used/assessed, yet often silenced in academic writing. This book then fluidly moves to celebrating the body through discussing taboo topics like sex/sexuality in friendship, underwear (knickers), ageing, and death, as well as how a non-binary body moves in a heteronormative world. Through the lens of Bodyography, this book does research differently – illuminating how the body flourishes, excites knowledge, and is complicated when placed on a ‘screen’. This book celebrates a collaborative and arts-based approach. This book is a dialogue between The Bodies Collective, with dialogic resonance sections between each chapter and art pieces throughout. This book will encourage all scholars to do research differently. Anyone with a thirst to challenge normative practices in academia and who wants research to be inspiring and playful will fall in love with this book.

The book thus seeks to trace the construction and contestation of the central axes around which its political frontiers were organized.

This book presents a critique of neoliberalism within UK Higher Education, taking its cue from approaches more usually associated with literary studies. It offers a sustained and detailed close reading of three works that might be understood to fall outside the established body of educational theory. The unconventional methodology and focus promote irreducible difference and complexity, and in this stage a resistance to reductive discourses of managerialism. Questioning the materialism to which all sides of the contemporary pedagogical debate increasingly appeal, the book sets out a challenge to investments in ‘excellence’, ‘transparency’ and objecthood. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of education, sociology, and literary theory.

The Vicos Project was a major effort to apply anthropology to community development in a rural community of Andean Peru in the 1950s. Deconstructing Development Discourse in Peru is a retrospective examination of the Vicos research and development project through a poststructuralist lens. William Stein details the work of North American researchers, with emphasis on factors which limited their capacity to engage in development. Stein endeavors to apply the work of the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, as an aid in the interpretation of events and reactions of both North American and Peruvian researchers.

The book brings together for the first time a range of integrated essays produced out of a programme of research and scholarship designed to better understand advanced-level research supervision as pedagogy. Doctoral Research Supervision, Pedagogy and the PhD questions the traditions of how doctoral work is accomplished, in the context of the changing role of research and universities in contemporary societies. Focused on research supervision and the pedagogies of doctoral work, the book brings together for the first time a range of integrated essays produced out of a programme of research and scholarship designed to better understand advanced-level research supervision as pedagogy. Those original ground-breaking chapters are framed by new work, extending the overall argument, reflecting on the emergence and development of doctoral education research, and evaluating the state of the field today. This book is of interest to scholars and postgraduate researchers in higher education, postgraduate and doctoral education, supervision and the philosophy and theory of higher education.

This book addresses a set of interlocking and overlapping big questions that ‘sit’ behind the plethora of doctoral advice texts and run through the practice of knowledge/identity work.

WINNER: 2004 AESA Critics' Choice Award "With wonderful clarity Maggie MacLure shows how deconstructionism opens new avenues of critical inquiry and understanding for educational researchers. In exposing the hidden, ideological side of terms like clarity, certainty, mastery, and relevance she allows us to see schooling and educational policy in new ways. In so doing she allows us to imagine classrooms as liberating, pedagogical places, as places where new forms of desire, knowledge, and learning take place" Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign This book is both practical and provocative. It demonstrates the insights and the challenges of a discourse-based orientation to educational and social research. Drawing on a variety of educational and social science 'texts' - including press articles, life history interviews, parent-teacher consultations, policy debates and ethnographies - the author shows how knowledge, power, identities and realities are constructed and problematised in discourse. The book also deals with research itself as discursive practice, examining the texts that qualitative researchers produce and consume: reports, monographs, journal articles. Practical examples are included for researchers and graduate students wishing to 'interrogate' their own data from a discourse perspective. The author develops a critical awareness of the researcher's role as writer/reader of texts. The book makes the case for 'discursive literacy' in research. While its primary allegiances are to poststructuralism and deconstruction, it draws from a wide range of disciplines, including interaction sociology, feminist ethnography, literary theory, critical discourse analysis and art history. What holds the book together is the persistent question: how to do educational research and social research within a 'crisis of representation' that has unsettled the relationship between words and worlds?