The Impact of Doctoral Study on University Lecturers’ Construction of Self within a changing Higher Education policy context

Dann, R ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0204-4165, Scanlon, J, Basford, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3662-6606, Booth, C, O'Sullivan, R, Woodfine, C and Wright, P (2019) The Impact of Doctoral Study on University Lecturers’ Construction of Self within a changing Higher Education policy context. Studies in Higher Education, 44 (7). pp. 1166-1182. ISSN 0307-5079

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Abstract

This paper explores the impact of lectures’ individual current doctoral study on their own and collective constructions of self in a changing Higher Education (HE) policy context. It focuses on how lecturers, drawn from a professional knowledge background, make sense of new institutional requirements for new lectures to have doctorates. The lecturers themselves, through ‘facilitated collaborative auto-ethnography’, generate the substantial data and analysis for this research. This study exposes the enormous pressure of the doctorate on their lives and reveals different ways in which they resist particular forms of language, affiliations and positioning within their institution. However, of particular significance in this study is their own agency and collective voice, through using their developing cultural tools of research to ‘be’ researchers, in and beyond their own doctoral studies, in order to understand their own changing identities within HE. The study therefore reveals complex, contradictory and unexpected responses to HE policy.