This event is part of the School of Education's Bristol Conversations in Education research seminar series. These seminars are free and open to the public.

Hosted by: Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET)

Speaker: Prof Catherine Montgomery, Durham University

Politics and partnerships in doctoral research: exploring the doctorate as a site of resistance and struggle

This paper explores the politics of the educational partnerships engendered in doctoral research, focusing on the nature of knowledge construction between the global and local actors who are part of the structures and systems of international doctoral education. The paper casts doctoral research as part of the colonial encounter and presents it as marginalised or ‘Southern knowledge’ embedded in global divisions and long-standing patterns of inequalities in power, wealth, and cultural influence (Connell, 2007, p. 212). The paper rests on a two year funded research project examining international doctoral research as a coherent body of knowledge. Using the British Library’s digital repository EThOS, a collection of up to 500,000 doctoral studies carried out in British universities, the research analyses the theoretical, methodological and practical impact of international doctoral research for social and community organisations (Montgomery, 2019; 2020). In this paper, the research is extended to draw on a second repository, NARCIS, the repository in the Netherlands, which holds around 120,000 doctoral theses. Using a prototype of an artificial intelligence tool developed as part of the funded project, the paper presents the outcomes of an advanced natural language and clustering search of the repositories, focusing on the knowledge constructed in educational partnerships in international supervisory relationships. The analysis shows that across both the UK and Netherlands, the social and academic hierarchies embedded in universities’ structures of power theoretically and methodologically restrict knowledge generated in supervisory partnerships. Despite this, the paper presents examples of theoretical and methodological resistance in the theses. The research underlines the fact that doctoral research is highly institutionalised and knowledge partnerships are set within the fields and communities of the academy (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), making it a struggle for doctoral students, particularly international doctoral students, to incorporate their own local knowledge, cultures and interests in their research.

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