Conference Agenda

Background and purpose

In this symposium we are analyzing the making of doctoral education in education sciences. A general background is the remaking of the system of higher education and research as pointed out by e.g. Nowotny et al (2003) from a discipline-focused Mode-1 to a problem-focused Mode-2 where societal rather than scientific relevance is underlined at the science-society agora. To our understanding educational sciences are very much influenced by a mode-2 position (e.g. Lindblad & Pettersson, 2024). What are the implications of this?

Given this, we turn to the work of Kuhn (1962) who studied doctoral education as an object for understanding paradigmatic reproduction and change in the sciences. This study has been important in discourses on science and society and is debated and further developed in later studies (e.g. Shapin, 2022), for instance with a focus on Matters of globalization of doctoral education are of interest here, for instance considering North-South differences and matters of intellectual predispositions (Connell, 2017) at work in doctoral education discourses and in the making of doctoral education.

Research questions:

The purpose of this symposium is to analyze doctoral education in the education sciences over time and place. We ask:

- How is doctoral education evolving as an institution in the paradigmatic (re)production of knowledge in different contexts over a longer period?

- What are important events and agents in making and re-making of doctoral education?

- Which scientific predispositions and matters in the making of arguments and systems of reason are at work in the making and remaking of doctoral education, shown as global North-South differences?

Theoretical framework and research approach

A recent research review (Lindblad & Gross, 2025) shows that previous research on doctoral education is mostly studying doctoral education as a matter of educational problems (supervision, identity problems, attrition, etc.). Thus, there is little research with a focus on doctoral education that corresponds to the research interests presented above. To analyze paradigmatic reproduction and change, we turn to historical institutionalism (Thelen, 1999), to describe and understand doctoral education trajectories – events, agents and tracking of processes – and to compare these trajectories over global contexts. Of special interest here is arguments for making and remaking of doctoral education – its tasks, design, and selection of relevant knowledge, in systems of reason (Popkewitz, 2014) at work in these trajectories.

To answer and discuss these questions we put forwards a comparative case study approach. We are not comparing nations, but we use the opportunities to compare changing institutions in different contexts. Thus, we choose a Grounded Theory approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1977) by comparing doctoral education trajectories over time and place regarding important events, agents, and reasoning in the making and remaking of doctoral education.

Scientific significance:

The proposed symposium will describe and analyse historical developments of institutions of doctoral education in educational sciences over time and place. This is of vital importance for reflections on scientific reproduction and change and for cooperation between different epistemic cultures in the sciences (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) in a changing system of higher education and research.

Doctoral studies are social spaces of making kinds of people who generate knowledge. Its historical and cultural practices for seeing, ordering and classifying the things of the world embody regulatory ideals to be internalizes as epistemic virtues; principles about what objects are to be seen as facts and evidence, and the modalities and possibilities to be understood as a type of subject matter Daston,2011). This paper explores the different paradigms and their regulatory ideals in the making of kinds of people in doctoral studies. Kuhn’s (1970) notion of paradigm provide one strategy by directing attention to science as not things that we “find” but practices that make regulatory rules for “seeing”, and making judgements about the matters of social life and what matters in those “matters”. Hacking (2004)) provides difference nuances to the regulatory principles of doctoral studies through viewing disciplinary conduct as styles of reason. He argues that disciplines have different rules and standards about what “counts” as types of objects, evidence, sentences, ways of thinking and acting about the candidates for truth or falsehood. The philosopher Habermas’ (1968/1971) expressed early such differences in the human sciences as different “human interest”; empirical-analytic, symbolic, and critical sciences. Recent contemporary scholarship has distinguish such knowledge interests and n differences in relation to the politics of knowledge with references to Eurocentric, positivism, the multiplicity of ‘post”, new materialism and anti-colonial studies. Why is this important for doctoral studies? Reusch and Bateson (1951) suggested that we have only four ways of understanding social life: talking to people, being a participant observer or non-participant observer, and reading about the culture. The issue of research is how the different technologies are put to use to “know”. Each style of reason offers different perspectives for the possibilities and limits of knowledge. Focusing on the styles of reason in graduate studies provide a way of thinking about the political in modernity.

Habermas, J. (1968/1971). Knowledge and human interest (J. Shapiro, Trans.). Beacon Press. Kuhn, T. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Daston, L. (2011). The empire of observation, 1600-1800. In L. Daston & E. Lunbeck (Eds.), Histories of scientific observation (pp. 81-114). The University of Chicago Press. Hacking, I. 2004. Historical ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruesch, J., & Bateson, G. (1951). Communication: The social matrix of psychiatry. W.W. Norton & Co.

The article first examines changes in the German doctoral education system in the context of the German qualification system, and in the wake of the European Union's Bologna and Lisbon processes. These changes can be described as increasing ‘educationalisation’, at least for the humanities, social and educational sciences. At the same time, however, important elements of the cultural and symbolic capital (Bourdieu) of the desired doctoral title remain, adding a cultural “surplus” to the market-based possibility of converting the title into economic capital. These symbolic traditionalisations, which date back to medieval, corporatist guild systems, thus constitute an ideologically shaped relationship to “marketisation”, which imbues the knowledge economy with an aura of responsible expertise. Finally, the extent to which the forms of participation and examination of professors of education, who were and still are involved in these transformations, have changed is discussed. The analysis is based on documents, literature and personal experience. It starts from the German case and broadens the perspective to the European area. Methodologically, it takes a theoretical-historical and exploratory approach.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Routledge. Shin, Jung Cheol; Kehm, Barbara M. & Jones, Glen A. (Eds.) (2018). Doctoral Education for the Knowledge Society. Convergence or Divergence in National Approaches? Springer. Wissenschaftsrat (2023): Ausgestaltung der Promotion im deutschen Wissenschaftssystem. Positionspapier. Bedersdorfer, Regina (2024). Promovieren in den Bildungswissenschaften – Empirische Analyse von Unterstützungsangeboten im Promotionsprozess. Phil. Diss. PH Heidelberg. Schmidt-Hertha, Bernhard; Tervooren, Anja; Martini, Renate & Züchner, Ivo (Hrsg.). Datenreport Erziehungswissenschaft 2024 (S. 113-137; S. 201-218). Verlag Barbara Budrich.

This paper is about development of academic culture through a doctoral education partnership program in Educational Sciences, a collaboration between an Ethiopian and a Swedish university, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). Since the late 1990s, doctoral education has been seen by national and international aid organizations as a key component for locally relevant capacity building, poverty reduction and development. At the same time, such programs are shaped by global policy ideas about relevance, knowledge society, quality, and measurable results. Taking the partnership program as an analytical point of departure, the paper investigates Sida’s governing rationales in relation to international policy shifts and in particular the World Bank’s evolving framings of higher and tertiary education. We ask: What forms of academic cultures are produced and shape the formation of doctoral education, in the tension between locally defined relevance and global policy ideals? The paper draws on historical institutionalism (Thelen, 1999) to trace agents and processes in the formation of doctoral education design. We pay attention to epistemic and geopolitical asymmetries in North South academic relations (Connell, 2017), and to how university governance and donor political economy can shape academic work (Mamdani, 2016). The analysis is based on reports and meeting minutes from Sida’s planning and review meetings with the partnership program, interviews with stakeholders, Sida evaluations and strategy documents, and World Bank reports. In the 1990s, Sida’s sandwich model was consolidated as a template for partnership cooperation that combined studies at the home university with periods at a partner university abroad. Over time, Sida’s cooperation shifted from producing PhDs and strengthening supervision capacity in the 1990s to building academic cultures in the 2000s through peer review routines and research management. As the World Bank’s policy framing shifted from a crisis and efficiency-oriented agenda to knowledge society rationales, Sida increasingly aligned doctoral education support with relevance, quality and measurable results. In the 2020s, Swedish policy added stronger emphasis on sustainable research environments, including conditions for academic freedom. Overall, the findings point to the making of hybrid academic cultures, where doctoral education strengthens locally defined relevance (Connell, 2017; Mamdani, 2016) while simultaneously internalise global Mode 2 rationales for societal usefulness and accountability (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, 2003). An implication is that “academic culture building” depends on how external policy ideas are translated into local institutional arrangements and knowledge norms, and on whether complementary post-graduate career structures can stabilise change.

Connell, R. (2017). Southern theory and world universities. Higher Education Research and Development, 36(1), 4-15. Mamdani, M. (2016). Undoing the effects of neoliberal reform: The experience of Uganda’s Makerere Institute of Social Research. In T. Halvorsen & J. Nossum. North–South Knowledge Networks. African Minds. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., and Gibbons, M. (2003). Introduction: Mode 2 revisited, the new production of knowledge. Minerva, 41(3), 179 -194. Thelen, K. (1999). Historical institutionalism in comparative politics. Annual Review of Political Science, 2(1), 369 -404.