Conference Agenda

Once a formative space for future researchers and a relatively protected space for the curiosity-driven pursuit of deep knowledge and mastery (Deem, 2020) (aligned with Mode 1 of knowledge production), doctoral education (DE) has been increasingly shifting its focus and reconfiguring its characteristics (Magalhães & Veiga, 2018; Sarrico, 2022).

At the beginning of the XXI century, within the scope of the Bologna Process, higher education institutions were pressured to demonstrate DE’s value in more tangible, quantifiable terms, and called upon to play a more active role in driving economic growth and innovation. To respond to the growing demands for relevance (Kyvik & Olsen, 2012) for enabling technological development and cutting-edge innovation (Jung, 2022), transnational policy discourse began influencing Higher Educations’ dynamic and the concept and design of DE (Magalhães & Veiga, 2017). As the ‘knowledge triangle’ doctoral education-research-innovation (Maassen & Stensaker, 2011; Veiga, 2023) nexus became embedded in national and institutional strategies (Magalhães & Veiga, 2018), the purpose of STEM[1] DE was reshaped to incorporate innovation-oriented goals. This provoked changes in the characteristics of the traditional model of the doctorate (Cardoso, 2024; Kehm, 2006; Nerad, 2020). In the scope of Mode 2 of knowledge production, it reconfigured to a project-based (Ylijoki, 2016) model, often accompanied by stronger ties to externally/privately funded research projects, in collaboration with industry partners (Santos & Patrício, 2020), and a growing emphasis on producing tangible outcomes (e.g. prototypes, patents, innovations with commercial value).

As DE became driven by globalisation and internationalisation, interconnected global challenges (such as sustainability and digital transformation) were placed on funding agendas and research priorities (Heitor, 2025; Letta, 2024). DE became expected to shift its focus on solving immediate context-specific problems towards focusing on integrating knowledge into complex, dynamic, interconnected ecosystems more aligned with Mode 3 of knowledge production (Carayannis et al., 2016).

Given the current ‘’new complex of uncertainty’’ (Heitor, 2025; Nowotny et al., 2001) shaped by geopolitical tensions, the call for strengthening the link between the knowledge triangle components to promote European competitiveness and sovereignty, as well as addressing global common challenges (e.g. Letta, 2024; Draghi, 2024; Heitor, 2024; Niinisto, 2024) became imperative. As such, a hybrid, adaptive, and evolving Mode 3 of knowledge production (Machado et al., 2024; Smith & Leydesdorff, 2022) is gaining traction, expanding the purposes of DE towards greater societal responsiveness and global responsibility. However, this shift does not replace Mode 2 logics; rather, it appears to coexist with (and in some cases intensify) expectations related to competitiveness, innovation and strategic utility. These tensions increasingly permeate STEM DE given this fields’ connection to dual-use knowledge, defence-related technologies and strategic innovation.

From a theoretical perspective, these dynamics are unfolding in what has been conceptualised as a shift (CDE-EUA, 2022; Heitor, 2025) towards Mode 3 of knowledge production. While DE has been analysed through the lenses of Mode 1 and Mode 2 knowledge production, given the current social, economic and political dynamics, it is worthwhile to analyse how Mode 3 conditions are reconfiguring the purposes and the characteristics of DE, particularly in STEM fields.

Against this background, this paper seeks to examine how the purpose and characteristics of STEM doctoral education are being reconfigured under the shift to Mode 3 knowledge production?

[1] STEM-science, technology, engineering, mathematics

With the continuous expansion of higher education and the rapid transformation of labor market structures, the proportion of non-traditional doctoral students has been steadily increasing. PhD students following a non-linear pathway represent a typical subgroup. Unlike those on a linear pathway, non-linear pathway students are those who experience a gap between completing their previous level of higher education and enrolling in a doctoral program (Zhuchkova & Terentev, 2023). In this study, We define them as PhD students who had formal working experience prior to enrolling in a PhD program. It is worth noting that, although this group of students constitutes a considerable proportion of the doctoral population (Offerman, 2011), the existing doctoral training system has long been designed around students with continuous educational trajectories[ (Gardner, 2008). Institutional structures, training schedules, and evaluation standards generally assume that doctoral entrants have followed an uninterrupted academic path prior to enrollment (Marine, 2020). This raises a critical question: to what extent can a training paradigm based on continuity effectively meet the academic development needs of students with non-linear educational trajectories?

Unfortunately, despite growing scholarly interest in non-linear educational trajectories among non-traditional doctoral students, research on this group's doctoral learning experiences and academic development remains severely limited. Existing studies have largely relied on qualitative approaches, using illustrative cases to document the academic trajectories and growth stories of students with non-linear pathways (Burgess et al., 2025; Jiménez & Escalante, 2017). Zhuchkova and Terentev ( 2023) made an initial attempt to compare publication outcomes between non-linear and linear pathway students. However, it should be noted that this study relied solely on chi-square tests to compare proportion differences, without controlling for potential confounding factors. Consequently, it is difficult to determine whether observed differences are attributable to the non-linear pathway itself rather than to other factors. These limitations underscore the need for a systematic and rigorous analysis of the academic development of students with non-linear educational trajectories, including cross-disciplinary variations, to provide more robust theoretical and policy insights.

In order to fill this gap, we utilize a large-scale dataset of 12,140 Chinese doctoral students and introduces Entropy Balancing to mitigate potential selection bias. By achieving covariates balance across personal characteristics and prior educational experiences, we establish a rigorous counterfactual framework to estimate the net effect of non-linear PhD pathway on students’ academic development.

Specifically, this study aims to answer the following research questions:

RQ1: What are the typical educational backgrounds and individual characteristics of students who pursue a non-linear PhD pathway?

RQ2: What is the effect of a non-linear path on PhD students’ academic development?

RQ3: To what extent do these effects vary across disciplines?

The objectives are threefold: (1) To characterize the students who pursue non-linear PhD pathways by examining their educational backgrounds and individual characteristics, thereby identifying the key factors associated with non-linear doctoral trajectories. (2) To quantify the effect of non-linear PhD pathways on academic development using a rigorous counterfactual framework. (3)To explore disciplinary differences in these effects to reveal how the impacts of non-linear pathways may vary across diverse academic contexts.

The findings contribute to the international literature on doctoral education by extending the analysis of PhD trajectories beyond linear pathways. Using evidence from China, it demonstrates how non-linear doctoral pathways shape PhD students’ academic development in ways that are both contextually embedded and internationally relevant. By foregrounding disciplinary heterogeneity, the study offers comparative insights that speak to the diversity of doctoral training systems globally. The study thus provides evidence relevant not only to national policy contexts but also to broader international debates on flexible doctoral training and diversified academic pathways.

In recent decades, research exploring new paradigms of learning in the university context has proliferated, particularly through qualitative and postqualitative approaches in educational research. These perspectives have proven relevant for investigating how learning is given meaning, how it affects, and how it transforms people in higher education, shifting the focus from institutional frameworks toward biographical approaches that intertwine learning and identity across life trajectories (Biesta, 2008; Hernández-Hernández, 2023).

The importance of research aimed at rethinking university academic training through individuals’ life trajectories highlights the relevance of the affective turn in contemporary conceptions of learning. From this onto-epistemological perspective, affects are understood as forces with their own autonomy in the generation of knowledge, beyond their confinement to discourse (Massumi, 2002). As changes or shifts that emerge in encounters between bodies (Colman, 2010), affects precede individuality and place relationality at the center of learning. Learning, from this standpoint, is always a relational process in which we co-constitute ourselves through relationships (Barad, 2007), assuming the situated and partial nature of knowledge (Haraway, 1988).

Within the framework of university teacher education, this approach makes it possible to position affects not only as a dimension of learning, but as a central axis for rethinking research in academia and the relationship it establishes with students.

This research is part of the Master’s Final Project in Visual Arts and Education, completed during the 2023–2024 academic year at the University of Barcelona. The starting point consisted of exploring imaginaries of art and education among students enrolled in the Bachelor’s Degree in Early Childhood Education at the same university, with an emphasis on their learning trajectories, within the context of a pedagogical transformation process of a compulsory course in visual arts education in which the author was the instructor.

The research considered artistic practices as forms of interpreting the world and generating narratives, with a specific capacity to mobilize affects and enable meaningful learning. In this sense, it aligns with the understanding of the arts as practices sensitive to the expressiveness of the subject and open to inquiring into the qualities of life that affect what we know and how we live (Barone & Eisner, 2011). As Marina Garcés points out, the arts are, above all, practices of the threshold (Garcés, 2013), from which it becomes possible to question how we look at our surroundings, how we are affected, and, consequently, how we learn.

From this paradigm, artistic experience is conceived as inherently pedagogical and transformative, and as facilitating a form of learning that validates the experience of the “we" (Aguirre, 2006). This approach connects with contributions such as those of Sheikh (2009), who points to the need to shift academia from a model centered on the reproduction of knowledge toward the configuration of spaces for experience and thought, and those of Rogoff (2008), who proposes understanding fallibility as a form of knowledge production. In this context, it is increasingly necessary to explore educational paradigms that unfold relationships of proximity and pedagogical formats sensitive to affects within the university (Riera-Retamero & Hernández-Hernández, 2020). Artistic practices can thus become triggers for transformation and open spaces for reflection sensitive to becoming (Hernández-Hernández & Revelles Benavente, 2019; Atkinson, 2015).

From this perspective, the article not only analyzes affects as the content of the research, but also shows how the research process itself becomes an affective space that allows for rethinking the relationship between academia and students in university teacher education.

In European education and policy research, quantitative textual analysis (QTA) has been increasingly used to examine institutional and policy documents at scale, particularly within European Union governance and comparative strategy research (Bunea & Ibenskas, 2015). Existing European studies demonstrate how computational and text-oriented approaches enable systematic comparison of strategic discourses across institutions and national contexts (e.g. Bunea & Ibenskas, 2015). Universities increasingly rely on formal strategy documents to articulate institutional identities, priorities, and future orientations. These documents function simultaneously as texts that project imagined futures and as processes shaped by negotiations among stakeholders and competing institutional logics. While higher education research has paid growing attention to strategic governance, the methodological toolkit used to study university strategies has remained largely qualitative approaches. This creates limitations when scholars seek to analyse large collections of strategic documents or to conduct systematic cross-institutional or comparative research.

The aim of this work-in-progress study is to explore the potential of QTA as a methodological approach for higher education strategy research. Rather than presenting a completed empirical study, we present QTA as a complementary methodological approach and reflect on its opportunities and limitations when applied to the analysis of university strategy documents. The contribution is explicitly exploratory and methodological in nature, positioning the paper as a laboratory space for methodological experimentation and conceptual clarification. A synopsis of this research (originally titled “Introducing Quantitative Textual Analysis in Higher Education Strategy Research: Opportunities, Advantages, and Limitations”) has been accepted for publication in the volume of book series Theory and Method in Higher Education Research published by Emerald Publishing Limited. The study is guided by the following research questions:

1. How can Quantitative Textual Analysis be used to systematically examine large collections of university strategy documents?
2. What kinds of patterns, and tendencies become visible through QTA that may remain less apparent in qualitative analysis alone?
3. What methodological advantages and limitations arise when QTA is applied to the study of higher education strategies?

Conceptually, the study builds on the understanding of university strategies as both meaningful artefacts and steering instruments (Stensaker et al., 2024). Strategy documents are treated not merely as neutral representations of institutional intentions but as sites of meaning-making through which universities communicate priorities, values, and imagined futures (Stensaker & Hermansen, 2025). In this sense, the study aligns with research on strategic governance and institutional sense-making in higher education, while responding to calls for greater methodological pluralism in the field (Wells et al., 2015).

From a theoretical perspective, the study draws on insights from computational text analysis developed in political science and the digital humanities, where text is treated as data capable of revealing latent structures, framing dynamics, and patterns of emphasis across large corpora (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013). QTA is approached not as a replacement for close reading or qualitative interpretation, but as a way to amplify human analytical capacity by enabling systematic discovery, measurement, and comparison across texts.

The empirical focus of the illustrative example is Finnish universities` strategy documents. This context is used not to produce generalizable findings, but to demonstrate how QTA procedures can be applied within a European higher education system. The European dimension of the research lies both in this contextual grounding and in the broader relevance of QTA for comparative studies of higher education strategies across national systems.

By framing QTA as a methodological complement to established qualitative approaches, it seeks to contribute to ongoing methodological discussions in higher education research and aims to open space for future comparative analyses of how universities linguistically construct priorities, responsibilities, and futures within changing European and global contexts.