A critical realist study of doctoral student agency and reflexivity in navigating PhD trajectories : narratives from Hong Kong /

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Student Theses

2022

Sun, Xiujuan

Hong Kong : The Education University of Hong Kong

Thesis

Research on PhD student experiences has flourished over the past two decades, which noticeably takes place under the contemporary background of doctoral population expansion, higher education marketisation, and intensifying competition for academic employment worldwide. Amongst the enlarging body of literature that is mostly Western-based, research has yielded abundant evidence on the turbulent aspects of doctoral study. However, little has focused on the agentic role doctoral students play in the candidature process, particularly regarding their interaction with the historically continuously shifting doctoral education conditions configured in specific social, cultural, and political contexts. To address this knowledge vacuum, the present study draws on a critical realist perspective to examine the lived PhD experiences captured and articulated within Hong Kong. Using Margaret Archer’s sociological notions of structure, agency, and reflexivity, it seeks to unveil how participants from diverse backgrounds proceed through their doctorate in the social environment where they inhabit. The project adopted a two-phase narrative inquiry design, which combined life story and photovoice interview protocols. Analytical dualism was applied to the analysis of one-off narrative interviews with 18 participants enrolled at two Hong Kong universities whereas narrative analysis was undertaken on four distinct stories collected over a period of one year and a half. According to the initial findings, participants prominently enacted proactive, reactive, projective, and reserved types of agency to address circumstances they intentionally, temporarily, imaginatively, or involuntarily confronted over the course of their doctoral studies. Meanwhile, participants’ exercise of agency was tied in complex ways to the significant social relationships of distinct properties, divergent institutional structural and cultural affordances, and the endemic neoliberal discourse of performativity surrounding them. Furthermore, Archer’s reflexive modalities (i.e., communicative, autonomous, meta, and fractured) were employed to explicate the subjective mechanisms that mediate the complex agency-structure intersection in four divergent doctoral pathways. Analysis revealed that the individual was prone to practise different reflexive modes in a context-contingent, hybrid, and shifting manner. This illuminated why and how agency can play an effective but, under some circumstances, insufficient role in helping participants respond to the affordances and constraints existing in the multi-layered doctoral education system. The study promotes a novel understanding of the nuanced manifestations and efficacy of doctoral student agency enacted across the participants’ experiences. It provides an elaborate description of how charting the PhD trajectory as active agents is a structurally bounded and reflexively mediated process. Accordingly, the study proposes agency-centric action guides for university leaders, policymakers, supervisors, and candidates alike to adopt and adapt. It concludes by outlining empirical, methodological, and conceptual recommendations for future research endeavours

LG51.H43 Dr 2022eb Sunx

https://educoll.lib.eduhk.hk/records/XYGeQJwx