Surviving and Thriving: Navigating the Doctoral Trajectory

Xu, Xing; Sit, Helena Hing Wa; Chen, Shen

doi:10.1007/978-981-15-4265-7_5

Cited by 4 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…For these participants, their overseas PhD journeys would be a start of something new, ‘an escape’, ‘a break’, which triggered stimulating sensations and a sense of satisfaction as the need for higher achievement was met. This resonates with the findings of previous studies (Wu, 2014; Xu et al, 2020) that overseas study is often sought as a means of self enhancement and actualisation. Students are motivated to take part in international higher education as they will gain new experience and a global outlook (Marginson, 2014).…”

Section: Findings and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…The benefits of international education to international students have been well studied in previous literature. The list includes a new and exciting chance to mix with people of different nationalities (Brown & Holloway, 2008), personal and professional development (Xu et al, 2020), enhanced intercultural learning and competence (Gu et al, 2010), higher employability upon graduation (Tran et al, 2021), and developing intercultural, cosmopolitan or social capital (Tran & Pham, 2016). In doctoral education in particular, international PhD students accumulate transnational social capital through ‘valued relations with significant others’ (Jenkins, 2002, p. 85), for example, contacts and collaboration with experienced researchers in academia.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why overseas? Vietnamese doctoral students’ motivations for a doctoral study abroad

Phan

2022

Journal of Adult and Continuing Education

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This article reports a study that investigated Vietnamese doctoral students’ motivations to pursue their doctoral study outside their home country. Analyses of in-depth interviews with 19 participants revealed what made a PhD abroad imaginable to them, thus revealing the motivational factors for Vietnamese doctoral students to sojourn for their academic undertakings, including professional requirement and academic development, life enrichment and self-exploration, prior transnational experiences and funding availability. Using the conceptual tools of imagination and capacity to aspire, the study highlights not only the capacity to navigate the horizons of aspirations of Vietnamese doctoral students but also the unevenness of imaginative spaces among them. Going beyond the push-pull framework or the traditional binary of external-internal motivation, this study, with a particular focus on imagination and aspiration, emphasises the capacity of the doctoral students and the socio-cultural context that made a PhD abroad a possibility for them. It further illuminates how their capacity to aspire was different from one another, leading to dissimilarities in their imaginative space and maps of horizons.

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Section: Findings and Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why overseas? Vietnamese doctoral students’ motivations for a doctoral study abroad

Phan

2022

Journal of Adult and Continuing Education

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“…Through photos and corresponding revelatory dialogues, the confines of language could be overcome and potential meanings attached to the previously indescribable notion of researcher identity could be unveiled. Utilizing VEP to delve into doctoral students’ experiences, previous literature (e.g., Elliot, Baumfield, & Reid, 2016; Elliot, Reid, & Baumfield, 2016; X. Xu et al, 2020a) has reaffirmed that this method (combined with interviews) facilitates the bringing of abstract questions down to a hands-on and imagery level due to its visual nature (Van Auken et al, 2010) and enabling more disclosures of the students’ lived reality than an interview alone could possibly elicit.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 94%

A Probe Into Chinese Doctoral Students’ Researcher Identity: A Volunteer-Employed Photography Study

2021

SAGE Open

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Researcher identity has been widely studied as central to doctoral education. However, little is known about students’ emic conceptualization of what represents researcher identity based on their lived experience. Using a sample of 24 Chinese doctoral students in Australia, this study adopts volunteer-employed photography (VEP) to facilitate the participants’ delineation of their researcher identity. Findings reveal that researcher identity is indexed at three levels: belonging as being, doing as becoming, and limited limitlessness. It presents itself as a complex formulating process in which dichotomous, yet mutually constitutive, forces collide and merge. This study concretizes perceptions about the notion of researcher identity through photographs and corresponding revelatory dialogues in relation to people, objects, feelings, phenomena, and relationships. Some insights on visual research methodology are also discussed.

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“…According to a recent report issued by EIC Education (2022), one of the biggest service agencies on studying abroad in China, the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Canada remain the top four destinations for Chinese students pursing a post-secondary education level, and the PhD cohort is primarily clustered in STEM subjects. Emerging studies have shed light on this cohort studying in different education systems, with a focus on their supervisory experience (Shen, 2018), career decisions (Lee et al, 2018), academic socialization (Weng, 2020), cross-cultural adaptation (Xu et al, 2020), etc. Albeit these scholarly insights, more efforts are needed to delve into other facets of this body of students, given its salient status and a new context encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic whose knock-on effects are still being felt.…”

Section: Overview: Research On Chinese International Doctoral Student...mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sociomaterial Investigation into Chinese International Students’ Navigation of a Doctoral Trajectory During COVID-19

2022

Journal of Studies in International Education

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Despite a vast body of scholarship delving into international students’ educational experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known about the doctoral group's perception from a sociomaterial perspective. Utilizing a group of Chinese international doctoral students while drawing on semi-structured interviews, the article unpacks what and how matter and human forces are entangled with one another as bricolages to shape a disrupted doctoral trajectory. It reveals that, within working and social spaces, human agency and non-human matter mediate, forge and produce a doctoral trajectory embedded within a complex lived experience of responding to shifting dynamics during the pandemic. It also shows how doctoral students aligned material and social assemblages to construct sociomaterial bricolages that facilitate a restoration of relative stability. The study contributes to the literature of international doctoral education with a nuanced disclosure of its navigation as a continual process of mobilization, negotiation and construction emerging from the performative flow of sociomaterial practices. It concludes that a doctoral trajectory represents network operations of experiencing and accounting for, not just what humans do with matter, but what matter does to human thinking and action.

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Surviving and Thriving: Navigating the Doctoral Trajectory

Cited by 4 publications

References 52 publications

Why overseas? Vietnamese doctoral students’ motivations for a doctoral study abroad

Why overseas? Vietnamese doctoral students’ motivations for a doctoral study abroad

A Probe Into Chinese Doctoral Students’ Researcher Identity: A Volunteer-Employed Photography Study

A Sociomaterial Investigation into Chinese International Students’ Navigation of a Doctoral Trajectory During COVID-19

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