The trouble with doctoral aspiration now

Abstract

This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an ‘academic good life’ in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a research-intensive university in Aotearoa New Zealand, and accomplishes two primary objectives. Firstly, it contributes to scholarship that considers how visual methodologies might inform accounts of contemporary doctoral education. And secondly, it extends queer theorizing of affect in higher education studies, with the goal of understanding how doctoral aspiration might be reimagined through an engagement with Lauren Berlant’s ‘Cruel Optimism’ (2011). I propose that Berlant’s analytic framework helps to explain why students retain attachments to even problematic objects, like PhDs. I conclude the article by tarrying with the question of what to do about doctoral aspiration now.