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Opponent professor Francis M. Hult (University of Maryland, USA) and Custos professori Taina Saarinen (Ģ��ֱ��).
The doctoral dissertation is held in English.

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This dissertation explores doctoral education as a form of social action. The qualitative mode of inquiry guiding both the theoretical and methodological choices of this work is nexus analysis. In the context of this work, doctoral education is a nexus where different social actors (such as doctoral researchers, supervisors, and funding agencies), places (such as seminar rooms, universities, conference venues), and discourses (such as the one of internationalisation) come together. For this reason, they should also be examined together, rather than as individual facets.

To conduct the analysis, I generated data by doing insider ethnography in two distinct settings over the course of eighteen months: CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland/France) and CALS (the Centre for Applied Language Studies, Ģ��ֱ��, Finland). The data consists of recorded and transcribed interviews, fieldwork notes and photographs, survey data, documents, and reports. In both settings, I followed three practical stages of nexus analysis: engaging, navigating, and finally changing the nexus of practice.

Based on the comprehensive analysis process, I argue that nexus analysis offers a promising holistic, inductive mode of inquiry to study doctoral education from a perspective that is currently underrepresented in research on doctoral education. It enables the researcher to become an activist with powerful analytical tools, which can be used to facilitate change in the studied nexus of practice. Nexus analysis also allows individual doctoral researchers to approach doctoral education in a bottom-up manner, rather than a top-down one, challenging the existing power relationships, gatekeeping, and decision-making practices. Therefore, I suggest that the social actors involved in doctoral education ought to critically assess whether the decisions regarding doctoral education and specific doctoral practices are made by those who have experience and/or research-based knowledge on doctoral education, instead of those who have neither. In this way, challenges of contemporary doctoral education could be addressed more effectively.

Keywords: doctoral education, nexus analysis, social action

Further information

Melina Aarnikoivu, melina.aarnikoivu@jyu.fi

Communications Specialist Anitta Kananen, +358 40 8461395, anitta.kananen@jyu.fi