This book on doctoral writing offers a refreshingly new approach to help Ph.D. students and their supervisors overcome the host of writing challenges that can make—or break—the dissertation process. The book’s unique contribution to the field of doctoral writing is its style of reflection on ongoing, lived practice; this is more readable than a simple how-to book, making it a welcome resource to support doctoral writing. The experiences and practices of research writing are explored through bite-sized vignettes, stories, and actionable ‘teachable’ accounts.Doctoral Writing: Practices, Processes and Pleasures has its origins in a highly successful academic blog with an international following. Inspired by the popularity of the blog (which had more than 14,800 followers as of October 2019) and a desire to make our six years’ worth of posts more accessible, this book has been authored, reworked, and curated by the three editors of the blog and reconceived as a conveniently structured book.
Associate Professor Susan Carter is an academic developer at the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Prof. Carter has spent eight years putting together a generic doctoral programme, designing and facilitating seminars, writing retreat workshops, and preparing half-yearly fora. She has designed and taught workshops for supervisors, including several on sustaining their candidates’ writing. Funded by Ako Aotearoa, a research project that she led provides good-practice advice for supervisors at the national level. She also provides workshops for academics seeking support with research writing. She is a founding co-editor of the DoctoralWriting blog.
Dr. Cally Guerin is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. Dr. Guerin has worked in researcher education, running workshops and short courses for research students and supervising Ph.D. candidates at the School of Education. Her active involvement in doctoral education includes serving on the organizing committees of key conferences in the field, Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR) and the International Doctoral Education Research Network (IDERN). She is a founding co-editor of the DoctoralWriting blog and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (now known as Advance HE). Her research interests include research writing, academic identities, academic mobility and internationalization, academic integrity, the academic workforce, and doctoral education.
Dr. Claire Aitchison is a Senior Lecturer working as an academic developer at the Teaching Innovation Unit, University of South Australia. At Western Sydney University, she provided individual and writing group support for researcher scholars, a context in which she researched doctoral and supervisor writing practices and established on-campus and online writing programmes. Her interests include pedagogies for supporting doctoral writing and publication, emotions in candidature, external non-traditional support for doctoral candidates, and social media spaces for doctoral writing and support. As co-founder and contributor to the DoctoralWriting blog, she regularly rehearses her supervisory practices and delights in the collegiality of social learning networks.
