A Doctoral Colloquium: Examination of a Doctoral Theses: From a Theatre of Control to a Space of Collective Learning and of Knowledge-Making

Abstract

Abstract: “Human society has not developed in accordance with a prearranged plan, but empirically, in the course of a long, complicated and contradictory struggle” (Trotsky, 1986, pp.24). This paper reports on the reflective engagements about the topic, From a Theatre of Control to a Space of Collective Learning and of Knowledge-Making, with a co-researcher in the collaborative international research space. The engagement emerged from the following question, “Why do some peer reviewers expect a manuscript to bend to their will, as though the author’s intellectual labour is merely a vessel for their own unfulfilled agenda?” At ECRM 2024, I tried to address this matter as the need to continuously engage the tight boundary objects and gatekeeping strategies in the pursuit of the intellectual project. At ECRM 2026, I proposed a rejoinder, specifically about why a Meta-theory matters in a Doctorate Study? A Doctorate Qualification, while significant, its success measure is
to reflect the claims that portray new knowledge as transcendence into new trajectories of knowledge. However, the nature of a Doctorate examination may make the character of the process susceptible to the inherent power dynamics about knowledge. The claims in this paper follow a personal experience of a theses rejection twice. I understood those rejections as navigating the Doctoral Journey, as being in conversation about the examination in a process which is open and complex. While at ECRM 2024, the focus was on the three thinking tools (Judgemental Rationality, Epistemic Relativism, and the
Ontological Collapse of the Natural Necessity), at ECRM 2026, the discussion revolved around the value of the meta—theory chapter. Therefore, the findings of these reflections entail what must be the value of casting a deep eye into the system of examination as the reflexive generative methodology, that is, by reflecting in more critical ways about the history and social relations about a Doctorate Study. Such a system need to understand the complexity of power relations and its inherent politics of knowledge/knowledge wars. The ability to manage the power dynamics in the latter context refers to the growth and maturity about the field, both as the nexus of theory and of practice. In the case under review, the processes entailed questioning the ideological positions of both the candidate and of the examiners, where the examination process could be described as a discursive space. By role playing the paper refers specifically to the examination process as the exercise of agency where the implicit assumptions about the examination process is a social system, and in ways that the potential
disjuncture between the elements, can make for the examiner not to be able to understand fully the life world of the candidate, at least from a philosophical position.