Doing Doctorates Differently: The parapedagogic potentialities of the PhD process

Coming together in this conference collectivity, these are doctorates that in their doing – thinking, researching, writing, supervising, assessing, publishing – live by “no preexisting rules, processes, methods, categories or ‘determining judgement’.”1 They are doctorates that “cannot be taught or learned.”2
3
Such PhDs – thesis’ refusing to (con)form – in their ever probing, in-forming, stubborn curiousness of problematics living beyond solution driven research, lead to transformative moments in the act of learning, that in their difference are “...made sense of, not in terms of what [they] mean but in terms of what [they] do.”4
Yet in their difference, doctorates working within the ‘terms of what they do’ are oft accompanied by bewildered whisperings: What is doctoral research without methodology? What about ethics? Literature reviews? Or introductions? How are they supervised? Assessed? What is being written? Concluded? Solved? How do such doctorates exist at all?
This panel is a collective insight into doing doctorates differently, doctorates that rather than model processes of knowledge making, offer potentialities of engagement that orientate academia towards “...experimentation in contact with the real.”5