Robyn Barnacle

Denise Cuthbert

This book addresses a world-wide audience with reference to a global problem: how the PhD can serve the planet. It examines the role of the PhD, in and of itself, and, as representative of research, the university and evidence-based knowledge, in relation to global crisis and the future of humanity. As such, it speaks to the scholar, the teacher, the policy-maker and the administrator concerned with the role of higher education’s highest award at a time of great global crisis. The approach is critical in that it offers diverse views on these issues and does not seek to privilege one single school of thought. The collected articles span theoretical reflections on key issues through to case-study examples of how PhDs are being deployed and re-thought to address global issues.

Provocations for the Doctorate and a Future Contested

The PhD at the End of the World

Christine Schmidt

Expertise is under sustained interrogation. We see it in so-called edu-scepticism and pessimism about graduates' apparently diminishing employment prospects, challenges to the role of Higher Education institutions as arbiters of knowledge and post-truth rhetoric more broadly. This paper examines how the PhD is being discursively positioned in this context. We ask what these changing conceptions of expertise, education and work mean for how PhD-level expertise is understood. Drawing on a range of sources, from the scholarly to the wider media, we draw together five exemplar models of expertise to expose the transforming ratio between generalist, transferable skills and specialist knowledge. The evident diminution of specialisation raises numerous issues for the PhD as it is increasingly called upon to serve multiple and potentially contradictory needs: an innovation society on the one hand and the discipline on the other. Reconciling the tension between depth and breadth is an important issue for a degree whose hallmark is -- or at least has been -- depth.

Robyn Barnacle

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