‘Room of Our Own’: An Alternative to Academic Isolation

Thus, Virginia Woolf (1977, p. 7) identifies the minimum material requirements for the production of literature. This chapter aims to explore the relevance of this statement to the PhD research process with specific reference to the experiences of five female postgraduates. John Hockey comments that ‘A number of studies highlight the potential isolation of postgraduate researchers’ (Hockey, 1991, p. 324), and that relationships are of fundamental importance in enabling postgraduates to stay in control of the ‘inevitable disorientation’ (p. 323) in PhD work. He conceptualizes potential isolation as being on two levels-social and academic.