ABSTRACT
Curriculum inquiry as a distinctive field of study seems to have little purchase in higher education and more particularly in the university. In this way, and expressly from a curriculum-theoretical point of view, it becomes immediately pertinent to think of it in terms of the representation problem. Doctoral research is described as characteristically sui generis: one of the problems of being a supervisor is that each has to be worked out separately. The professional doctorate only relatively recently emerged as an alternative form of doctoral study in Australian universities, not uncontroversially. In the case of doctoral research studies, this includes, at a minimum, what is involved in 'becoming researcher' or what it means to become, as it were, the putative subject of knowledge, to say nothing further for the moment about knowledge per se. As various commentators such as Ulf Lundgren and Hindess observe, representation is in fact foundational with regard to disciplinarity, social theory and the modern university.
