ABSTRACT
This chapter makes the argument that the processes of doctoral students becoming researching professionals and of life-long learning, outlined in Chapter 1, fundamentally requires that they are provided with genuine opportunities to form the ‘capabilities’ and ‘achievable functionings’ (Sen 1992; 1999), which, on the one hand, they have reason to value as researching professionals, and on the other, are capabilities which their doctoral supervisors see as valuable. The chapter first outlines normative goals for higher education, including doctoral education, and then introduces key ideas from the capability approach indicating what might appear to be a surprising relevance to postgraduate researchers. It locates doctoral education as a process of human development in which doctoral scholars individually and as members of doctoral communities participate in an educational environment ‘in which they can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests’ (UNDP 2006, quoted in Taylor 2008: xxiv). The goal of human development is to have the freedom to exercise genuine choices (freedoms described by Sen as capabilities), and to participate in equal decision making that affects each person’s life. In practice, exercising such agency to realise the capabilities formed through doctoral education may be constrained both by prior advantage or disadvantage (Burchardt 2009) and by social and economic arrangements. But for my purposes the point is to underline our responsibility as educators to work with our students to form capabilities that enable their genuine choices, albeit influenced by wider conditions, which we and they may have less power to change.
