ABSTRACT
Drawing on data from an empirical study in Aotearoa New Zealand, our chapter contributes to the theorisation of care and carers in doctoral education. We closely analyse two self-portraits and related diary-interview data produced by a doctoral parent named ‘Gertie’. In our analysis of her visual artefacts, we identify the significance of parental care in shaping Gertie’s doctoral experience. More specifically, we consider how the discourses of ‘intensive mothering’ and ‘the autonomous and unencumbered doctoral researcher’ operate to produce the doctoral student-mother as a non-ideal form of doctoral and parental subjectivity. While the discourse of ‘intensive mothering’ calls mothers to devote significant time and emotional energy to their children, this often conflicts with idealised forms of doctoral subjectivity, which remain associated with autonomy, and a singular focus ‘unencumbered’ by care responsibilities. Our analysis reveals how Gertie, as a doctoral student-mother, is squeezed between these two seemingly contradictory discourses, causing her significant strain. In the second part of the chapter we extend our analyses to ask what greater attention to the concept of care might offer for doctoral education scholarship. Building on existing research, we explore ‘care’ as a concept with the capacity to contribute to a wider re-imagining of doctoral education. Overall, our chapter acts as a theoretical bridge, linking critical theorisations of how care labour becomes positioned as out of time/place in doctoral education with a wider theorisation of care as an appropriately core dimension of the doctoral curriculum.
