Doctoral education is a key site of knowledge creation that has the potential to either foreclose or open up possibilities for transformation in higher education. It is a pedagogical space rife with neoliberal social imaginaries of efficiency and accountability (Zembylas, 2023) that can provoke anxiety, fear, shame and anger among both doctoral candidates and supervisors. The pressure to conform to dominant Eurocentric linear and fast capitalist timescapes, while at the same time, developing a vast array of global market, project management, industry-ready and entrepreneurial graduate attributes and publishing and applying for research grants while completing a doctoral thesis particularly affects First Nations and transcultural doctoral candidates who have different community, family, work and other demands on their time (Manathunga, 2019).
In this paper, a team of First Nations, transcultural and non-Indigenous researchers and doctoral candidates seek to challenge dominant neoliberal affective imaginaries by centring their research and knowledge creation in geopolitical, cultural and linguistic First Nations and transcultural counter-imaginaries. Our research demonstrates how these counter-imaginaries raise ‘historical and political questions’ (Zembylas, 2023, p. 10) in doctoral education about how the historical, geographical, linguistic and cultural resources that First Nations and transcultural doctoral candidates bring with them into doctoral education can be foregrounded and accredited. By engaging in facilitating these counter-imaginaries of doctoral education, this research seeks to create ecologies of affect of hospitality and cultural responsiveness. Adopting a strengths-based approach that centres First Nations and transcultural doctoral successes, this research seeks to produce affects of critical and radical hope (Manathunga & Bottrell, 2019) and ‘connectedness, relationality and solidarity’ (Samuel & Mariaye, 2023, p. 26) in doctoral education.
This paper seeks to engage in projects of reimagining the university otherwise by placing First Nations knowledge systems at the centre of Australian doctoral education through life history and visual time mapping methodologies (Dhunpath & Samuel, 2009; Goodson et al, 2017; Manathunga et al., 2021). Life history and time mapping methodologies invite participants to articulate stories of their intellectual and cultural life journeys that have led them to research and form the basis of deep and respectful relationality between doctoral students and supervisors. Selecting a number of life history narratives and time maps from their study, they demonstrate how First Nations knowledge approaches about Stories have the potential to transform doctoral education policy and practice and produce ecologies of affect that can transform educational research.