Voice, truth and place in doctoral education: the role of life histories and time maps

Doctoral education is a critical site for the creation of new knowledge. Recently, more systematic attempts to support the success of Australian First Nations doctoral candidates have been introduced. An increasing number of Australian transcultural migrant and culturally diverse candidates have been completing their doctorates. Despite the COVID pandemic and the hiatus in many international doctoral candidate enrolments in Australia, international candidates are slowly recommencing or beginning their doctoral journeys. Yet Australian universities, like their counterparts across the Western/Northern world, remain embroiled in a doctoral education system that continues to privilege Western/Northern epistemologies, methodologies and research practices. Despite decades of postcolonial, decolonial, feminist and First Nations research, the combined legacies of colonisation and the commodification of research associated with an insatiable, cyber-capitalist knowledge economy make it very challenging for candidates and their supervisors to activate knowledge justice in Australian doctoral education.