Doktorat
The Doctorate

Academic and Socio-cultural Contexts

Author(s): Emilia Grzesiak
Subject(s): Social Sciences, Education, Higher Education
Published by: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: PhD; academic degrees; education; career
Summary/Abstract: This book presents issues related to doctorates and doctoral studies in various contexts. It describes their social significance, taking into account their value to society, and also explains their continuing popularity. The publication has an ordered structure consisting of seven chapters. The first and second chapters reconstruct the concept of the doctorate, starting with its history and then moving on to possible understandings and perceptions; the types of doctorate and different approaches to it are considered. The third chapter is devoted to the rituals associated with the awarding of doctorates. It focuses on matriculation, understood as an academic ritual, and the social significance of academic rituals and symbols, as well as the nature and course of the PhD thesis defence. The fourth chapter describes the role of the doctorate, which often constitutes a conscious and deliberate turning point in a career, whether academic or non-academic, or in the strictly private dimension. The fifth chapter is a synthetic analysis of the transformation processes in the modern-day university. It addresses the issue observed nowadays of the commercialisation of the knowledge acquisition process. Moreover, it presents current approaches to research and academic careers, as well as referring to the issue of diploma inflation (e.g. in terms of the theory of credentials). Chapter Six outlines selected contexts of access to doctorates. It analyses the participation of women in doctoral studies and identifies opportunities for foreign students to realise their academic ambitions. The final chapter presents the psychosocial aspects of writing a doctorate, starting with the ways of selecting candidates for doctoral studies. It addresses a variety of issues, starting with the choice of the topic of the doctoral dissertation, through doctoral seminars, the issue of tutoring and mentoring in doctoral studies, the role and importance of the supervisor in the process of writing the dissertation and conducting research (also in the context of the phenomenon of indexing and the ubiquitous fight for points), and ending with problems and difficult situations occurring during the process of writing one's dissertation, such as isolation in academic space.

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