Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Educational Measurement and Research

Major Professor

Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, Ph.D.

Co-Major Professor

Janet C. Richards, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Christie Byers, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Lorien Jordan, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Alexandra Panos, Ph.D.

Keywords

emergence, posthuman methodologies, research literacy, process philosophies

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation was to experiment with qualitative research methodologies while exploring the complexities of doctoral education, research practices, philosophies of inquiry, and other topics intersecting with(in) educational scholarship. My vision for this work was fueled by postmodernist critiques of humanist education, frustrations with the methodological status quo pervasive in educational research, and deep concerns about the unsustainability of performance-focused teaching and learning.

The logic I follow in this project is simple: if we—researchers and academics—are to contribute solutions for challenges and ongoing crises in our world, then we must start thinking relationally and in ways more complex than the increasingly fast tempo of academic life typically affords. Moreover, learning to think differently requires scrutiny of already familiar assumptions, theories, desires, and truths, and then, it also needs play and freedom to (re)imagine reality. In my dissertation, I do just that: play, (re)imagine, and scrutinize educational research and doctoral education.

The experimental methodology of this project was inspired by Paul Stenner’s work on fabulation and liminal experiences (2017, 2018). By virtue of fabulation’s inherent incompatibility with objective truths pursued in positivist social science, I was able to explore ambiguous spaces that conventional research methods cannot reach, such as rifts between “reality” and “fantasy,” “individual” and “community,” “human” and “not-human,” “theory” and “practice,” “science” and “art,” and between other dualisms that are taken for granted in contemporary social sciences. The theme of this play/arts-based inquiry is doctoral student experiences studied with the help of process philosophies and liminality theories as experiences of emergence. The study unfolded as a first-person dialogue with imaginary (fabulated) monsters responsible for anxieties, fears, and apprehensions familiar to all doctoral students and theorized with Cohen’s Monster Theses (1996) as informants capable of revealing to us humans truths about ourselves.

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