M.M. (Melina) Aarnikoivu, Dr

Postdoctoral research project (2021-2022): Demystifying academic writing and publishing for doctoral researchers in Finland (University of Jyväskylä, Finland)

Although academic writing is one of the most important activities during doctoral studies and afterwards, courses related to writing or publishing are not typically taught extensively or systematically during doctoral studies. Instead, they are learnt through trial and error, from supervisors and peers, or through occasional workshops or symposia.

Yet, to succeed in academia it is impossible to escape academic writing, as it is the process that leads to publishing, and publications lead to promotions and research grants. The universities’ stakes are high as well: Publication and citation numbers improve the rankings of universities, which again leads to prestige and increased funding on an institutional level. However, the development of an individual doctoral researcher’s academic writing skills appears to come down to a series of lucky (or unlucky) coincidences.

With this project, I launched my interdisciplinary postdoctoral research on academic writing practices in Finnish doctoral education. Specifically, the project was for advancing and finalising three studies on academic writing and publishing, which were all aiming to “make sense” of the “academic writing entanglement” for doctoral researchers in the Finnish context:

1) How to support doctoral researchers’ academic writing and publishing skills?
2) How to make publishing-related decisions as a doctoral researcher?
3) What is a “good, publishable article” like?

This project was meant to provide new, research-based knowledge on academic writing and publishing practices within the context of Finnish doctoral education. It also offered valuable knowledge for those who work within Finnish doctoral education: supervisors, doctoral schools and programmes, and individual researchers who study doctoral education in Finland or abroad.

Doctoral project (2015-2020): "The best drunk decision of my life": A nexus analysis of doctoral education

My dissertation explores doctoral education as a form of social action. The qualitative mode of inquiry guiding both the theoretical and methodological choices of this work is nexus analysis. In the context of this work, doctoral education is a nexus where different social actors (such as doctoral researchers, supervisors, and funding agencies), places (such as seminar rooms, universities, conference venues), and discourses (such as the one of internationalisation) come together. For this reason, they should also be examined together, rather than as individual facets.

To conduct the analysis, I generated data by doing insider ethnography in two distinct settings over the course of eighteen months: CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Switzerland/France) and CALS (the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland). The data consists of recorded and transcribed interviews, fieldwork notes and photographs, survey data, documents, and reports. In both settings, I followed three practical stages of nexus analysis: engaging, navigating, and finally changing the nexus of practice.

Based on the comprehensive analysis process, I argue that nexus analysis offers a promising holistic, inductive mode of inquiry to study doctoral education from a perspective that is currently underrepresented in research on doctoral education. It enables the researcher to become an activist with powerful analytical tools, which can be used to facilitate change in the studied nexus of practice. Nexus analysis also allows individual doctoral researchers to approach doctoral education in a bottom-up manner, rather than a top-down one, challenging the existing power relationships, gatekeeping, and decision-making practices. Therefore, I suggest that the social actors involved in doctoral education ought to critically assess whether the decisions regarding doctoral education and specific doctoral practices are made by those who have experience and/or research-based knowledge on doctoral education, instead of those who have neither. In this way, challenges of contemporary doctoral education could be addressed more effectively.