Generation Delta at the Purposeful Doctorate Symposium: Some Reflections

Abdul Vajid Punakkath

On December 13, 2023, the Generation Delta team took part in the Purposeful Doctorate Symposium at the University of Oxford. The symposium was co-organised by SKOPE (Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance), CGHE Oxford (Centre for Global Higher Education), and the Graduate School at Goldsmiths. It explored the challenges, potentials, and futures of doctoral education in the UK and beyond.

The title of the symposium reflects a shared understanding of doctoral education as a social practice with far-reaching implications beyond academia. Such a practice faces numerous problems simultaneously rooted in structural social inequalities (race, gender, class among others) and exacerbated by ongoing austerity measures that make education itself wholly precarious. The symposium, which was attended by both doctoral students and staff from both institutions, aimed to create a sustained conversation about these issues. Some of the issues discussed included underfunding, rigid disciplinary boundaries, social exclusion, and inflexible progression structures.

Professor Frances Corner, Warden of Goldsmiths, opened the symposium with an introduction framing the event as an ongoing dialogue between research institutions, their leadership, academic staff and doctoral students. She highlighted a fundamental contradiction where research institutions grappling with austerity, have to make difficult choices that may go against the essence of a truly liberating doctoral education, often against their own commitments. Students can feel isolated, excluded, and disillusioned with the state of academia. Yet, only by bridging this seemingly irreconcilable gap through shared ideals, solidarity, and community can we even begin to imagine sustainable structural change.

Against this backdrop, the Generation Delta team presented our wider cross-institutional project and student-led work at Goldsmiths. We see our work as a crucial response to this contradiction. At the institutional level, Generation Delta works specifically to address the structural exclusion and marginalisation of Black and racially minoritised women in academia through changes in both policy, regulations, and viewpoints. Meanwhile, our student-led initiatives focus on community and network building. We Generation Delta Champions – Clementine Bedos, Sula Douglas Folkes, Devina Paramdeo, Angela Loum and Vajid Punakkath – presented how we built communities of care, solidarity, and intellectual exchange, centering marginalised voices and promoting inclusive and pluralistic values as a way to build resilience while awaiting or anticipating institutional changes. This further included how we designed the network and generated a series of safe space rules with the founding a space located at the Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA).

Building on  staff contributions on research culture and environment,  the afternoon session showcased the meaning of a “purposeful doctorate” through diverse research presentations by doctoral students from Goldsmiths and Oxford. The presentations encompassed a wide range of ambitious research topics, employing cutting-edge and interdisciplinary methodologies. They covered areas such as visual studies of food regimes, the politics of detention architecture, colonial histories of heritage, AI ethics, and the challenges faced by Black doctoral students in elite academic space. Generation Delta champion Angela Loum presented her research on childbirth pain understanding among Black mothers, within the context of their disproportionate mortality rates in the UK.

Each presented project actively pushes and blurs the accepted boundaries of doctoral research, situating it not just as a technical education but also as a social, political, and ethical activist-ic praxis. Whether our current institutional realities and Governmental structures can truly accommodate such an understanding and practice remains an open and turbulent question, as illustrated by AHRC executive chair Dr. Christopher Smith’s keynote conclusion. However, as minoritised and precarious doctoral students, who are simultaneously politicised, it is clear to us that while institutional and systemic changes are essential, we cannot simply rely on institutional goodwill. Our collective power and autonomous self-organisation as minorities, students, workers, and activists must be prioritised and understood also as a crucial site of struggle, equal to and perhaps even antecedent to the questions of institutional change via policy and regulation.