International PhD Seminar | Academic Transitions — Culture, Knowledge & Uncertainty

Doctoral Education as a Liminal Space: Uncertainty, Opacity, and Educational Experience

This talk conceptualizes doctoral education in Russia as a liminal space marked by high uncertainty and information asymmetry, where “rules of the game” are often insufficiently transparent for applicants and where doctoral study can be treated as a credence good whose quality is difficult to assess even during consumption.

The dissertation’s overarching aim is to identify manifestations and consequences of this uncertainty in both doctoral experience and institutional arrangements, implemented through four linked empirical tasks. 

First, it evaluates the (non)transparency of doctoral provision by analyzing websites of doctoral-training units using a communicative-potential framework with technical metrics and substantive content elements needed by applicants (e.g., supervisor lists, curriculum documents, local regulations), producing an index and comparing organizational types (leading vs non-status universities). 

Second, using MEO survey data, it measures holistic expectation–experience mismatch across 19 aspects of doctoral study and clusters doctoral students into five latent profiles (Total match, Hard Workers, Indifferents, Softies, and Loners), then links these profiles to satisfaction with doctoral education and perceived probability of successful defense via binary logistic regression (N = 1,176). 

Third, drawing on paired survey data from doctoral students (N = 1,045) and supervisors (N = 324), it examines determinants of considering informal relationships and non-dissertation-related tasks acceptable within supervision. 

Finally, it focuses on doctoral students with non-academic entry motives who nevertheless shift toward a research career orientation, combining descriptive profiling, nonparametric association tests, and a final-stage logistic regression comparison design to identify experience components associated with such reorientation and to derive recommendations for enriching doctoral experience accordingly.

Making Sense of Fragmented Knowledge Cultures in the University Space: An International Student Development Lens

Contemporary universities reflect broader conditions of modernity: increasing complexity, fragmentation, and contradictions across knowledge systems. This fragmentation manifests in disjointed educational environments, teaching practices, knowledge culture orientations, as well as practical implementation and policymaking. As AI transforms what counts as valuable human knowledge work, universities face urgent questions about their mission: What should students learn that goes beyond instrumental knowledge? What knowledge culture are students actually absorbing in university spaces?
The way traditional scholarship has conceptualized universities—examining campus, academic, and organizational cultures as separate domains rather than as integrated epistemic systems—contributes to these fragmentation dynamics. Yet student experience is holistic, and a significant part of their knowledge comes from how they make sense of contradictions between different spaces and traditions. It remains unclear whether university environments actually provide conditions for students to develop capacity to productively work with contradictions and use them as generative sources of knowledge. This dissertation sees unibversity as a holistic space for intellectual development and asks: How can student development be reconceptualized as dialectical engagement with tensions across multiple knowledge traditions in the university space?
Drawing on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, ecological frameworks, and transdisciplinary scholarship, I examine how university spaces should encourage students to work with contradictions within and across epistemic traditions, encountering different ways of knowing, different logics, and different epistemic systems. This study sees work with contradictions not only as an intellectual exercise: students absorb knowledge cultures from the university space as a whole, navigating experiences that blur boundaries between formal learning and everyday life; and particularly from liminal intellectual spaces, intersectional spaces, and spaces of contradiction.
For this study, I focus on international students in US universities, where cultural and epistemic distance from their home contexts intensifies experiences of working with contradictions and complexity. While this population makes these processes particularly visible, the framework is applicable to all students.