Thesis
Navigating critical literacies in academia : identity exploration among international doctoral students in the UK
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2026
- Thesis identifier
- T18185
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 202158106
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- The internationalisation of UK higher education has led to a significant increase in multilingual international doctoral students; however, academic literacy practices are predominantly shaped by Eurocentric epistemologies and monolingual norms. This places multilingual international doctoral students in a precarious position, as they must navigate academic systems that may not fully recognise, legitimise, or value their linguistic resources, epistemic traditions, and ways of meaning-making. This thesis examines how multilingual international PhD students negotiate identity, voice, and critical literacy practices within UK doctoral education and how they position themselves within, against, and beyond institutional expectations of academic knowledge production. Critical literacy is an approach to text that encourages individuals to question how texts relate to power, inequality, and social contexts, rather than treating them as neutral (Freire, 1970 & Luke, 2012). It positions learners as active meaning-makers who analyse whose voices are represented or excluded and how texts can challenge or reinforce existing social structures (Janks, 2000; Vasquez & Comber, 2019). The aims and objectives of this thesis are framed to explore how these participants engage with academic reading and writing as socially and culturally situated practices. The research is situated within a critical literacy framework informed by Freirean notions of reading the word and the world. It further draws on Moje and Luke’s metaphors of identity and literacy, positioning literacy practices as sites where identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested. Drawing on a poststructuralist understanding of identity as fluid, relational, and discursively constructed, this perspective enables an understanding of doctoral reading and writing not merely as technical competencies but as social and discursive practices through which students author themselves as legitimate knowledge producers. The data from this study also pointed toward the embodied nature of meaning-making and power. This study, therefore, also brings Ahmed’s critical affective literacy into conversation with scholarship on critical literacy in higher education. Together, the concept of critical affective literacy focuses on the emotional and embodied dimensions of academic practice. These theoretical perspectives frame doctoral literacy as a space of identity negotiation, affective investment, and epistemic positioning within internationalised higher education. By integrating critical discourse analysis and narrative inquiry design, the study offers a layered methodological approach to examining doctoral literacy practices as sites of identity formation and transformation. Using a qualitative approach, 6 pieces of academic writing, 48 narrative interviews, and 24 written diaries were collected from 6 international PhD students across multiple disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities at UK universities. This thesis then examines how participants discursively constructed voice, authority, and belonging in their literacy practices. Findings demonstrate that participants’ reading and writing practices extend beyond technical skill acquisition; rather, they involve ongoing negotiations between comfort and discomfort, compliance and resistance, and monolingual and multilingual epistemologies. The establishment of voice and academic identity has been found to involve conflicting layers of postcolonial hybridity, as students navigate inherited epistemic traditions alongside the normative expectations of UK doctoral discourse. Participants’ reading and writing practices have been shown to involve critical engagement with dominant knowledge structures, yet these practices are frequently shaped by affective tensions, including doubt and ambivalence. While spaces for critical affective literacy have been shown to be essential for enabling authentic intellectual engagement and identity formation, such spaces are often institutionally constrained and limited. This study contributes empirically, theoretically, methodologically, and at policy level to research on critical literacies, higher education studies, narrative analysis, and doctoral education. Empirically, it foregrounds the lived literacy practices, demonstrating that doctoral academic literacy is an ongoing, ideological, and affective process shaped by institutional and transnational power relations. Theoretically, this study extends critical literacy into doctoral contexts and advances critical affective literacy by highlighting the interplay of emotion, identity, and epistemic authority. Methodologically, it demonstrates the value of poststructuralist critical narrative inquiry for analysing how students are positioned and how they reposition themselves through language and meaning-making practices. By integrating reflective interviews and creative writing diaries, the research illustrates how structured critical literacy activities can support researcher development and agency. At a policy and practice level, the findings challenge instrumental views of international doctoral students and argue for recognising them as knowledge producers whose perspectives can enrich and transform academic cultures, with implications for supervision, curriculum design, and doctoral training. Overall, this study argues for the creation of institutional spaces that recognise multilingualism, hybridity, and affective experience as central to doctoral learning, thereby challenging predominantly narrow conceptions of academic legitimacy within internationalised UK higher education.
- Advisor / supervisor
- John, Tomasz
- Govender, Navan
- Resource Type
- DOI
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PDF of Thesis T18185 | 2026-10-28 | Público | Baixar |