Adeeba Ahmad

Adeeba Ahmad


Postgraduate Research Student

About

My research project

Research

Research interests

Publications

Marion Heron, Karen Gravett, Adeeba Ahmad (2023)Doctoral literacy practices as sites of connections, competition and discomfort, In: International journal of educational research119102175 Elsevier Ltd

Due to a changing higher education sector, doctoral literacies are evolving. Students are increasingly expected to navigate a diverse range of literacy practices beyond the traditional monograph. Engaging ideas from the fields of Academic Literacies and New Literacy Studies, this study sought to explore what doctoral literacy practices students are engaged in and how these are acquired. Findings revealed that whilst some students maximised opportunities for making material and relational connections, others experienced unfamiliarity and discomfort due to the often tacit expectations of doctoral literacy practices. The contributions of this paper lie in the surfacing the range of doctoral literacy practices and highlighting the need for the doctoral community to make doctoral literacy practices visible and familiar.

Karen Gravett, Marion Heron, Adeeba Ahmad (2023)The doctorate unbound: relationality in doctoral literacy research, In: Literacy Wiley

What do literacy events look and feel like for doctoral students, and how do these events overlap intertextually, materially and relationally? The last three decades have seen a rapid diversification in doctoral education where new opportunities for study, combined with an increasingly competitive landscape, have disrupted what it means to undertake a doctorate, as well as reshaping the literacy practices that comprise doctoral experiences in new ways that have not been fully explored. To understand literacies in new ways, we put to work the construct of literacy-as-event, and engage ideas from assemblage theory, to theorise the relationality of literacy practices. Crucially, our study seeks to examine how literacies are emergent and entangled within a wider network of relations. This article draws on data from interviews involving critical incidents with 12 doctoral students, in order to unpack the literacy moments, beyond the thesis, that comprise students' experiences. Our data suggest that we can understand doctoral literacies, not as bounded occurrences, but as assemblages of practices. We contend that thinking with concepts of assemblage and of event offers new insights into the evolving experiences of doctoral students, as well as offering an enriched understanding of literacies and literacy research.