2024/10/18 by Pat Thomson · 1 voice
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Doctoral Education Challenges and Solutions #Evaluation of Teaching Practices #Higher Education Practises and Engagement
paper · doi:10.1080/0158037x.2024.2417095
openalex publication_date 2024/10/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Social media afford the proliferation of doctoral memes across numerous, generally anonymous, accounts spread over multiple platforms – the timeline where the PhD candidate starts off gleaming with health and beaming in delight and ends up an overweight, dishevelled wreck. Or the exhausted cat who has managed to write one line of their thesis in an entire day. But should these memes be a cause for concern? After all, it’s just humour, albeit somewhat dark. My exploratory thematic analysis of a corpus of 292 doctoral memes and a theorisation of memes as public pedagogy, point to strong resonances between the memes and research on the doctoral experience. This enhances their credibility as a source of information. Based on the analysis, I suggest we might seriously examine doctoral meme-based learning, focusing on the potential of their gallows humour to support identity formation, community building, coping and wellbeing. Memes may be small but could potentially do useful work for both doctoral researchers and their supervisors.