Place of theory: Locating the New Zealand Education PhD experience

Abstract

The year 1998 marked 50 years of doctoral study in New Zealand, and in 1999 I embarked on a history of Ph.D. theses in Education. Influenced by Foucaultian genealogy, this employed a fusion of bibliographic, archival and life-history interview methods. One hundred and eighty-three Education theses were identified and 57 of these graduates interviewed. How has New Zealand's 'corpus' of Education Ph.D. thesis production been enabled and constrained by its temporal/spatial location? To address this, I draw on geographical debates on 'space' and 'place'. The first part contextualises thesis topics, theories and methods in discourses of international scholarship, New Zealand politics and social change. The second part narrates a parallel history of the changing circumstances and sites of thesis production—biographical, domestic and institutional. It integrates students' accounts of thesis work's epistemological, methodological, spatial and technological dimensions to suggest a history of New Zealand doctoral candidates' experience.