At the crossroad between "scientific excellence" and "practice-relevant science". Epistemic tensions in the Doctoral School.

Abstract

Disciplines are, and have always been, in dynamic change, and with change come new challenges for educating new generations of researchers into the academic profession. This paper address these challenges by focusing on the latest decade’s regulation of the production of knowledge in contemporary PhD Education, and especially, the organising of Doctoral Schools (or Research Schools, Graduate Schools, etc.) as a more recent initiative to structure the distribution of knowledge into education as well as research. With regard to a sample of Doctoral schools within the field of Educational Science in Sweden (Utbildningsvetenskap) we analyse different ways of organising curriculum knowledge, and discuss what consequences these differences can be said to have for the survival and traditional dynamics of the disciplines within the field.