In contemporary doctoral education, much less attention is devoted to understanding how students engage with higher-level readings than to supporting the development of their academic writing skills. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and equated with an extractive process to retrieve, survey, or review the information needed for writing.

This paper reports findings from a two-year British Academy/Leverhulme-funded project that examined the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms, and practices among doctoral students in the UK and Norway. The project explored how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of and engaged with reading as a research practice in its own right.

Through the original use of a methodology centred on the students' lived experience, the project took a closer look at the material, cognitive and affective dimensions of reading, drawing pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education and supervision whilst foregrounding mutual learning from cultural difference.

The project was guided by a primary research question and two interrelated sub-questions:

How do English and Norwegian doctoral Students relate to, make sense of and engage with reading as a practice, cognitively and emotionally?

• What do different reading practices reveal about different cultural reading and schooling traditions?
• How do different languages and socio-political contexts shape reading a a socio-cultural practice and what can be mutually learned from Norwegian and English context?

Our presentation will depart from the seemingly commonsensical point that reading takes time. Engaging in a text with the aim of interpreting and understanding is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discuss this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.

 This ECER presentation will grapple with these issues and illuminate the commonalities and differences in the emerging findings among respondents in the Norwegian and English case studies. The findings have not yet been fully analyzed, but they will be well in advance of the conference in Belgrade. Given the rich data we have, we will not be able to address all aspects of what we find in one presentation, but we will select the most salient points in the hope of stimulating a meaningful debate with the audience. 

With that in mind,  our paper will focus on experienced time in relation to reading.  Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time (experienced) seem to be juxtaposed in the process of reading, creating conflicts and tensions for the majority of the PhD students in the project. The idea that reading can and should be done fast and targeted to supply the project under study with the right information seems to hoover over many students – meaning efficiency and a goal-oriented practice are what the students point to as an expectation in their doctoral work. Deeper reading of texts opposes this – and thus creates various challenges, demanding coping mechanisms and strategies for the students. The project further confirmed that reading practices in doctoral education are rarely addressed as a direct ‘supervisory matter’ – meaning reading is expected of the students as a practice to be sorted by them individually.

Against this backdrop, we asked participants to pause and reflect on their reading practices and engage in deep and slow reading to illuminate individual and collective processes of interpretation, the development of the doctoral voice, and the value of community building.   

Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, this project proposes an original methodological combination of Hermeneutics and Phenomenology, with particular reference to the works of Ricoeur (1984) and Schutz (1972) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, the embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making and the spatio-temporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students. This research project is a phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfold in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involves two groups of doctoral students based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham) - eight students and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim), nine students. In the first phase of the study, which took place in early fall 2024, we conducted focus group interviews with the students: two in Norway and one in England. We also collected Individual reflexive diaries of one week’s reading practices from students. In the second phase, which began in late fall 2024, we conducted individual episodic narrative interviews with each student and ended with a slow reading experiment we called the ‘circle of voices’. All data were recorded, and some were videotaped. The data were collected in the respective languages, meaning that when transcribed from the Norwegian case, they were translated into English so that the whole research group had access to them. The project has yielded rich data across the two case studies (Norway and England). When this proposal is submitted, the team of researchers plans to analyze and collate the main findings.

This project will produce rich, in-depth data about the students’ engagement with reading in their doctoral studies. A greater understanding of current practices and predicaments will benefit the doctoral community, enabling better support for their intellectual and personal development. This, in turn, will produce positive ripple effects on their ability to write, fully participate in the academic epistemic community, complete their studies and alleviate mental health and well-being issues that are currently rife in doctoral education (Dakka 2019). The findings are expected to lead to pedagogic innovations in supervisory teaching/mentoring practices in Norway and the UK, with a specific focus on embedding hermeneutic phenomenological reading exercises in doctoral training programmes alongside academic writing support. Acknowledging that reading practices are not neutral but socio-culturally and geographically embedded, the study’s dual site fosters cultural exchange and valorises difference as a source of mutual learning for English and Norwegian higher education cultures and practices. Finally, the project's findings will inform plans for a scaled-up, comparative, longitudinal project with Norwegian, Italian and German partners that will examine cross-cultural variations in doctoral reading engagement across different disciplinary fields and will assess the long-term effect of slow-reading practices on the quality of academic writing.

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