Why Doctoral Education is a Place to be Committed to Social Justice: From Argument to Practice

Doctoral education is the last formal step in a globally accepted higher education certification scheme. It has the formal responsibility of educating the next generation of scholars. This unique role gives doctoral education programs access to people who have, or will have, authority about specific subjects and would be able to make changes that contribute to socially just practices. This chapter is the beginning of an investigative journey to demonstrate that such changes can be executed not only in the research agenda but also in the doctorate research training processes-the research-training ecosystem itself. Using a few examples, we explain how a social justice approach can be used to scrutinize processes of doctoral recruitment and admission, preparation of doctoral candidates for the workplace, and pedagogical decisions exerted throughout the doctorate program. Particularly, in our current era of rising nationalist governments, an alarming environmental crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic raging, we argue that doctoral education can play a critical role of making visible and questioning the norms and values that (re)produce inequity and exclusion in society at the local, national, and global levels.