Community, Belonging, and Inclusion in Doctoral Research: Rethinking Support for Diverse Student Populations

Community and belonging are widely recognised as crucial components of student well-being, motivation, and success in higher education. For doctoral researchers—whose learning is often independent, relationally uneven, and structurally isolating—the presence or absence of community can profoundly influence identity formation, academic progression, and emotional resilience. These dynamics are even more significant for diverse doctoral students, including home and international candidates, mature students, part-time researchers, caregivers, and those entering academia from non-traditional or marginalised backgrounds.

Although “community” is a familiar term, scholarship shows it is a deeply contested and multifaceted concept. Community is often idealised as inherently positive, associated with warmth, security, and a sense of cosiness, and imagined as something shared or characterised by solidarity. Yet community is also political, mobilised as a policy response to social problems, and invoked to support the integration of minority groups. Community can be imagined, symbolic, or utilitarian, fleeting and temporary, concrete and material, or ephemeral and pragmatic.

This thematic issue uses community as a lens to examine how doctoral students experience inclusion, exclusion, and belonging across the intersecting domains of place, networks, and identity. Doctoral researchers often navigate multiple, overlapping communities—academic departments, research groups, disciplinary networks, cultural and linguistic groups, geographic locations, and family or workplace communities. These communities shape students’ sense of belonging, which Ahmed (2015) describes as “feeling or being a part of, rather than apart from.” For international, mature, and part-time students, places may be unstable or dispersed; networks may be fragmented; and identities may shift as students move between academic and non-academic worlds.

We approach belonging not only as a matter of participation and inclusion, but also as an ethical and relational practice shaped by care, vulnerability, responsibility, and uneven relations of power. In this sense, belonging is always produced through particular institutional arrangements, supervisory relations, and labour conditions that differently enable or constrain who can belong, on what terms, and at what cost. Understanding how these diverse groups create, access, negotiate, or feel excluded from academic communities enables institutions to reimagine doctoral education as a genuinely inclusive, relational, and socially just endeavour. Alongside critical analyses of current conditions, then, the Special Issue also invites contributions that imagine alternative ways of organising doctoral life and academic community, including practices of repair, collective support, and inclusion that both work within and challenge existing institutional structures in an increasingly performance-driven higher education landscape.

This thematic issue seeks to:

• Investigate how diverse doctoral students experience community, inclusion, and belonging.
• Examine the social, emotional, structural, and political processes that shape doctoral communities.
• Illuminate how doctoral researchers build and sustain networks, form identities, and negotiate multiple forms of belonging.
• Analyse institutional practices, cultures, and policies that enable or hinder inclusive doctoral communities.
• Highlight innovations, interventions, and models of support that foster belonging for underrepresented, international, part-time, and mature doctoral students.
• Study the antecedents of participation and its consequences on students’ well-being, persistence, and later career trajectories.
• Through the inclusion of quantitatively oriented research, provide robust empirical evidence on patterns, mechanisms, and inequalities of belonging by making visible the structural and relational dynamics that shape doctoral life at scale.

References
Ahmed, A. (2015). Retiring to Spain: Women’s narratives of nostalgia, belonging and community. Policy Press.

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