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Reimagining the PhD in the Thick of It by Raymond Hyma & Javier García-Martínez

Raymond Hyma & Javier García-Martínez write:

“We’re delighted to share that our paper, “Still in the Thick of it: A Duoethnographic Account Navigating and Challenging the Institutional PhD through Participatory and Action‑Oriented Research,” has been published in Action Research. You can read the full paper and link to the Podcast below.

“What happens when participatory, relational, and action‑oriented inquiry meets the institutional architecture of the PhD: tight timelines, individual authorship, and demands for methodological certainty?

“We began with a question that many doctoral researchers will recognize, especially those trying to work with communities rather than about them: What does it mean to pursue participatory and action‑oriented research as a PhD project inside the university system?

This article grew from our shared experience as two PhD candidates in a joint Monash–Warwick Alliance connecting Australia and the UK, navigating participatory and action‑oriented commitments across two institutional contexts. We noticed that much of the literature about participatory doctorates is written retrospectively, once the thesis is submitted and the mess has been tidied into a coherent story. Our contribution is different: we write from the middle, while decisions are still being negotiated, while constraints are still shaping the work, while we are still learning how to stay accountable to participatory values in real time.

To do this, we used duoethnography: a dialogic inquiry grounded in co‑reflexive interviewing, months of correspondence, and the practice of co‑authoring each other’s narratives. This became a meaningful reflective action in itself: a way of “thinking with” one another, staying close to unfolding realities, and building the kind of critical friendship that participatory work often requires.

So, what did we learn?

1) Participatory PhDs intensify identity tensions, and the PhD often insists on a single role.

Across our accounts, the institutional category “doctoral researcher” didn’t fully hold the multiplicity of who we were becoming. For Raymond, entering the academy after long‑term practice made identities collide (practitioner, academic, funder, colleague) while the PhD structure demanded a singular authorial voice. For Javier, researching online peer‑support spaces while also carrying lived experience created another tension: being marked as “researcher” can restrict how one participates, shapes trust, and even blocks access to communities when disclosure changes the relational field.

What we take from this: participatory doctorates require not only methodological creativity, but ongoing ethical work around who we are allowed to be in relation to the people we hope to research with.

2) “Only one name on the cover” is not a small detail, it structures what co‑production can become.

Both of us encountered early warnings about the PhD’s demand for sole authorship. This constraint shaped our projects differently: Javier was warned early that his dissertation would carry only his name; one supervisor even pointed to a prior “participatory PhD” that fell apart over authorship, making sole authorship feel less like a formality and more like a hard boundary around co‑production. Raymond faced pressure to reclassify a deeply collaborative approach, his action research method Facilitative Listening Design, as merely an “intervention” rather than the core of knowledge‑making; he resisted, instead negotiating authorship across multiple outputs so community partners could be named and recognized beyond the thesis.

What we take from this: Workarounds (e.g., co-authored outputs beyond the thesis) can support recognition, but they also highlight a hard truth: the PhD remains an individual credential even when the knowledge is collectively made.

3) The most relentless tension may be time: “relational time” versus “academic time.”

Participatory and action‑oriented research unfolds through iterative cycles, trust‑building, and responsiveness to community rhythms, what we call relational time. The PhD, by contrast, runs on academic time: milestone reviews, ethics approvals, and submission deadlines that rarely flex for relational realities. This mismatch shows up everywhere, from delayed ethics approvals that compress fieldwork windows, to the fear that scholarship timelines will force the research to serve the degree rather than the degree serving the research.

What we take from this: staying accountable in participatory and action-oriented doctoral work often means learning to negotiate between two clocks, and naming that negotiation as an ethical, not merely logistical, problem.

4) Ethics review is often where participatory commitments get translated into institutional legibility.

One of the clearest places we felt the clash between participatory/action-oriented logics and institutional expectations was the ethics review process. Ethics procedures often assume a research design that can be specified in advance and managed through standardized protections (e.g., scripted interactions, formal consent, anonymity), whereas participatory and dialogic inquiry can require responsiveness to what emerges in real time and recognition of participants as agentic partners. In Raymond’s case, ethics review was ultimately navigable, but it still required negotiation over what “appropriate” consent and anonymity should look like when participant-researchers are known, named, and invested in being recognized. In Javier’s case, ethics review became a major bottleneck: he was asked to pre-define what he would share in online dialogic encounters before those relationships and conversations existed, and the process significantly reshaped the participatory character of the project by constraining how he could show up and interact in the field.

What we take from this:

Ethics review is not just a procedural hurdle; it is a governance site that can actively shape (and sometimes narrow) what participation can mean in a PhD, especially when inquiry depends on relational responsiveness and co-produced knowledge.

An invitation

If you’re undertaking participatory or action‑oriented work inside a doctoral program, or supervising it, reviewing ethics applications for it, or trying to make space for it institutionally, we hope this paper offers insights and language for experiences that are often kept private. We also invite universities to reflect on the mismatch between growing expectations of “impact” and the infrastructures that can limit what impactful PhD research is able to become.

Links

Full paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503261443972

Authors: Raymond Hyma (Monash/Warwick) & Javier García Martínez (Warwick/Monash)

PODCAST

Citation

Hyma, R., & García Martínez, J. (2026). Still in the Thick of it: A Duoethnographic Account Navigating and Challenging the Institutional PhD through Participatory and Action‑Oriented Research. Action Research, https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503261443972.