What do literacy events look and feel like for doctoral students, and how do these events overlap intertextually, materially and relationally? The last three decades have seen a rapid diversification in doctoral education where new opportunities for study, combined with an increasingly competitive landscape, have disrupted what it means to…

The concept of a typical pathway to becoming a student is a pervasive narrative within higher education, with moving away from home to live at university framed as the "traditional student experience". In response, recent literature has begun to trouble the thinking around student mobilities. Building on this work, this study draws upon…

This article examines teachers' perspectives on a neglected area of practice: academic referencing. Commonly considered a simple skill to learn, we suggest that instead a study of referencing practices enables us to glean valuable insight into the challenges experienced by students when developing a learner identity. Drawing on interviews with…

Student transitions are a central part of higher education policy and practice internationally. However much of the work within this important area is underpinned by unquestioned and limited assumptions of what transition as a concept might mean. Moreover, too often understandings of transition defer to narratives that sustain a stereotypic…

In the context of a marketised higher education system, meaningful interpersonal connections remain of paramount importance to many students. Using a story-completion method, we examine how relationships impact upon students' experiences of higher education, and explore the importance of relational pedagogies. We draw upon data from a longitudinal…

This article employs a new approach to understanding student transition. This area of theory and practice has developed a huge global significance. However, transition as a concept is under-theorised, and a discourse that reiterates stereotypic narratives of students' normative and linear trajectories can be seen to permeate the field. Drawing on…

This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging, we suggest that normative narratives often contain a number of omissions. Such omissions include a consideration of the experiences of those students…

This article examines the challenges experienced by students when developing referencing practices. There has been minimal research into students' development of their referencing skills, with referencing often considered a mechanistic skill and not worthy of attention. This paper argues that, rather, referencing is an area of practice imbued with…