Based on tracing interviews with multi-lingual thesis writers and their academic readers, this study considers the complex role creativity has in doctoral writing and how doctoral writers emerge – or may fail to emerge – as creative academic writers. It also examines how this identity influences thesis writing throughout the doctorate.
An insistent and rapacious call for innovation exists at the heart of academic knowledge production. However, this drive to produce novelty does not appear to encompass notions of creativity in doctoral writing contexts. This means that any burst of creativity that results in original knowledge may not be reflected in the creative expression of that idea in the written form. Thus, the power of creativity to engage both the writer and their readers in the novel idea is at best, sidelined, and at worst, actively excluded. This presentation extends knowledge of this area from two perspectives; the thesis / dissertation writers themselves and their academic readers. The researcher’s perspective was obtained through a tracing study of four multi-lingual doctoral writers in the Faculty of Arts at a research-intensive Australian university during their four-year candidature. The second was based on interviews with a group of six experienced doctoral supervisors in the same faculty. It builds on previous published work which investigated how beginning multilingual doctoral writers understood the notion of creativity. In the current study, the students’ changing perceptions of creativity were, in part, captured through discussion about extracts of their own doctoral writing which they had categorised as creative or uncreative. The academic interviews uncovered what constituted creativity from a reader’s perspective and used textual extracts sourced from doctoral students in the same faculty as a key method to elicit information. The abundance of rich data which resulted from numerous interviews with multi-lingual thesis writers and their academic readers informs this study. This data helps us understand the complex role creativity has in doctoral writing and how doctoral writers emerge – or fail to emerge – as creative academic writers. It also considers how this identity influences their writing throughout their doctoral studies.
