Competitive doctoral cultures can turn belonging into a performance
Updated Aug 05, 2026
Belonging in doctoral education is often discussed as a wellbeing issue. This paper shows it can also become a performance demand, where students learn which behaviours, values, and social cues they must display to count as someone who fits. At Student Voice AI, we see similar patterns in postgraduate comments when student voice captures supervision culture, peer connection, and how safe it feels to ask for help. That is why Benjamin Mulvey and Ewan Wright's Studies in Higher Education paper, "Navigating neoliberal 'regimes of belonging' as a doctoral student", published online on 3 August 2026, matters for UK universities. It shows why doctoral belonging should be read as evidence about research culture and institutional design, not as a test of whether students are resilient enough to adapt.
Context and research question
Universities often talk about doctoral belonging as if the answer is mainly better orientation, more community-building, or stronger pastoral support. Those things matter, but they can miss a harder question. What if some doctoral environments reward self-promotion, competition, and strategic compliance in ways that make belonging feel conditional rather than secure?
Mulvey and Wright examine that problem through 74 in-depth interviews with current and former Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme awardees. Their focus is international doctoral students in Hong Kong, which makes the context specific, but the mechanism highly transferable. The study asks how these students navigate overlapping projects of belonging inside the academy and in the wider society. For UK Graduate Schools, that matters because many of the same pressures appear in local PGR feedback: uncertainty about fit, pressure to perform competence, and isolation that sits somewhere between academic culture and everyday life.
Key findings
The clearest finding is that belonging was shaped by a competitive, individualised university culture rather than by social connection alone. Many interviewees expected an international doctoral environment to be intellectually demanding, but were still surprised by how strongly they experienced it as competitive and self-focused. For UK teams, that is important because a doctoral culture can look high performing from the institutional side while still feeling thin, lonely, or performative from the student side.
Students often felt pressure to internalise the norms producing their exclusion. The paper argues that doctoral researchers were not only trying to join an academic community. They were learning how to appear employable, productive, and strategically visible within a neoliberal research culture.
"many feel they must internalise the very set of practices and values central to producing these environments"
That is a useful warning for universities. If belonging depends on adopting a narrow performance style, then institutions may be selecting for conformity rather than building a genuinely inclusive research culture.
The problem did not stop at the university boundary. The paper shows that students were also navigating national, cultural, and linguistic boundary-making in Hong Kong, which compounded isolation and non-belonging. That matters for UK higher education because doctoral belonging often sits across multiple systems at once: the department, the supervisory relationship, the institution, the city, and the student's wider social world. A narrow survey item on belonging can miss that layered reality.
The paper also exposes a tension between recruitment ambition and long-term inclusion. Universities may succeed in attracting highly qualified international doctoral researchers while still leaving them to do much of the work of cultural adjustment and academic positioning alone. That is close to what we saw in recent research on why international postgraduates build peer support when institutions leave gaps. Global recruitment can look successful on paper while the lived experience remains fragile.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to stop treating doctoral belonging as a soft add-on to research culture. If students describe belonging as conditional, competitive, or difficult to sustain, that is not just a pastoral concern. It is evidence about how the doctoral environment is organised. Local PGR surveys, PRES follow-up work, and doctoral college reviews should therefore ask about peer culture, confidence, visibility, and whether students feel they can participate without constant self-positioning. The benefit is a clearer diagnosis of whether the problem sits in support services or in the culture itself.
Second, institutions should collect PGR feedback at the level where belonging is actually experienced. A whole-university PGR average can hide whether the real issue sits in one faculty, one discipline, or one type of student journey. Where governance and anonymity allow, teams should separate themes such as peer support, supervision, research culture, and local integration. That is especially important for international doctoral researchers, because practical adjustment and cultural fit often show up together in comments rather than in neat survey categories. The benefit is action that is specific enough to improve daily doctoral life.
Third, universities should pair belonging measures with comments about mattering and trust. A student may say they "belong" in a broad sense while still feeling unseen, instrumentalised, or unsure that raising a concern will help. That is why work on belonging, mattering, and trust is so useful here. For UK teams, the practical move is to ask not only "Do you feel part of your research community?" but also "What made you feel taken seriously?" and "What made it harder to trust the environment around you?" The benefit is evidence that explains a score instead of merely confirming it.
Finally, teams should govern doctoral comment analysis carefully. PGR cohorts are smaller than undergraduate cohorts, and comments about supervision, culture, or exclusion can become identifiable quickly. If universities want to segment doctoral feedback more intelligently, they need clear thresholds, ownership, and escalation routes. A student comment analysis governance checklist is particularly useful here because stronger listening only helps when confidentiality and follow-through are credible. The benefit is safer evidence handling in a high-trust context.
FAQ
Q: How should a university apply this paper when reviewing PGR belonging or PRES feedback?
A: Start by adding a few prompts that move beyond generic satisfaction. Ask what helped students feel part of their research community, what made belonging harder, and whether the pressure to appear competent or self-sufficient affected how they participated. Then read those comments alongside existing PGR survey themes on supervision, support, and development.
Q: What are the main methodological limits of this study?
A: This is a qualitative study of 74 interviews with current and former Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme awardees. It is strong for explaining mechanisms, but it is not a UK sector benchmark and it focuses on a high-achieving, internationally mobile doctoral population in a specific setting. UK teams should use it as an interpretive lens for local PGR feedback rather than as a direct prevalence estimate.
Q: What does this change about student voice in postgraduate research more broadly?
A: It suggests PGR student voice should ask what students have to navigate, perform, or suppress in order to feel that they fit. That produces stronger evidence than a broad belonging score alone. Universities learn more when they read doctoral comments as evidence about culture, trust, and institutional design, not only about individual adjustment.
References
[Paper Source]: Benjamin Mulvey, Ewan Wright "Navigating neoliberal 'regimes of belonging' as a doctoral student" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2026.2711405
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