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This research aims to explore the professional identity of supervisors and their perceptions of stress in doctoral learning supervision. The research determines ways of developing strategies of resilience and well-being to overcome stress, leading to positive outcomes for supervisors and students.

Research is in two parts: first, rescrutinising previous work, and second, new interviews with international and UK supervisors gathering evidence of doctoral supervisor stress, in relation to professional identity, and discovering resilience and well-being strategies.

Supervisor professional identity and well-being are aligned with research progress, and effective supervision. Stress and well-being/resilience strategies emerged across three dimensions, namely, personal, learning and institutional, related to emotional, professional and intellectual issues, affecting identity and well-being. Problematic relationships, change in supervision arrangements, loss of students and lack of student progress cause stress. Balances between responsibility and autonomy; uncomfortable conflicts arising from personality clashes; and the nature of the research work, burnout and lack of time for their own work, all cause supervisor stress. Developing community support, handling guilt and a sense of underachievement and self-management practices help maintain well-being.

Only experienced supervisors (each with four doctoral students completed) were interviewed. The research relies on interview responses.

Sharing information can lead to informed, positive action minimising stress and isolation; development of personal coping strategies and institutional support enhance the supervisory experience for supervisors and students.

The research contributes new knowledge concerning doctoral supervisor experience, identity and well-being, offering research-based information and ideas on a hitherto under-researched focus: supervisor stress, well-being and resilience impacting on supervisors’ professional identity.

Much research into outcomes of doctoral learning focuses on employability, or the dearth of academic employment in relation to doctoral graduate expectations, emphasising precarity of academic future work. This new work begins with and moves beyond employment issues, highlighting professional practice and personal knowledge development and impact.

Much doctoral education research focuses on the academic identities of postgraduates, their change and alignment to the work and experience of being a doctoral student and beyond, in academic or other jobs. This longitudinal work explores professional and social impact from doctoral research and transformational changes experienced and reported by graduates in two projects. Based on narrative interviewing turned into case studies, it asks fundamental questions about the purpose and impact of postgraduate knowledge.

Respondents emphasised change in their sense of personal, academic and professional identity; immediate impact on professional practice leading to job change, status, changes in practices and longer-term impacts of further influences on professional practice, some international in reach.

This small-scale study has widespread implications for understanding the impact of postgraduate knowledge on professional practice and personal development.

The work could influence doctoral student intentions and the focus of doctoral programmes.

Postgraduate knowledge is seen as crucial in theorised and practical contributions to social development.

This longitudinal work generates new knowledge, answering questions: What is the purpose of postgraduate knowledge? Who benefits from results? What is the impact from the research? How are outcomes put into professional practice? It found significant developments in professional practice and personal development.

The purpose of this article is to present findings from the authors' research into how supervisors of doctoral students cope with change in supervisory relationships where a supervisor takes on a student previously supervised by another, or has to hand over a student to another supervisor's care, and to identify recommendations for applying these findings to supervisory practice.

The research used interviews to gather and analyse perceptions and practices from experienced supervisors, and aimed to identify good practice to support supervisors in enabling transitions to enhance student success. This work is underpinned by work on conceptual threshold‐crossing, students working at sufficiently critical, creative and conceptual levels to achieve doctorates; well‐being and emotional resilience, particularly in doctoral studies. It makes links between knowledge construction, resilience and well‐being, from the perspective of the supervisors, since it focuses on the experience of supervisors engaging with and supporting students.

The research identifies supervisors' anxiety at, and ways of managing the difficulties of, either losing or acquiring students. It highlights effective strategies for taking on students midway into their research to enable successful supervision.

This research offers new knowledge about supervisor perceptions of, experiences with and good practice suggestions for, supporting transitions for doctoral students who change supervisor.

The aim of this article was to focus on how supervisors relate to and handle the emotional work involved in the supervision process. These emotional issues are related to changes in the academic system, such as an increasing emphasis on efficacy and quality assurance.

Interviews with supervisors are discussed using a theoretical framework built on the concepts of emotional boundary work and feeling rules. A narrative approach was used to make connections between individual stories and the institutional level of the academic system.

The findings show how emotions challenge and condition supervision, and how the micro-processes of supervision and the wider university systems are tightly connected. A paradox is illuminated where emotional aspects are both recognized as an important feature of supervision and as a threat, which could affect it in the context of regulation and increasing demands on efficiency.

The findings suggest that a mediating role of supervisors and emotional boundary work needs to be considered in supervision, which demands certain amount of flexibility in regulations. Also, the risks of associating supervision with private issues are acknowledged.

The findings suggest that supervision is a highly emotional process, and that supervisors, on the one hand, tend to downplay the emotional side of this process, but on the other hand, are well aware of the complexity of the supervision process and its demands on them. Although supervisor–student interactions have become more regulated, they also include more attention to human interactions, feelings and emotional boundary work.

Institutional framings of doctoral education mostly do not recognize the existential dimension of doctoral experience. This paper aims to offer an expanded understanding of experiences of doctoral researchers in the humanities with the concept of entangled becoming. This concept is developed through an existential lens by using Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy – particularly his emphasis on emotions such as passion, anxiety and despair – and Denise Batchelor’s derived concept of vulnerable voices.

The conceptual framing is used for an empirical study based on ethnographic interviews with 10 doctoral researchers and supplementary observational notes from fieldwork at a university in Denmark. Two of the interview cases were selected to showcase variation across lived experiences and how doctoral researchers voice their entangled becoming.

Common experiences such as loneliness, insecurity(ies), vulnerability(ies) or passion for one’s research were identified across the interviews. On the other hand, this study shows that each doctoral journey in the humanities envelops a distinct web of entanglements, entailing distinct navigation, that makes each case a unique story and each doctoral voice a specific one.

Combining an existential philosophical perspective with a qualitative study, the paper offers an alternative perspective for doctoral education. It connects the humanities doctoral experience to the broader condition of human existence and the sophisticated uniqueness of each researcher’s becoming.

The purpose of this paper is to explore belonging in relation to postgraduate wellbeing in the light of renewed concerns about the mental health and wellbeing this group of learners. It attends to postgraduates’ subjective wellbeing, identifying ways in which this is intertwined with a sense of belonging. Belonging is situated in relation to the social domains of postgraduate experiences. This paper seeks to contribute in-depth understandings of postgraduate experiences, to make recommendations for practice and to identify fruitful paths for further theorisation and research.

Two qualitative data sets situated in UK higher education are drawn on here: firstly, longitudinal qualitative data entailing 33 narrative interviews and written reflections of doctoral researchers were collected as part of a phenomenological study of doctoral learning. Secondly, interview data from 20 postgraduates (including masters, professional doctorates and PhD researchers) were collected as part of mixed method qualitative case study research into postgraduate wellbeing. Postgraduate participants were based in the social sciences, humanities, arts and professional disciplines at a cross-section of UK higher education institutions. Data were analysed thematically with a focus on interconnections between wellbeing, learning and belonging.

A sense of belonging arose as a key contributing factor to postgraduate wellbeing. Belonging emerged as multi-faceted, interlinking with spatial, relational and cultural factors which are likely to be experienced in different ways and degrees depending on positionalities. Experiences of belonging and non-belonging are understood as produced through academic cultures and structural inequities. They also pertain to the uncertain, in-between position of postgraduate learners. For postgraduates, and doctoral researchers especially, reaching a sense of belonging to academia was a profoundly important aspect of their journeys. Conversely, lack of belonging is linked with poor mental wellbeing and engagement with studies.

This paper engages with the neglected social domain of wellbeing. Attending to subjective perceptions of wellbeing enabled nuanced understandings of the links between wellbeing and belonging. It identifies spatial, relational and cultural dimensions of postgraduate belonging, contributing an understanding of how feelings of non-belonging manifest, how belonging might be nurtured, and how this potentially contributes to postgraduates’ wellbeing.