This document summarizes Andy Coverdale's research on how PhD students use social media to negotiate their academic practices and identities. The research uses an activity theory framework to examine PhD students' social media use across multiple, interrelated practice contexts during different stages of their doctoral studies. Key findings include that PhD students develop cultural artifacts like blog posts and tweets as agentic tools. They also exercise agency within and across figured worlds of different academic communities. However, participatory contexts provided by social media may only partially enable agency depending on levels of adoption and integration with other doctoral practices.

1. Andy Coverdale
School of Education | University of Nottingham
Digitally-mediated Doctoral Agency: How PhD students are using social
media to negotiate academic practices and identities
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Losing Momentum? Current Challenges in Learning and Technology
Department of Education | Oxford University
14 June 2012

2. Doctoral Agency
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Human Agency
“The power of people to act purposively and reflectively, in more or less complex
interrelationships with one another, to reiterate and remake the world in which they live.”
(Inden, 1990: 23)
Human agency “happens daily and mundanely” (Holland et al, 1998)
A ‘cultural view’ of learning (Bruner, 1996)
• Construction of a conceptual system that ‘organises’ a record of agentic encounters
• Performed through knowledge and skills acquisition in specific settings
• Interrelated with identity development
Doctoral Contexts
• Socialisation and enculturation into specific fields of academic enquiry
• Transformation of identity
• Positionality – locating oneself in the ‘field’
• Doctoral research cultures – (inter)disciplinary, supervisory, departmental, peer group

3. Key Motivations for Research
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What is ‘doing a PhD’?
• Holistic and authentic models of doctoral practice
• Key phases in doctoral study across multiple practice contexts
Ecological perspective of social media
• Contextualised and situated approach
• The multiplicity, interrelatedness and transiency of social media practice
• PLE as an idealised and consensual conceptual model
Profiling and sampling participants
• The reality of low adoption rates and lack of widespread use
• Inclusive approach to social media users and user contexts

4. Research Design
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Participants
Six PhD students:
• Different stages of PhD
• Humanities, Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary
• Based in ‘traditional’ Faculty and Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs)
Data Collection
15-month data collection period:
• Logging all digital artefacts (blog posts, tweets etc.)
• Field notes
• Participant-reported accounts
• Three interviews with each participant (90-120 mins. per interview)

5. Analytical Framework
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Activity Theory
• Social, cultural and historical perspective of doctoral practices
• Culturally-mediated, object-oriented activity systems
• Objects are emergent and partly shared, fragmented and contested
Data Analysis
• Used as a descriptive analytical framework
• Multiple and interrelated activity systems
• Open coding and ‘thick description’
Agency in Activity Systems
• Object-oriented ‘interagency’
• Development of cultural artefacts
• Figured worlds and genre knowledge

6. Activity Systems Development
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7. Cultural Artefact Development
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Genre Studies
• Socio-cultural fork of Genre Studies (e.g. Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993)
• Traditions of using tools rather than artefact categorisation
• Development of ‘genre knowledge’ as cultural tools
Figured Worlds (Holland et al., 1998)
• Historical, socially enacted and culturally constructed in recognised frames of social life
• Space of authoring’ (Bakhtin) – mutual shaping of figured worlds

8. Key Findings
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Developing Cultural Artefacts as Agentic Tools
• Purposes , contexts and stages of the PhD
Agentic Contexts
• Agency exists within and across multiple and interrelated practice contexts
• Boundary crossing and interdisciplinary activities
• Peripheral and thesis-oriented work
Loci of Agency
• Networked individualism vs. community development
• Relational agency (Edwards, 2008); Collective competency (Hakkarainen et al. 2004)

9. Key Findings
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“Privileged Insight”
• Social media practices within and across figured worlds increase authenticity of agency
Partiality of Participatory Contexts
• Social media practices within and across figured worlds increase authenticity of agency
• Agency may be partially realised in figured worlds with limited social media adoption
• Greater reliability when integrated with other doctoral practices
• Dominant parties, discourses and cultural practices
Ambiguity of Participatory Contexts
• Interactive vs. broadcast metaphors of social media engagement
• Identifiable and ‘imagined’ audiences

10. Thanks
Andy Coverdale
Blog: http://www.phdblog.net
Twitter: @andycoverdale
Supervisors: Gordon Joyes & Charles Crook