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Abstract

Presented as part of a panel at Doing Doctorates Differently, this provocation returns to the question of doctoral difference from a changed position. No longer asking whether a strange thesis might be permitted, it asks instead whose philosophical and institutional architectures decide what counts as thinkable, rigorous, excessive or possible.Beginning with Deleuze's invitation to send a problem "through the ceiling," the paper lingers with the ceiling itself: why is it there, who built it and what happens when doctoral work begins to reach it? Through metaphors of rooms, houses, landlords, tenants and muddy boots, the talk considers how researchers inherit philosophical spaces while also learning where those spaces can no longer hold.Rather than rejecting theory, supervision or institutional life, this paper asks what it means to build a thesis without mistaking inherited shelter for sky. It reflects on the difficult shift from asking permission to think differently, toward recognising when the work has begun to build its own conditions of possibility.

Publication Date

2026-06-02

Event

Doing Doctorates Differently

Deposit Date

2026-08-14

Keywords

postqualitative research, doctoral study, philosophical enquiry, conceptual architecture, theory-use, Deleuze, academic legibility, originality, doctoral experiementation, institutional ceilings

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