Inequality and doctoral education: exploring the "rules" of doctoral study through Bourdieu's notion of field

While studies have examined a myriad of issues in doctoral study, much of this research has not employed the tools of major social and cultural thinkers to the dynamics of doctoral education. This paper explores the use of Bourdieu's notion of field to render visible the practices and contexts of doctoral education that produce inequalities across doctoral students. This qualitative study with 15 doctoral students in Engineering and in Philosophy demonstrated that these inequalities related to conflicted and codified rules of success within doctoral study, and students' struggle to understand these rules, and then act in ways that enable students' success in doctoral education.