Representing postgraduate education: Media, pop culture and public imaginaries hybrid symposium event
How are postgraduate students and postgraduate education represented in popular culture? What do novels, films, television, comics and social media tell us about how doctoral and postgraduate life is imagined—and how might these representations shape public understandings of universities, academic work and the experience of postgraduate study?
The Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre (DEAR) at the University of Warwick is hosting a hybrid symposium bringing together researchers interested in the representation and cultural imagination of postgraduate education. The symposium provides an opportunity to explore how postgraduate education is imagined, represented and circulated through popular culture and media. We are interested in the stories, images and narratives through which postgraduate students become publicly intelligible.
The event brings together work drawing on a range of cultural forms, including popular literature and social media. Contributions examine public attitudes towards the PhD, queer postgraduate students in contemporary Anglophone fiction, the representation of doctoral students within Dark Academia, online self-representation among prospective Chinese doctoral students, and depictions of postgraduate students in contemporary fiction.Why representations of postgraduate education matter
The symposium builds on earlier scholarship examining how universities are represented in popular culture and media, including Professor Pauline Reynolds' pathbreaking work in Representing U: Popular Culture, Media and Higher Education, as well as research on the cultural imaginaries of doctoral education, including Frances Kelly's book The Idea of the PhD.
Our interest is the ways that postgraduate students and postgraduate education are represented across different cultural forms and what these representations might reveal about contemporary imaginaries of academic life. Who gets represented as a postgraduate student? What kinds of lives, identities and aspirations are associated with postgraduate study? What forms of success, failure, belonging, exclusion or transformation are attached to the doctorate? What can popular representations tell us about wider public expectations of postgraduate education? And what areas might popular representations allow insights into that other types of representation (e.g. scholarly accounts) do not?
The symposium is intentionally exploratory rather than a presentation of settled work. We hope to use the event to test ideas, develop conceptual and methodological approaches, and identify connections across different areas of research. We are also interested in developing the ideas into a future collaborative publication or collection focused on representations of postgraduate students and postgraduate education.
Join the conversation
The event will provide space not only for presenting developed research, but also for collectively thinking through new questions and approaches. We hope that conversations initiated through the symposium will contribute to future collaborative work on the representation and public imagination of postgraduate education.
We welcome colleagues to register for the event to attend either in person or online.
The event is Chaired by Dr James Burford.
Event information
Date & time
- 7th September 2026
- 12.30-4.30pm (British Summer Time)
Venue
- Hybrid event - attend in person at the Warwick campus (Faculty of Social Sciences Building) or online.
Registration
📣 Registration is required - please go to the event registration pageLink opens in a new window
Programme:
12.30–12.40
Welcome: Why public representations of graduate education matter, and to whom
Dr Owen Gower, UK Council for Graduate Education. Presentation format TBC.
12.40–12.50
Introduction: Setting the agenda for the day
Dr James Burford, University of Warwick.
12.50–13.15
Public Attitudes toward the PhD
Dr Rachel Handforth, Nottingham Trent University.
13.15–13.40
Queer Graduate Students' University Orientations in Anglophone Fiction
Dr James Burford, University of Warwick.
13.40–14.05
Interrogating the Neoliberal Academy: Dark Academia as Public Pedagogy in the Novel Katabasis
Dr Joyce Uerpairojkit, Thammasat University, Thailand, and Mary Eppolite, Mahidol University, Thailand.
14.05–14.20
Discussion
Chaired by DEAR Centre colleagues.
14.20–14.40
Refreshment break
14.40–15.05
Becoming Doctoral on Red Note: An Analysis of Online Self-Representation Among Chinese Overseas Applicants
Evan Zheng, University of Warwick.
15.05–15.30
Depictions of Postgraduate Students in The Love Hypothesis
Dr Phoebe Macindoe, University of St Andrews.
15.30–16.10
Roundtable discussion
Prof Pauline Reynolds, University of Redlands, and Prof Emily Henderson, University of Warwick, with all presenters.
16.10–16.30
Closing reflections and next steps
Dr James Burford, University of Warwick
About the speaker(s):
Dr James Burford is a Reader in Education Studies and is the co-founder of the Doctoral Education and Academia Research Centre.
Dr Owen Gower is the Director of the UK Council for Graduate Education. Dr Gower is a member of the DEAR Centre Advisory Board.
Dr Rachel Handforth is a Senior Lecturer in Doctoral Education and Civic Engagement at Nottingham Trent University.
Dr Joyce (Thornchanok) Uerpairojkit is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Learning Sciences and Education at Thammasat University.
Mary Eppolite is an Assistant Lecturer, Mahidol University International College.
Evan Zheng is a doctoral researcher at the University of Warwick and the current Doctoral and Postdoctoral Representative on the DEAR Centre Collective.
Dr Phoebe Macindoe is a researcher and University Tutor in Medieval Literature at the University of St Andrews.
Professor Pauline Reynolds is a professor in the Education department at University of Redlands. Professor Reynolds is one of the Chairs of the DEAR Centre Advisory Board.
Professor Emily F. Henderson is a professor in Education Studies at the University of Warwick. She is co-founder and Director of the DEAR Centre.