Back in early December 2024, Prof Emily Henderson and doctoral student S. Arokia Mary travelled to Nottingham UK to present at the Society for Research into Higher Education Conference 4-6th December.

The Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) is a UK-based international learned society concerned to advance understanding of higher education, especially through the insights, perspectives and knowledge offered by systematic research and scholarship. The Society aims to be the leading international society in the field, as to both the support and the dissemination of research.

Higher Education has always had a role in engaging with society’s ‘wicked issues’, with academics consciously engaging with or being drawn into politically-charged discussions about a wide variety of issues including climate change, human rights, migration, nationalism, conflict and war-torn societies, medical ethics, resource scarcity, or economic issues (both global and country-specific). The borderland between activism and dialogue is, however, a contested one and gives rise to a number of concerns. This year’s conference seeks to explore the ways in which staff and students are, and have historically been, involved in various forms of activism and ask questions about the future roles that higher education – and the people in it – might take.

In a parallel session , S. Arokia Mary presented her paper "Expanding Understandings of Doctoral Academic Socialisation: Exploring Doctoral Students’ Definitions and Experiences in India". Doctoral academic socialisation (AS) has been argued to be crucial for doctoral education. Existing research explores doctoral AS from a higher education institution-centred perspective, predominantly in the global north. S Arokia Mary's paper aims to (i) further expand the conceptualisation of doctoral AS by engaging with doctoral students’ definitions and experiences, and (ii) contribute to doctoral AS existing research literature from a global south context (i.e., India).Through this paper, she argues for a student-centric conceptualisation of doctoral AS. For this, she explored doctoral students’ perceptions and day-to-day experience-based definitions of doctoral AS. Employing a three-week-long solicited diary study with doctoral students in Delhi, India, she argues for a broader conceptualisation of doctoral AS led by students’ aspirations. Through these varied individual and collective aspirations informed AS, she aims to demystify the processes of doctoral education.

In a specially held symposium proposed by the DEAR Centre and looking at "Academics doing their own thing – waywardness as resistance in international academia", both Prof Henderson and S. Arokia Mary presented the paper "A sense of social responsibility’: Informal higher education outreach practices in Indian academia" (co-authored with Dr N Sabharwal, Prof Stewart, D Sierra, R Khurana and A Painuly). The empirical base of this paper is an in-depth case study of a government college as part of the four-year WAHEI research project.

The paper explores how academics in India enact higher education (HE) outreach even in the absence of a formal HE outreach culture. While community engagement is strong in Indian HE, the notion of outreach as a practice of sharing information and guidance on HE is less common, though the national education policy (NEP 2020) agenda seeks to alter this. The paper argues that academics in India are engaging in HE outreach practices, but that these practices tend to be informally enacted rather than located within the professional setting. The study underpinning the paper is an in-depth case study of a public HE college in Delhi, India, and the paper sets out the HE outreach activities and motivations of academics, using Capabilities Approach to develop the notion of a HE outreach capability to understand how and why academics engage in HE outreach work even outside their formal roles.