“Student success” in UK higher education remains a surprisingly vague concept, encompassing a range of priorities from retention and completion to employability and satisfaction. Over the past two decades, as UK higher education has undergone broad transformations, doctoral education has come to sit within a metric-driven environment, where notions of success are reduced to measurable outcomes aligned with regulatory and managerial agendas (Lowe, 2023). What tends to fall out of this view is how success is conceptualised and experienced by students themselves (Cook-Sather, 2018). This gap becomes particularly pronounced for Global South¹ scholars, who are often cast through deficit and homogenised lenses, flattening the diversity of their doctoral experiences. 

This blog post draws on a year-long UKRI-funded, multi-method project – PhD@Cam: What it Takes, Breaks, and Makes – that examines how international PhD students from the Global South (IGS) at the University of Cambridge experience and navigate doctoral “success” – what it means, how it is pursued, and what it costs – beyond narrow, outcome-driven definitions. Study details in Fig 1.

This project is led by three scholars from the Global South: Nidhi Singal, who has been at Cambridge since 1999 – charting a journey from MPhil student to full Professor; and two members of her research group, Nikita Jha and Surya Pratap Deka, who began their PhDs in 2021. All three studied at Cambridge on full scholarships, came from varied middle-class backgrounds in India, and continue to reflect on their own Global Southness and what it means to pursue and inhabit “success” within a historically white institution like Cambridge. In a field where the “international student” experience is largely studied from a Global North vantage point (Mittelmeier et al., 2023), this work begins from our positionality as Global South scholars, foregrounding lived experience as both method and object of inquiry.

The blog post opens with a vignette from a scholar’s life – Arlo’s² – grounding the analysis in his first-person account of everyday doctoral experience, before moving to some key findings and recommendations.

Arlo’s doctoral journey – A vignette

Arlo is the first in his family to attend university. A chance encounter with his current supervisor, then teaching a short course in his home country, set in motion a chain of events that eventually brought him to the University of Cambridge on a fully-funded PhD scholarship. For his family and community, going to “a place like Cambridge” (“everyone had heard of the Cambridge dictionaries”) marked a significant milestone.

Arlo’s transition to Cambridge was a mixed experience. While he found academic footing with a supportive supervisor, pressures beyond his research began to pull him from his “core PhD work”. Plans to relocate with his family had fallen through due to funding constraints. His PhD thus began with an unplanned separation – his wife and children remained back home.

To sustain two homes on his stipend meant juggling a tight fiscal arithmetic: rent in Cambridge, rent back home, school fees, medical bills etc. He recalls, at times, “going without lunch” and withdrawing from social life. The strain seeped into his sense of belonging and mental health. “Instead of worrying about PhD progress,” he found himself worrying about survival – “for myself and my children.”

Yet, Arlo chooses not to be defined by these constraints. In the second half of his PhD, he started an online mentorship initiative, drawing on his experience as a first-generation student to support others navigating access to elite universities and scholarships. What began as a small effort has grown into a social media platform with close to a 1000 subscribers, having supported more than 40 individuals to “win international scholarships.” The project has somewhat stabilised his finances and, just as importantly, renewed his sense of purpose. 

Looking back on his life, Arlo reflects, “It’s not breaking news that I’ve gone through a hard life.” What matters is how he has “navigated through it.” He is now writing a book documenting his life-journey, hoping, “it inspires another child from a humble background” to reach their potential. 

Today, alongside his academic outputs – publications, conference presentations, and newly acquired research skills – this possibility of giving back makes his sense of success feel complete, like “a story coming together.”

The triple labour of doctoral success

While Arlo’s account reflects a distinct doctoral journey shaped by particular life circumstances, it also reveals a broader pattern across our study: the extent of work that remains unseen in conventional accounts of doctoral life and success. We conceptualise this as the ‘triple labour’ of doctoral life – academic, bureaucratic, and emotional/relational labour (Fig. 2) – that sustains success for IGS scholars, yet remains largely unrecognised within institutional frameworks that privilege measurable outcomes over the conditions that sustain them.

The first amongst these is academic labour. Beyond the technical demands of research work, participants described the labour of learning to thrive in new professional cultures (“fast-paced”, “hands-off”) which often differed from those in their home contexts. Navigating this “steep learning curve” of positioning oneself within Cambridge’s academic culture, often without sustained mentorship, intensified self-doubt for some, as in Tesrae’s account of not feeling “good..or smart enough,” with implications for scholars’ mental, emotional, and academic lives.

The second is bureaucratic labour, encompassing the work of navigating opaque information systems, and institutional and geopolitical norms. Participants described grappling with institutional bureaucracies, where access to information, networks, and even timely scholarship payments was uneven and delayed, intensifying both practical and emotional strain. For Ritwik, this meant taking “extra bureaucratic steps” in planning his overseas internship – negotiating visa regulations and permits – adding months-long non-academic work simply to sustain his academic progress, unlike his Global North peers.

The third is relational or emotional labour. Participants described the work required to persist amid underrepresentation, microaggressions and racism, and for navigating cultural differences in predominantly white academic spaces. Tesrae recounts being singled out to show her ID at her college entrance, revealing how her belonging is policed along racial lines. For Nathaniel, even informal spaces of “small talk” became sites of exclusion, where shared cultural references among peers shaped conversations that often bled into academic discussions and potential collaborations, limiting his entry into both. 

Relational labour also involved contending with entrenched epistemic hierarchies and claiming academic legitimacy within them. As Sheena explains, her attempts to pursue global, comparative research triggered pushback – “who are you to do this research?” She noted that such scrutiny, whereby “literally no one else in my group was asked,” fell particularly on “women of colour scholars.” This reflects a differential expectation: Global South scholars are expected to research within their “own contexts,” relegated to “case study work,” while “white scholars” are not subject to the same scrutiny. These encounters point to a persistent “colonial lens,” through which Global South scholars must continually negotiate recognition as legitimate knowers in global academia.

The “triple labour” performed by participants is substantial and often gendered: female participants described heavier relational and emotional demands, while male participants framed their navigation pragmatically but reported more acute isolation and mental health strain. Across participants, this labour remained largely invisible within institutional frameworks. This invisibility has important implications. It obscures the unequal distribution of labour – disproportionately borne by IGS scholars – and allows similar outcomes to be read as comparable achievements, despite being produced under unequal conditions.

Beyond the deficit discourse

Even under significant structural constraints, participants described the PhD as a deeply transformative experience. They narrated their journeys through a dual lens of labour and resilience. Rather than approaching their Global South location through a deficit frame, participants recounted a repertoire of knowledge, skills, networks, and capacities, what Yosso (2005) terms ‘community cultural wealth’, that they mobilised alongside institutional infrastructures to navigate success. 

For instance, in the face of challenges, participants drew on emotional and social support from families back home (familial capital), as well as informal student-led networks (“women’s collectives”) within the University that shaped their sense of belonging (social capital). Others described skillful engagement with institutional cultures through strategies such as being “like water” – patient, attentive, and responsive to where change is possible (navigational capital) – while sustaining hope through agentive meaning-making (aspirational capital). These forms of cultural wealth, rooted in their lived experiences, are central to how doctoral success is sustained. Sara’s statement – “Does it matter that white Cambridge approves? I don’t think it does,” echoes a sentiment running through participant accounts: that success is redefined through scholars’ own practices of navigation, rather than resting solely on institutional validation or support. In these accounts, students succeed because of, not despite, their Global South backgrounds.

Finally, participants articulated a temporally evolving understanding of success itself. Over time, it broadened from a narrow focus on outputs, such as publications, to a wider orientation towards wellbeing, inner-growth, and societal contribution. This shift was captured through a range of metaphors: a journey of becoming, where the PhD was understood as a process of personal growth and ongoing learning (Steven); fulfilling a moral responsibility, reflecting a commitment to giving back to one’s field, community, and the world (Jamal, Nathaniel, Tesrae, Sara); and the coming together of a coherent story, where success was experienced as the alignment of research into a holistic thesis and career trajectory (Arlo, Mei).

Rethinking doctoral education and success

The recommendations emerging from this study call for moving beyond one-size-fits-all models of doctoral support towards more responsive frameworks that recognise the PhD as a relational process and position doctoral students as whole persons embedded in social, institutional, and personal contexts. First, universities must strengthen relational support structures by investing in supervision, college-based support, peer engagement, and accessible services. Second, institutional responses must move beyond individualised deficit framings to address structural barriers – funding insecurity, bureaucratic rigidity, and cultural gaps – through more flexible, responsive processes. Third, universities must engage with epistemic diversity by expanding the knowledge cultures they privilege and recognising IGS scholars like Arlo not as mere recipients of support or inclusion, but as agents in reshaping doctoral education and institutional research cultures.

By foregrounding the lived experiences and cultural wealth of IGS scholars, this study seeks to extend that conversation.

Note: The full report for the PhD@Cam project is available at . The PhD@Cam team aims to share findings from the Cambridge study with diverse audiences and academic spaces this year to co-develop a more comprehensive set of recommendations for UK higher education. We welcome your engagement, please get in touch at: ku.ca.macobfsctd-57f8a7@142ns

¹As classified by NORRAG in the following list at

² This is a pseudonym; all participant names in this blog have been changed for confidentiality.

For us—six researchers working with Southern epistemologies across disparate contexts—the theme of this year’s ĚÇĐÄ´ŤĂ˝ conference^[1] provided us the space to tease out some common threads in our doctoral projects, being undertaken with the same supervisor.

The idea of ‘(re)bordering education’ evoked for us the demarcation of boundaries—epistemic, theoretical, methodological, pragmatic, and axiological—that define what constitutes a transgressive act. It was the interstices between these boundaries that each of us sought to address in our respective research settings. At the intersections where the established order begins to fray, we each delved into questions around agency, empowerment, and redefinition, anchored heavily in Southern epistemologies.

Away from scholarly or abstract conceptions, we drew on a literal understanding of ‘liminal’ as something ‘on a boundary or threshold […]’^[2]. Liminality, for us, was the potent space where new ideas and frameworks emerge from the testing of entrenched perimeters. This was exemplified in the visceral struggle of our participants (belonging to different stakeholder groups) to redefine themselves against systems that aren’t built for them. In Nigeria, it was mothers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders; in Pakistan, it was headteachers reimagining leadership under strain. In South Africa, India, and within Tibetan refugee communities, our stories were about rethinking inclusion, crisis response, and the process of research itself.

The session was built around five provocations, presenting distinct yet interconnected perspectives on how education, in its many forms, is being re-bordered. For each of us, the subject matter and participants in our research represented a breaking of norms. Equally, we ourselves, guided by a common research mentor, wished to challenge through our work, conventions around the topics, processes and perspectives that comprise ‘legitimate’ research. By exploring the intersections of disability, gender, race, class, and refugee status, we collectively sought conceptual and methodological innovations for ‘just’ and transformative education systems. By ‘just’ we mean education systems that confront and dismantle culture, economic, social, and geographical barriers through inclusive policies and transformative practice, ensuring equitable opportunities for marginalised communities^[3].   The foci of the five provocations were the following:

1. Re-bordering Agency: Mothers transgressing boundaries to transform the education of their children with disabilities in Nigeria (Basirat Razaq-Shuaib)

In Nigeria, children with disabilities, particularly children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) remain sidelined despite progressive legislation meant to safeguard their educational inclusion. This injustice places mothers in a constant state of crisis, having to continuously renegotiate the absence of support for their children’s education, resulting in truncated educational journeys and extra costs. Utilising an Afrocentric lens, the presentation explored how mothers carve out new pathways within fraught spaces, harnessing resilience and strategic resistance to transform their children’s learning experiences. Through the re-bordering of education and its purpose, these mothers re-engineered spaces where their children could flourish. Questioning the legitimacy of expert knowledge and transgressing prescribed sites of learning, this research flipped the narrative from what is broken to what is possible without excusing the government’s inaction. In doing so, it made a case for context-relevant policies that reflect the ingenuity already at work in the face of systemic neglect.

Provocations: Who defines what education should be like for children with disabilities? What do we do when the prescribed ways of educating children don’t appear fit for purpose and able to serve all? Whose knowledge counts in the how of education for children with disabilities?

2. Transgressing Expectations: Headteachers Redefining Headship in Karachi’s Low-Income Schools (Camilla Hadi Chaudhary)

Researching with headteachers of schools catering to low-income communities in Karachi, this piece interrogated what constitutes inclusive headship within resource- and time-constrained school environments. Examining headteachers’ reflections of their practices, the study found they actualised situated ‘transgressions’ in order to support their students and create pathways to their inclusion in environments that were fraught with financial and structural inequities. Headteachers’ commitment to supporting their students transgressed prescribed professional expectations, upturning commonly held perceptions about them lacking professional motivation. By bringing to light these practices we begin to re-border understandings of inclusive headship. Furthermore, by creating micro- spaces for change within their schools and in their students’ conditions, these headteachers introduced liminality into contexts where extreme inadequacy of resources had created semi-permanent states of crises.

Provocation: How can transgressions become process for ‘just’ goals? What is the role of policy and training?

3. Transgressive Spaces of Inclusion: Reimagining a Pedagogy of Play for Autistic Children in South Africa (Stephanie Nowack)

The South African education reform underscores the importance of inclusion and play in fostering learners’ holistic development. However, most autistic children are educated in special schools, where play policies overlook geo-political and neurodivergent dimensions. Building on the experiences of predominantly Black participants, this research illuminates the intersectionality of autism and race, historically overlooked. The research delves into transgressive spaces of education by exploring educators’ experiences with a pedagogy of play (PoP) in South African autism schools. Through immersive exploration in pre-school classrooms, findings indicate that educators in these settings emphasised exploration, enjoyment, and empowerment, underpinned by trust and structures, which form the core of a PoP. The research highlights the importance of harnessing learnings from these liminal spaces.

Provocations: How can we harness what can be learnt from transgressive special schools? Why are they rendered invisible if this is where the education of autistic children in South Africa is taking place?

4. Leveraging Crisis: Pandemic Responses in India’s Under-Resourced Schools (Nikita Jha)

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected schools across India, particularly those operating with minimal resources. This presentation examined the experiences of an educational NGO in Punjab, where schools found ways to innovate and adapt in the face of crisis. Without governmental support, these schools found avenues to balance education provision, community engagement, and compliance with regulations. The research shed light on how roles, spaces and processes were recast by schools during the pandemic, transgressing traditional notions of schooling. This adaptability and resilience offer important lessons on how non-mainstream schools can effectively navigate crises, emphasising the need to centre these experiences in future educational responses to emergencies.

Provocation: What can we learn from the crisis experience of such ‘invisible’ schools? What ‘legitimate’ learning role do these schools occupy within the education ecosystem?

5. Improvisation as transgression: Reflections from an ethnographic study with Tibetan refugees-in-exile (Surya Pratap Deka)

The final presentation explored the potential of improvised fieldwork practices in research, using fieldnote writing as an example. It highlighted how an ethical dilemma in the field left the ethnographer at a loss for words, and how this disorientation was captured on paper through a doodle. Workshopping the doodle highlighted the improvisational nature of fieldnote writing and its epistemic value in inscribing and articulating untranslatable field experiences. These multi-modal improvisations challenge the conventional methodological view of writing as a passive transcription of experience. Building on this example, the presentation argued that improvisations are not exceptions but a feature of deep-immersive fieldwork—and of social life more broadly. In fact, improvisation in the face of uncertainty is a defining reality for the Tibetan refugee community-in-exile as they navigate the liminal experience of statelessness in their daily lives. Taking improvisation seriously in our research can redefine the methods-practice boundary, expanding the conversation from how methods shape practice to how, in turn, field practices can transform methodological thinking. In this particular case, it also serves to honour the lives of the people we study.

Provocations: How have you navigated fieldwork contingencies and uncertainties? What new insights have arisen from these experiences? How do your fieldwork improvisations challenge the methodological status quo and contribute to a more context-sensitive and just research agenda?

Concluding reflections

By challenging geographical, methodological, and pedagogical boundaries in education, this symposium sought to probe what constitutes just research, especially when held against taken-for-granted, Northern frames of reference for educational best practices. We each examined and made visible the transgressions that materialise in the interactions between subject and context, individual and structure, policy and practice, and between institutional structure and field reality.

We believe that illuminating the liminality, the capturing of transgressions doesn’t happen by chance, but needs to be a conscious part of the research design. Data on its own is not valid or accurate- it is also the lens that we, as researchers. bring to it- the questions we choose to ask, the methods we employ, and the research processes we participate in. In each of our contexts, we entered the field, not to simply reproduce deficit discourses of education, which abound in the field of education and international development, but rather to also seek out the transgressions, which make systems function despite the many challenges. The ĚÇĐÄ´ŤĂ˝ conference theme provided us with a way of rethinking how these transgressions are essential for transformation, but remain overlooked within competing agendas of international funding bodies, simplistic notions of ‘what works’, and so on. Educational transformation needs more acts of transgressions to be identified and supported, and not silenced.

Finally, as a research group, we are bound by a conviction that ecosystems of knowledge production and practices (both research and otherwise) do not have firm answers, but invite conversations that beckon further inquiry, challenging us to confront the hidden hierarchies and biases embedded within the very frameworks we rely on, given that all of us operate in an institution which is deeply anchored in (and promotes) Northern knowledge structures. We seek not only answers to these challenges, but a reimagining of the questions themselves—a call to unsettle the boundaries of what we deem possible, and in doing so, to cultivate a more expansive, inclusive vision of justice. In our manner of doing so, as a collective research group, we also aim to transgress and reimagine what it means to be a doctoral student and supervisor in a higher education setting.

About the Team

The six participating scholars are based at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and are members of the Cambridge Network for Disability and Education Research (CaNDER). Dr Basirat Razaq-Shuaib is an advocate for parental wellbeing and disability inclusion in Nigeria, author of three children’s books, and founder of The Blooming Mum as well as the Winford Centre for Women and Children. Dr Camilla Hadi Chaudhary is co-convenor of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network and the Climate and Sustainability Education Seminar (CASES) Series at the Faculty. Dr Stephanie Nowack is a South African psychologist focusing on early childhood education and development, and completed her doctorate at Cambridge as a LEGO Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholar within the PEDAL and REAL Centres. Surya Pratap Deka is a current Gates Cambridge doctoral researcher at the Faculty. He is the Communications Officer at ĚÇĐÄ´ŤĂ˝ and the founder of Flourishing Minds Foundation, an education non-profit based in India. Nikita Jha is a Gates Cambridge doctoral researcher at the Faculty, and a mentor at Project EduAccess, a non-profit supporting access to higher education among marginalised communities in the global South. Dr Nidhi Singal is Professor of disability and inclusion at the Faculty, and Vice President of Hughes Hall College.

^[1] Transgression and transformation: (re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises

^[2] Oxford English Dictionary. (July 2023). Liminal, Adjective. OED. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/liminal_adj?tab=meaning_and_use#308505961

^[3] British Association for International and Comparative Education. (2024). Just learning: Teachers, curriculum, pedagogies and literacies. In Transgression and transformation: (Re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises (ĚÇĐÄ´ŤĂ˝ 2024 Conference).