Becoming impactful: Humanities doctoral researchers navigating a lively zone of entanglement

This article explores societal impact of humanities doctoral research. Through an empirical inquiry based in Denmark, we analyse how current doctoral researchers conceptualize societal impact and how they articulate potential contributions to society. For theoretical framing, we employ a double-winged perspective combining concepts from the work of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard with others from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, namely concepts of subjective thinking, necessity-freedom; and the concepts of field, capital and habitus. Such a combination allows taking into consideration both the structural, social factors and the individual and subjective elements shaping doctoral researchers’ perspectives. Our findings offer both shared concerns and anxieties across several humanities doctoral contexts in Denmark with regards to the impact agenda and the more subjective aspirations of researchers for producing impactful research, as articulated in idiosyncratic ways. We offer the term of ‘zone of entanglement’ to describe the landscape of humanities doctoral researchers navigate.