Silenced Voices, Lost Purpose: What Doctoral Education Tells Us About Economics

This paper examines the silencing of critical scholarship within academia, using a doctoral viva voce examination as a point of departure for reflecting on and critically assessing the erosion of education, particularly from the lens of economics as a discipline. The importance of education for sustainable development is influenced by significant challenges, stemming from the detachment from the realities of research and the socio-economic contexts under study. This disjunction between the lived realities of individuals from the Global South is reflected in the evaluative culture of the academy, which also mirrors the deeper crisis in economics as a discipline. This discipline has increasingly turned inwards, privileging abstract modelling and methodological orthodoxy over engagement with human need, ethical responsibility, and structural inequality. Drawing on critiques such as Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven and Ha-Joon Chang’s call for pluralism, Erik S. Reinert’s historical reassessments, as well as works such as Hauge’s How Economics Lost Its Soul and the Re-thinking Economics curriculum review, this critical paper argues that doctoral examination processes can be affected by systemic problems of exclusion, marginalisation and detachment. Furthermore, the silencing of critical voices is not confined to doctoral examination rooms; it permeates the discipline itself, shaping how economics is taught, evaluated, and reproduced, underlining the need to recover a discipline and an academic culture capable of engaging with the pressing challenges of our time and guided by an open and critical working context.