Between utopias and realities: Reclaiming doctoral education as a practice of freedom

Twenty years after the Salzburg Principles, the promise of doctoral education (DE) as a space for autonomy, creativity, and social responsibility has been reworked through neoliberal governance and audit culture. Drawing on critical policy sociology, Levitas’s utopia as method and autoethnographic reflection, this paper identifies four paradoxes of the contemporary doctorate: freedom and bureaucratisation, creativity and performativity, belonging and exclusion, and training and transformation. In response, it advances five utopian practices already emerging within universities – supervision as care, epistemic plurality, research with social commitment, time to think, and research centres as spaces of possibility – as grounded counter-logics to managerialism. Reading policy frameworks alongside lived experience, the analysis shows how doctoral subjectivities are shaped by performative rationalities while leaving openings for ethical, relational, and democratic futures. Reclaiming time to imagine and courage to dissent becomes a political refusal to reduce DE to credentialism and knowledge to capital.