The Hollow Habitus: AI-Mediated Doctoral Production, Scholarly Disposition, and the Problem of Surface Competence

This paper develops the concept of hollow habitus as a theoretical contribution to the scholarship of doctoral education in an era of generative artificial intelligence. Hollow habitus is defined as a scholarly disposition that has acquired the surface forms of the academic field, its linguistic registers, citational practices, argumentative structures, and disciplinary conventions, through AI-mediated production, without the deep dispositional transformation that authentic, sustained engagement with the field's intellectual demands is supposed to produce. Building on Bourdieu's (1990) theory of habitus formation through practice, the paper argues that the doctoral thesis is not merely a credentialling artefact but the primary site at which the scholarly habitus is constituted through intellectual struggle