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Bringing GTAs into the career development conversation

by Kristyna Campbell and Kaiyun Feng

The 2026 report published with HEPI by Dr Charlotte Fawcett entitled More than academia: Expanding career support for doctoral researchers sheds light on a timely challenge faced by swathes of PhD graduates. Notably, that much of their studies and professional development is shaped on the premise that an academic profession will be the destination for most. Fawcett weighs in on this issue, illustrating that PhD candidates are increasingly applying themselves to professions both across and beyond academia in today’s fierce employment landscape, and goes on to explain that preparation for this reality is made more difficult by the varied availability of resources to PhD candidates, mainly through their supervisors. While the report calls for better collaboration between stakeholders and more opportunities for work experience, we expand Fawcett’s work by offering insight into professional learning and career development experienced by Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) during the doctoral journey.

Fawcett’s report gives the sector something it has lacked for some time: a clear, current picture of how doctoral researchers experience career support, set against a labour market that no longer resembles the one for which doctoral study was originally built. Its central contribution is not simply diagnostic. By tracking change since 2019, and by pairing survey data with the voices of students and careers professionals, Fawcett provides institutions with meaningful evidence to work from, and a set of recommendations for action. It is essential reading for anyone with a stake in doctoral education, and it sets a benchmark for the kind of practical, student-centred research this space needs. 

Our recent study highlights the significance of the GTA role as a site for doctoral employment, within which wide-ranging skills are fostered pertaining to teaching, research and service. Using a model that explores how GTA career trajectories were shaped by expectations and realities of the role, and aspirations beyond graduation (Feng, 2024), qualitative data from eight GTAs from different disciplinary contexts were explored. The intention of our study was to make explicit the connection between GTA professional development and career development, through consideration for how GTAs understand teaching, research and service roles and their implications for identity.

In the GTA role, doctoral candidates are encouraged to ‘try on’ identities, and to undertake dedicated skills training designed to ensure high-quality teaching and assessment practice.  Their capabilities can include interpersonal, leadership, and organisational skills. Our findings indicated that the GTA role remains oriented toward academic careers, despite the various professional pathways taken by today’s doctoral candidates, a point also raised by Fawcett. Building on this understanding, we consider possible internal institutional and experiential opportunities designed to elevate the competence and confidence of doctoral candidates applying for work beyond academic teaching roles. Like Fawcett, we argued that support in recognising and articulating the transferability of knowledge and skills acquired through employment as GTAs is needed and instead suggest that learnt skillsets should be understood as competencies that can be applied across many careers and contexts.

From our study, we sensed that the expected linear academic career trajectory was falling away as graduate numbers rise and post-doctoral positions become fewer. While, as Fawcett reports, an increasing number of career-focused resources are becoming part of supervisory toolkits, we believe the responsibility extends to other members of the institution (including disciplinary experts, careers teams, and education developers) whose tailored care may have implications for preparedness.  

Our data add another perspective to Fawcett’s work regarding a shared understanding of the benefits of GTA-related competencies. Where Fawcett finds that only 27% of PhD students believe their supervisor has useful advice for non-academic careers, a related opportunity for helping supervisors and GTAs to better articulate GTA competencies was found in our data. We asked GTAs to plot their expected, actual, and hoped-for relationships with teaching, research (doctoral studies), and service, and the participants’ responses scattered without forming any discernible cluster. This variation has been attributed to the challenge of communicating tasks, responsibilities, and learnt skills, which may be a disciplinary concern. Helping PhD students to identify and articulate their current work within Feng’s (2024) framework could, in turn, support supervisors and other significant colleagues to help with locating prospective career paths and understand the transferability of competencies developed as GTAs and doctoral researchers. While the GTA lived reality appears varied, individual-level insight now can prepare for career clarity later, pointing to a single intervention with dual benefit rather than two separate problems to solve. 

We also noted a shift in GTAs’ present-tense identities and their imagined post-graduation selves. Participants who located themselves around teaching and service when reflecting on their reality consistently repositioned themselves towards research when projecting beyond their PhD studies. This shows that participants experienced their current role and future career as distinct rather than continuous. This resonates with Fawcett’s finding that, while 82% of students feel prepared for a research career, only 40% feel similarly prepared for non-research careers, and suggests that building this preparedness is partly about how GTAs are supported to narrate their experiences, not only about the information or resources on offer. This speaks to our earlier diagnosis about how aspects of a role are articulated, and how this is translated for work within and beyond academia. One participant’s insistence that they do not ‘identify as teaching staff’, despite teaching being a substantial commitment, points to an opportunity: helping GTAs to recognise the significance of teaching and service to the development of academic identity, rather than as detours from it, complementing the signposting Fawcett recommends.

Our third contribution sits slightly outside Fawcett’s frame but strengthens the recommendations: the emotional and relational labour GTAs absorb, for example, patience, diplomacy, and responsiveness to ‘unexpected situational cases’, is central to how participants experienced the role, even where it goes unnamed in formal role descriptions and training. This matters for career-readiness in a very practical sense. If pastoral and interpersonal skills are what GTAs are actually developing, naming them explicitly, alongside ‘research’ or ‘teaching experience’, would help doctoral candidates translate what they already do into what they can put on a CV. This lends weight to our suggestion of a competencies glossary, and points to a further opportunity that Fawcett’s supervisor-focused recommendations open up: module conveners, disciplinary leads, and GTA programme teams each hold partial knowledge of what a given candidate has developed, and bringing this knowledge together, alongside continued investment in careers advice, could be a valuable and immediately actionable step for institutions. 

Fawcett’s timely report creates an important point of departure for conversations about career readiness and stakeholder provision. It highlights the myriad resources available to doctoral candidates across the academy, whilst gently drawing attention to areas in need of development. Bringing this together with our study of GTAs offers a more holistic view of careers following doctoral study. Together, the studies describe support structures and the opportunity for work experience, thus initiating a conversation about translation and transition. Instead of asking what additional support is needed, we should emphasise supporting doctoral candidates to articulate the capabilities they are developing.

Dr Kristy Campbell is a Lecturer in Education (GTA Development Programme Lead) at King’s Academy, King’s College London, supporting staff with continued professional development through workshops and professional accreditation. She is also Unit Lead for the PGCHE and MA Creative Education courses at Norwich University of the Arts. Kristy completed her PhD at UCL Institute of Education, specialising in Higher Education. Her interests include adult teaching and learning, transition, and identity. Kristy is also Co-Editor-in-Chief of Postgraduate Pedagogies, a developmental journal dedicated to showcasing the experiences of GTAs.

Dr Kaiyun Feng is a Lecturer in Education at King’s College London, specialising in higher education policy, institutional management, academic identities and professionalisation, and impact and evaluation. Previously a Researcher at the University of Cambridge, she analysed access and participation and evaluated widening participation projects. She earned her PhD from UCL Institute of Education, investigating institutional strategies for undergraduate teaching in world-class universities across China, the UK, and Canada. She leads master’s and undergraduate seminars on social policy, higher education management, and research engagement. Her evidence-based teaching is informed by her research into the teaching-research nexus and academic career development.


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Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge? Big tech, AI, and the future of epistemic agency in higher education

by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manuel F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum

Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.

At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.

From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers

Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.

Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.

This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.

Big tech and the politics of knowing

The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.

This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.

The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant

The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.

That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.

The drift toward organised immaturity

Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.

In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.

Reclaiming epistemic agency

So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.

In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’

In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.

Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.

Why this matters to you

Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.

Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.

Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.

Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.

Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.


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Thinking with affect theory in higher education: what can it help us to do?

by Karen Gravett

How does higher education feel, to work or to study in? How do affects circulate through the places, spaces, bodies and the structures and pedagogies of institutions? And why might thinking about feelings and affect be useful for educators? This blog draws on recent research that seeks to explore how affect theory can be helpful to understand and enhance our work in higher education. Attuning to affect, I suggest, has implications for both how we understand power relations in education, as well as for finding ways to foster more creative and meaningful pedagogies. 

What is affect theory?

Interest in affect, and ideas from affect theory/studies, are gaining momentum across the evolving field of higher education studies. Within the social sciences, the ‘affective turn’ has been influenced by work from Clough (2007), Massumi (2015), Seigworth and Pedwell (2023), Ahmed (2010), and many others. No longer confined to binary ideas of emotion/reason, body/mind, scholars have begun to think about emotion and affect as interwoven with education in complex ways. What we mean by emotions and affect can be understood differently, but for many scholars, affect specifically refers to sensory experiences (Zembylas, 2021), forces that are felt bodily. Affects circulate and evolve within and in between ordinary encounters, and in mobile ways.

Affect in the classroom

Thinking with affect can help us understand the classroom as a space in which learning is not divorced from the body but viscerally experienced and felt. This helps us to see learning and teaching as always situated and informed by the moment in which it occurs and as we experience it. Feelings do not simply happen within individuals and then move outward (Ahmed, 2010). This shift in thought enables us to consider ourselves in relation to others (both human and non-human), to consider how learning and teaching feels, as well as the ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1961) that circulate within institutions. Thinking with affect helps us to think about the micro-incidents of co-presence, its frictions, and the ‘inconvenient’ (Berlant, 2022) work being present requires of us to engage with others. Education requires affective work of us; it requires us to change, evolve, and adapt constantly to others. This work is exposing; discomforting. In engaging with one another, and being affected and receptive to one another, we are made aware of our own interdependence.

Affective institutions

Thinking about affect, then, enables us to understand how institutions are permeated by, and also create, ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson, 2009), or ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1961). In his work, Williams uses the idea of ‘structures of feeling’ to study the affective quality of life, in order that we might understand ‘the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (Williams, 1961, 48). Affective atmospheres, including competition, collegiality, anxiety, inclusion and exclusion are created through pedagogies, policies and practices. For example, the affective atmospheres of self-improvement and self-promotion may permeate neoliberal higher education institutions. Cultures of neoliberalism and precarity require academics to adopt certain affective and embodied practices, such as being competitive, self-motivated or resilient. And yet, affect may be able to disrupt these conditions: affective experiences such as humility, collegiality and joy offer opportunities for resistance and can also be found flourishing within institutional cultures and practices.

Affective craft

In the classroom, there may also be ways in which teachers are able to reshape affective relations. This might mean that certain relations could be given space to flourish, and other hierarchies of difference might be, at least momentarily, constrained.Different pedagogical approaches contribute to different feelings in classroom spaces and to different connections. For example, Stewart describes the changing affective atmosphere of the classroom when she employs storytelling and uses questioning approaches to enable dialogue: ‘something subtle but powerful had shifted…The room had become a scene we were in together as bodies and actors’ (Stewart, 2020: 31). For Airton, these kind of affirmative pedagogic approaches work as ‘affective craft’ and might include providing open spaces for students to lead and shape the learning encounter. In my research with Simon Lygo-Baker, we examine different ways in which teachers can experiment with affective craft. These include through teaching in spaces beyond the classroom, using art and objects for generating discussion, engaging storying and the sharing of vulnerabilities, as well as through using Play-Doh modelling to disrupt hierarchies and foster collaboration. These are just some ordinary, everyday ideas, and are ideas we also explore further in our new book: Reconceptualising Teaching in Higher Education:  Connected Practice for Changing Times, to be published in 2026 by Routledge.

We believe that teaching is about presence, connection, an ‘encounter’, and that affect theory can be a helpful way to understand and enhance the connections we make, as well as the institutions in which we work and learn. As Dernikos and colleagues explain: ‘scholars are now theorizing what these affective swells can do. And what is surprising is that this does not call for grand movements, nor for great reforms, but depends on the subversive power of the very small’ (Dernikos et al, 2020: 16).

Dr Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education, and Associate Head (Research) at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of higher education. She is a member of the Society for Research in Higher Education Governing Council, a member of the editorial boards for Teaching in Higher Education and Learning, Media and Technology, and Associate Editor for Sociology. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is also an Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Assessment and Digital Learning at Deakin University. Karen’s latest books are: Gravett, K (2025) Critical Practice in Higher Education, and Gravett, K (2023) Relational Pedagogies: Connections and Mattering in Higher Education.