Taming the EdD Cthulhu: The Educational Doctorate for a Liberatory Praxis?

• In Event: (Re)Imagining Doctoral Education: Resisting and Interrogating the PhD/EdD Octopus

Abstract

Responding to the AERA conference call for us to Cultivat[e] Equitable Education Systems for the 21st Century, this paper examines the unleashed monster of educational doctoral degrees as degrees of practice with the potentials and pitfalls with/in higher education EdD programming to address: How might the EdD be reimagined together with K-12 and Higher Education contexts for greater justice and liberation? The authors of this paper apply Haraway’s call to trouble the structures and cultural assumptions contributing to the normalization of higher education and what researchers are referring to as the Capitalocence and Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016). Drawing from William James’ (1903) article The PhD Octopus and building on a paper presented at AESA in 2018, this paper identifies how some of the same conditions that James warned were in need of close consideration in the PhD are in need of (re)consideration in current EdD programming further exacerbated by the pandemic politics and pedagogies of COVID-19. These authors propose that current times call for radical EdD faculty to closely examine the emotional, intellectual, and material skills needed to destabilize and denormalize dominant assumptions of what constitutes education and schooling. Concluding the authors will share how the EdD Cthulhu might in fact be a powerful heuristic in the work towards radically (re)considering the EdD towards a liberatory praxis.

Authors

• John Joseph Lupinacci, Washington State University - Pullman

• Alison Happel-Parkins, The University of Memphis