Being a Doctoral Student in a Research Laboratory in History and Art History: Between Common Belonging and Differentiated Integrations to the Institution
Based on a quantitative and a qualitative interview surveys, this article analyzes the integration of doctoral students within a French research laboratory in modern and contemporary history and art history (called “Lab”), with a view to a more global reflection on the production of inequalities within higher education and research. These two surveys allow us to note the absence of a collective of doctoral students, both among themselves and within the laboratory. Several reasons can explain this absence. Firstly, the community of doctoral students exists only in theory: they have very different backgrounds, whether it be in their financial situation, their geographical location or their life course. This situation is complicated by the hybrid status of doctoral students, which keeps them in a state of unfinished professionalization. And if an image of the imaginary doctoral student seems to be shared, the lived experiences documented by the survey argue for profound differences in the apprehension of this particular period of a researcher’s life. Given this diversity, the laboratory could appear as a unifying actor. Unknown by almost all doctoral students at the beginning of their thesis, it is the object of a distant interest thereafter, without becoming a real support structure for the majority of them.