A return to Wonderland: Exploring the links between academic identity development and creativity during doctoral education

Creativity is essential to knowledge production within universities and beyond. Yet, conditions for creativity receive scant scholarly attention as a feature of doctoral development, or as an element of institutional evolution within higher education. Even fewer authors have considered how creativity may be linked to doctoral students' academic identity formation. In this paper, we analyse literature on creativity related to doctoral education for exploring the links to doctoral students' academic identity formation. Building on the theoretical notions of social identity, role identity, and personal identity our results reveal three key links between creativity and academic identity formation in doctoral education: 'Becoming a responsible scholar' (connected to social identity), 'Acting with informed agency' (connected to role identity), and 'Expressing the individual voice' (connected to personal identity). Each of these paths to a creative and academic identity formation is coupled with social interaction that paves the way for certain doctoral pedagogies.