The Commodification of Doctoral Student Agency in STEM Lab Supervision: A Phenomenologically Directed Study

Abstract

Higher education research on STEM lab supervision has often addressed the dynamics of doctoral agency through three parallel strands of scholarship: the restriction of research judgment, the redefinition of scholarly self-understanding, and the redirection of agency toward productivity-oriented self-management. What remains less clear is how these pressures combine within supervision to affect universities’ capacity to form independent scholars. This study addresses that gap by demonstrating that restriction, redefinition, and redirection are best understood as connected moments in one continuous reorganization of doctoral agency within PI-supervised STEM labs. We develop this account through in-depth interviews with nineteen STEM doctoral students in the United States, drawing on the phenomenological philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre to examine agency as students’ lived capacity to exercise research judgment and claim intellectual ownership. Our findings show that — within this continuous reorganization — students’ agency remained active, while becoming increasingly alien to them and redirected toward sustaining supervisory authority and productivity regimes. On this basis, we argue that STEM programs cannot safeguard doctoral agency by tracking productivity or progress alone. They should make supervisory conditions visible, build recognition beyond the PI, and protect students’ research judgment before compliance is misread as scholarly formation.