Start main page content

Wits Doctoral Academy (WDA)

The Wits Doctoral Academy (WDA) will be launched in 2025!

This project is designed to respond to the changing landscape of research, particularly, the imperative to find innovative and creative solutions to wicked problems, such as inequality and climate change. Together with international expertise drawn from partner institutions and collaborative research networks, Wits staff are creating an innovative curriculum for doctoral students to enable all students to realise their full potential.

Our approach is interdisciplinary, ensuring strong horizontal articulation between this central spine and faculty/disciplinary-specific offerings. Vertical articulation between master’s and doctoral level study will also be prioritised, facilitating and accelerating student mobility. While the key goals of increasing PhD student numbers and accelerating throughput are essential, our aspirations far exceed this baseline. The WDA reflects an ambitious approach to reimagine postgraduate education which is forward-thinking, carving out new trajectories of impactful research. Pursuing research questions that you are passionate about is incredibly exciting, but the PhD journey can also often be a daunting and rather lonely experience – the doctoral academy changes this!

The cohort model of the WDA creates a vibrant community of practice in which students can exchange ideas across disciplines and interact with key thinkers and research leaders. Reading, writing and speaking about your work in dialogical, collegial spaces both online and in-person, will ensure you can make your own original and authentic contribution to the world of ideas. We will critically explore what it means to do research here and now, drawing on the best of established traditions, but also opening up new forms of meaning-making for a more equitable epistemic world.  We aim to encourage the curiosity, creativity and commitment of the very best minds, not only to find new answers for old intractable questions, but also to pose new questions and explore possibilities for crafting the world differently. 

WDA Architecture

The WDA creates an enabling architecture to support students and supervisors throughout the doctoral degree, developing capacities to meet all milestones along the way. The programme offers an integrated suite of offerings that are well-resourced, providing material infrastructures of space and technology for a supportive and collegial context in which to work.  In the first year of the degree, the primary task is to write a proposal to respond to interesting, meaningful and provocative questions. The second year is all about research-in-action, in libraries, archives, laboratories or in fields of the ‘real’ world far away or close to home, requiring ethical and methodological rigour. Finally, you need to be able to convincingly communicate your work in research publications, conference presentations and, culminating in the written thesis and the Viva examination.  

Applications are now closed. Please note that there are two stipulated criteria for eligibility:

  1. 足球竞彩app排名s should be registering for the first year of the PhD in 2025. 
  2. Commitment to full attendance and active participation in the WDA programme.

Queries should be directed to Jill.Bradbury@wits.ac.za &  Antonette.Gouws@wits.ac.za 

Share