Doctoral Life in Metaphor: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Social Media Narratives

Abstract

This research delves into how the PhD experience is conceptualised metaphorically in social media discourse. Through the use of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and a corpus-based approach, a small-sized corpus of social media posts was compiled and analysed. The social media posts were taken from social media platforms like Threads, Facebook, and Reddit. Social media posts that contain the word “PhD” were manually compiled and thematically selected to focus on PhD students’ personal experiences. Through the use of Lancsbox, keyword and concordance analyses were implemented to detect recurring metaphorical patterns. The findings indicate prominent framings of the PhD experience metaphors that include JOURNEY, CONTAINER, WAR, ENTITY, BOOK, VEHICLE, SPORTS, and JOB. Each of the identified metaphors highlights different positive and negative perspectives of doctoral study. These framings of metaphors indicate the PhD students’ challenges and motivations which shed some lights in understanding how these researchers metaphorically construct their academic identities in social media discourse. The research contributes to an understanding of academic experiences through metaphors and highlights the signifance of metaphor in destigmatising academic pressure and normalising vulnerability in doctoral life.