Imagination and investment: unraveling academic identity in Chinese doctoral candidates’ publishing journeys in U.S. higher education

Doctoral writing for publication has evolved into a strategic activity in Ph.D. education, extending beyond a mere social practice. This paper presents a collective case study that examines the publishing experiences of four Chinese doctoral candidates in Linguistics. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, with narrative inquiry of how they prepared themselves to publish for the academic job market, how they imagined their future academic communities, and how they negotiated their academic identities in terms of publishing within imagined communities. The qualitative analysis incorporates Norton’s conceptualization of imagined community and identity, as well as investment and capitals, highlighting the positive influence of imagined academic identity on scholarly publishing as well as the dynamic nature of academic identity construction in the divergence between imagination and reality. The findings offer pedagogical insights into the negotiation of identities in doctoral publishing, with particular relevance to Chinese international students in the social sciences.