Impostors in paradise: Toxic inclusion in elite doctoral education

Elite universities have expanded access, but the terms of recognition after admission remain stratified. This article develops the concept of toxic inclusion to capture a form of institutional incorporation in which formal admission coexists with situationally negotiated recognition after entry. Drawing on interviews with Eastern European doctoral students at a prestigious transnational European graduate school, the analysis shows how admission does not itself secure legitimacy, but relocates inequality into everyday processes of evaluation, interaction, and self-positioning where the legibility of prior trajectories within transnational evaluative frameworks becomes consequential. The findings identify four mechanisms through which inequality is reconfigured after admission: legitimacy on loan, epistemic silencing, impostor work and the morality of belonging. While not uniformly experienced, these dynamics show how recognition is negotiated across symbolic, epistemic, affective and moral dimensions, reshaping inequality beyond admission.