The study, conducted by Muhammad Shaban Rafi of Riphah International University and Lubna Khalil of the University of the Punjab, applied the Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale developed by Perkins and colleagues in 2024 to evaluate the appropriate role of generative AI across the successive stages of dissertation writing. Rather than treating AI as either a threat or a miracle, the framework allowed the researchers to distinguish between tasks that can be fully delegated to machines, tasks that require a human–AI partnership, and tasks that must remain exclusively human. The results challenge both the alarmist narrative that AI will hollow out doctoral scholarship and the utopian claim that it can write a dissertation on command.

Where the technology shone most clearly was in the mechanics of writing. Participants reported that generative AI could be used without reservation to improve grammar, sentence structure, and overall coherence, enhancing the clarity and efficiency of their prose. For many doctoral students, particularly those writing in a second language, this mechanical support removed a persistent barrier that had previously consumed hours of revision. By offloading surface-level editing to the machine, students said they could redirect their energy toward deeper intellectual engagement with their arguments, literature, and data, a shift that supervisors in the study viewed as a legitimate pedagogical gain rather than a shortcut.

The second major application involved data analysis. Doctoral candidates described using generative AI to help analyze large qualitative datasets by defining a coding frame, identifying recurring trends, and conducting sentiment analyses. In the social sciences and humanities, where interviews, open-ended survey responses, and archival texts can generate overwhelming volumes of material, the ability of large language models to propose initial coding categories and flag patterns offered a practical starting point. Crucially, the participants did not describe the AI as replacing their analytical judgment. Instead, the machine-generated coding frames served as provisional scaffolding that researchers then tested, refined, and validated against their own close reading of the data.

A third productive territory was argument structuring. Students reported using generative AI to organize literature reviews, suggest logical arrangements of sentences and paragraphs, and generate counterarguments that stress-tested their claims. The capacity of these models to simulate an opposing viewpoint proved especially valuable in the humanities, where a dissertation’s strength often depends on anticipating objections. By prompting the system to challenge a thesis statement or identify gaps in a literature synthesis, candidates effectively gained a tireless sparring partner available at any hour, one that could surface alternative framings the writer had not considered.

Yet the enthusiasm had sharp limits. Participants were emphatic that generative AI should be limited or prohibited in areas demanding critical reasoning, originality, and cultural context. The core intellectual contributions of a dissertation, formulating research questions, interpreting findings within their disciplinary traditions, and producing genuinely novel insights, were judged to require human intelligence at their center. Supervisors in particular warned that AI-generated content may lack accuracy and contextual depth, producing text that reads fluently but fails under scholarly scrutiny. The study highlights the well-documented problem of hallucination in natural language generation, in which models confidently produce plausible-sounding but false claims, a hazard especially dangerous in academic contexts where fabricated citations or mischaracterized sources can constitute serious misconduct.

This is where the concept of prompt literacy enters the picture. The researchers argue that the quality of output from generative AI is not a fixed property of the technology but a function of how skillfully the user frames the request. Prompt engineering has emerged in recent years as a recognized digital competence, with studies describing it as a new twenty-first-century skill and cataloging systematic techniques, from chain-of-thought prompting, which guides models through explicit reasoning steps, to retrieval-augmented generation, which grounds model outputs in external source documents. The study positions prompt literacy as an essential component of broader AI literacy, encompassing the ability to specify role, context, constraints, and desired output format in a prompt, and to iteratively refine instructions when the first response falls short.

The pedagogical implications are significant. If the difference between a vague, hallucination-prone response and a precise, useful one lies in the prompt, then universities face a choice about whether to teach these skills explicitly or leave students to learn by trial and error. The study responds by providing a scale for the appropriate use of generative AI at each stage of doctoral writing, along with ready-to-use prompts developed as part of the research. Such resources suggest a model of AI integration in which institutions define clear boundaries, students develop the technical and critical competence to work within them, and assessment practices evolve to distinguish between acceptable assistance and academic dishonesty. The ethical dimension is central: the study received ethical approval under professional research ethics codes, and its framework is explicitly designed for the ethical integration of AI in educational assessment.

The findings arrive amid a rapidly expanding body of research on generative AI in higher education, including studies of students’ prompt patterns, hermeneutic approaches to prompt optimization, and surveys of hallucination in language models. What distinguishes this study is its focus on the doctoral dissertation, the genre in which the stakes of originality are highest and the tension between efficiency and authenticity most acute. By grounding its conclusions in the lived experience of students and supervisors rather than speculation, it offers a pragmatic middle path: generative AI as a powerful tool for mechanics, data handling, and argument testing, governed by human judgment, validated at every step, and wielded by researchers who understand both what to ask and what the machine cannot be trusted to answer.

For the current generation of doctoral candidates, the message is double-edged. The technology can genuinely save time and elevate the quality of dissertation writing, but only for those who invest in the literacy to use it well. As generative AI becomes embedded in the infrastructure of research, the study suggests that the most important qualification for the twenty-first-century scholar may not be the ability to write without AI, or even with it, but the ability to converse with it critically, skeptically, and skillfully, keeping human intelligence, as the authors insist, at the core of the scholarly enterprise.

Subject of Research: The applications, limitations, and prompt literacy requirements of generative AI in doctoral dissertation writing

Article Title: Generative AI in Doctoral Dissertation Writing: Applications, Limitations, and the Need for Prompt Literacy

Article References: Generative AI in Doctoral Dissertation Writing: Applications, Limitations, and the Need for Prompt Literacy. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44366-026-0088-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44366-026-0088-9

Keywords: generative AI, doctoral dissertation writing, prompt literacy, AI Assessment Scale, human–AI collaboration, AI literacy, higher education, academic writing, prompt engineering, hallucination, ethical use of AI, social sciences and humanities

The study’s central insight is that resistance is not a single phenomenon but a differentiated set of practices whose viability depends on where a scholar sits within the intersecting structures of institutional type, career stage, gender, and disciplinary tradition. The researchers identify three distinct modalities. The first, dispositional resistance, is exercised by senior academics in traditional public universities who block technocratic intrusion through institutional mediation. The second, tactical resistance, is expressed in slow tempo, informal collaborative networks, and thematic subversion that reorganize practice without directly disputing the managerial regime. The third, individual coping, describes how precarious and early-career scholars sustain their professional identity through irony and selective compliance, with no effect on institutional structure. Each modality tells a different story about power, voice, and the limits of commensuration in relational fields.

Dispositional resistance is the most structurally powerful of the three. In Chile’s traditional public universities, senior academics occupy positions from which they can mediate between managerial demands and disciplinary practice, effectively filtering or blocking the intrusion of standardized indicators into the everyday work of community engagement. These scholars draw on long-established professional dispositions and on institutional arrangements that give them a voice in how engagement is defined and evaluated. Their resistance does not take the form of open rebellion; rather, it operates through committees, accreditation processes, and informal authority, ensuring that the metric infrastructure never fully penetrates the core of academic practice. The study suggests that this is why the academic field retains its internal hierarchies in such institutions: the managerial regime is present, but it is held at arm’s length by those with the standing to contest it.

Tactical resistance, by contrast, works within the system while quietly reordering it. Academics adopting this modality slow the tempo of their work, refusing the accelerated rhythms that quantification regimes demand, and build informal collaborative networks that operate beneath the radar of official reporting. They also engage in thematic subversion, reframing the categories through which engagement is counted so that the substance of their community work survives even as its surface is rendered legible to administrators. Crucially, this form of resistance does not dispute the legitimacy of the managerial regime itself. It accepts the existence of indicators while hollowing out their capacity to dictate practice. The researchers found this modality distributed across institutional types, but its character shifted with context: where institutional cultures were more corporate, tactical resistance became subtler and more defensive.

The third modality, individual coping, is the most sobering finding of the study. Precarious and early-career scholars, along with many women academics navigating the gendered organization of academic labour, lack the institutional standing to block or bend the metric regime. Their resistance contracts to subaltern irony: dark humour about the absurdity of counting relationships, selective compliance that protects what matters most to them, and private narratives that preserve a professional identity the institution no longer recognizes. The study is explicit that these coping strategies have no effect on institutional structure. They keep individuals whole while the managerial infrastructure advances untouched. This finding helps explain an apparent paradox that has puzzled scholars of higher education: how substantive epistemic resistance can coexist with a stable and expanding managerial apparatus.

The theoretical stakes of the research extend well beyond Chile. The study engages a rich international literature on the sociology of quantification, which examines how numbers are never neutral descriptions but active devices that reorganize the fields they measure. When community engagement, an inherently relational and context-dependent practice, is translated into standardized indicators, something is necessarily lost: the reciprocity, the long-term trust, the open-endedness that define genuine engagement with communities. The authors argue that commensuration has structural limits in relational fields, and that the Chilean case demonstrates those limits in action. Academics do not passively absorb quantification; they interpret it, contest it, and sometimes subvert it, but their capacity to do so is unevenly distributed.

The Chilean context is essential to the findings. The country’s higher education system has undergone rapid marketization and the consolidation of quality assurance and accreditation mechanisms, making it a revealing site for studying managerialist governance. The social sciences and humanities occupy a particularly exposed position in this system, since their modes of knowledge production and their traditions of public and community engagement fit poorly with indicator-based evaluation. The study situates itself within this national trajectory while drawing comparisons with international research on academic resistance in the managerial university, from analyses of compliance and resistance games to studies of academic capitalism and the gendered structure of precarious research careers. The result is a contribution that speaks simultaneously to Latin American higher education scholarship and to global debates on academic agency.

Methodologically, the research rests on a multiple-case design across four Chilean universities, combining analysis of the formal infrastructures of quantification with 49 semi-structured interviews with social sciences and humanities academics. The interview roster, documented in detail in the published article, captures variation in gender, academic rank, disciplinary area, and institutional affiliation, allowing the authors to trace how each modality of resistance is structured by position. The study was approved by the Scientific Ethics Committee of the University of Tarapacá, and all participants provided informed consent. The research was supported by ANID FONDECYT grants 1241102 and 1221758. The authors, Julio Labraña of the University of Tarapacá and José Joaquín Brunner and Jocelyn López of Universidad Diego Portales, frame their work as part of an ongoing research programme on quantification and university community engagement in Chilean higher education policy.

The implications of the findings are considerable for anyone concerned with the future of universities. For policymakers, the study warns that indicator-based accountability systems do not simply measure engagement; they reshape it, and they do so unevenly, privileging institutions and individuals already endowed with the standing to resist. For university leaders, the research suggests that managerial infrastructures encounter genuine epistemic limits when applied to relational practices, and that ignoring those limits produces not compliance but irony, a corrosive form of consent that signals institutional dysfunction rather than institutional health. For academics themselves, the study offers a vocabulary for naming the differentiated forms of contestation in which they are already engaged, and a reminder that the capacity to speak back to the metric regime is itself a resource, distributed by rank, gender, discipline, and institutional tradition, whose preservation may be one of the most important tasks facing the contemporary academy.

Ultimately, the study reframes the debate about managerialism in higher education. The question is not simply whether academics resist or comply, but which academics can resist, in what ways, and at what cost. By distinguishing dispositional resistance, tactical resistance, and individual coping, the research accounts for the coexistence of substantive epistemic defiance and stable managerial infrastructure, and it exposes the gendered and career-stage inequalities that determine who can contest the quantification of their work and who can only laugh at it. As universities worldwide continue to extend measurement into ever more intimate corners of academic life, the Chilean case stands as a detailed empirical demonstration that numbers change the fields they enter, and that the struggle over what universities owe their communities is, in the end, a struggle over who gets to define the terms.

Subject of Research: Academic resistance to the quantification of community engagement under managerialist governance in Chilean higher education

Article Title: Resisting managerialism through academic voice: contesting the quantification of community engagement in the social sciences and humanities

Article References: Labraña, J., Brunner, J. J., & López, J. (2026). Resisting managerialism through academic voice: contesting the quantification of community engagement in the social sciences and humanities. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01763-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01763-6

Keywords: quantification, community engagement, academic resistance, managerialism, social sciences and humanities, higher education, academic agency, Chile, academic labour, gendered organization, Resisting, academic