A Narration of Dissertation Defense Sessions: An ethnographic Research

Todays, academic identity has been constantly criticized by some researches. They claim academic identity has lost. But some academics do not accept this criticism to all disciplines and they consider the humanities and social sciences to be ineffective. One way to find out this identity is to explore the discourse that governs dissertation defense sessions. The present research aimed to investigate the issue in a marginal university through ethnographic method. Due to achieve the aim, 31 observations of senior and doctoral defense sessions in various fields as well as 35 interviews with students, referee and guidance team were conducted. The results showed that only chemistry and physics disciplines rely on professional identity in defense sessions and accordingly the content of the dissertation is scrutinized. But in other academic disciplines, the dominant discourse of defense sessions is a formalist discourse in which the refereeing and supervisory teams devote all their time to the dissertation form and ultimately the method, and forget the content produced. Based on the institutional theory, the disciplines that have been formalized cannot be considered ineffective. Because the external environment of the university accepts and legitimizes the discourse of experimental disciplines, and because of this, there is an opportunity for professional discourse.  This issue is not true to other disciplines, and its actors have no choice except to resort to form and method to protect their identity.