Imagining success: the role of cultural capital and local wisdom in shaping international PhD students’ academic and professional aspirations

Academic success in international doctoral education is frequently constructed through institutional metrics, particularly completion, publication, and employability. However, such framings overlook how success is imagined, negotiated, and redefined by PhD students themselves across diverse cultural, social, and structural contexts. This study, therefore, examines how international PhD students in Australia imagine academic success and how these imaginaries are shaped by cultural capital and local wisdom over time. Adopting a collaborative autoethnographic design, we draw on self-reflections, creative image generation, and collective narrative analysis to examine our lived experiences across different stages of the doctoral journey. Guided by Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice and Yosso’s (2005) Community Cultural Wealth framework, we reconceptualise success as relationally produced, structurally conditioned, and culturally sustained. The findings show that success is not a fixed endpoint but an evolving construct shaped by the interplay of familial expectations, academic norms, relational support networks, and structural constraints. Across our narratives, early outcome-oriented definitions of success are progressively reworked into more relational, ethical, and process-oriented understandings grounded in contribution, care, and responsibility. At the same time, imagined academic futures are shown to be contingent, requiring ongoing negotiation between aspiration and constraint across transnational contexts. The study contributes to the literature by foregrounding international PhD students’ agency in redefining success beyond dominant institutional framings and by demonstrating how cultural capital and local wisdom continue to shape academic trajectories within global higher education. Importantly, we propose the Fluid Compass Model of International Doctoral Success to redefine success as a dynamic process of orientation, recalibration, and becoming across shifting academic landscapes.