<p>Doctoral education is a key site of knowledge creation that has the potential to either foreclose or open up possibilities for transformation in higher education. It is a pedagogical space rife with neoliberal imaginaries that ground strong affective investments in efficiency and strict regimes of accountability. The flexible knowledge worker, the entrepreneur and the industry-ready graduate comprise some key examples of governing significations in doctoral education that contribute to affective ecologies of anxiety, fear, shame and anger among both doctoral candidates and supervisors. These affective experiences are particularly heightened for First Nations and transcultural (migrant, refugee, culturally and linguistically diverse and international) doctoral candidates, whose ways of knowing and being in the academy are governed by imaginaries and affective investments that run up against dominant arrangements. This paper seeks to challenge dominant imaginaries by foregrounding First Nations Storying. This First Nations knowledge approach has the potential to produce ecologies of affect characterized by connectedness, reciprocity and solidarity. There are, however, a number of governing imaginaries, especially in settler-invader countries like Australia, which make embedding these localised and embodied affective ecologies very challenging. This paper explores both the opportunities and obstacles that exist in attempts to introduce alternative affective ecologies in doctoral education.</p>