Effective supervision of postgraduate students has been a widely shared concern among higher education institutions. Such a concern has been reinforced by rapid and profound changes within the landscape of today’s higher education characterized with increase in student numbers, more diversified student populations (in terms of age, gender, ethnicities, academic backgrounds and so on) and fierce international competition, internationalization and globalization (Cornforth and Lise Bird, 2008). This has generated a significant body of research on supervision of higher education students. However, only limited attention has been paid to the student’s perspectives on the supervision process. Furthermore, rarely have there been comparative studies across institutions and/or national contexts. Intending to help to address the above-mentioned knowledge gaps, we explore in this article postgraduate students’ negotiation of the academic/researcher self in the supervision process by analyzing participants’ narratives about their perceptions and lived experiences of this process. This comparative study involves two higher education institutions (HEIs) in two different countries (the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom). Although we still need to work out a well-developed theoretical framework, at this stage, we see as highly relevant to our analysis of the participants’ narratives the poststructural perspective employed by Petersen (2008), which theorizes postgraduate study as academic subjectification, and supervision as a process of "category boundary work’.

Data are collected by means of open-ended in-depth interviews with postgraduate students (30 from each of the two countries/institutions. The sample is varied by age, gender, ethnicities, academic backgrounds and so on. The paper is part of a larger project with the title ‘Effective tutorials at the Postgraduate Level: Research into Better Practice’ sponsored by the University of Lincoln.

The study sheds light on not only student’s perceptions of their own roles and their supervisors’ roles in the supervision process, but also the impacts of both the institutional cultures and the student’s socio-cultural backgrounds on the supervision process within a socio-cultural context of rapid and profound changes. Such comparisons are necessary given the commitment of the Bologna process to establishing a European Higher Education Area (EHEA).