Assembling Ourselves Differently: Contesting The Dominant Imaginary Of Doctoral Supervision

Author(s):

Barbara Grant(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

19. Ethnography

Format:

Paper

Session Information

19 SES 03,

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

17:15-18:45

Room:

316.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Christoph Maeder

Contribution

This paper will report on preliminary data from an ongoing postcritical ethnography (Noblit, 2004) of doctoral supervision in the arts, humanities and post-positivist social sciences (AHppSS) in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ).

The overall study is motivated in part by the challenges to these disciplines and fields from an increasingly utilitarian stance towards higher education in NZ (and elsewhere) as government funding for both student places and academic research is more and more steered towards both teaching programmes and research with apparent applications to industry and commerce.

The study is also motivated by the view that, while it is widely argued that academic work in NZ and elsewhere is undergoing significant intensification (see, for example, Davies, 2005; Gill, 2009; Harley, 2002; Sparkes, 2007; Petersen, 2011), the effects of this change on academic work bear further examination. I have chosen doctoral supervision as the entry point not only because it is a long-held research interest of mine, but also because it is a sphere of academic work that sits on the borders of teaching and research, and is vitally connected to the future of higher education more generally. More understanding of our current predicament is crucial in order to think carefully about when and how we, individually and collectively, might resist the changes taking place around us. Otherwise, as Dan Barney challenges us (2010), what will we say when students in the degraded universities of the future ask how we let such destruction happen?

The full study, which is running from 2013 until 2017 and involves about 10 supervisor key informants from a range of AHppSS fields and institutions in NZ, is guided by the following questions:

How do academics in the AHppSS undertake the work of doctoral supervision and fit it in among the rest of their academic work?
What specific kinds of day-to-day changes are they experiencing in that work, if any?
To what extent are they aware of broader contextual and/or political changes, including those in the status of the arts, humanities and post-positivist social sciences, affecting their work as supervisors?
How do those changes matter for doctoral supervision as one fragment of academic work and for academics’ sense of self as supervisors?
How do those changes matter for their wider academic work practices and sense of self as teachers/lecturers and scholars/researchers?

In this paper, following Rose (1996), I venture an exploration of the ‘doctoral supervisor’ as an assemblage (by which I mean a human self-in-connection-with certain objects, practices, spaces, forces, affects) produced within an anxious higher education imaginary. In presenting this work, I will draw on recently gathered data to propose some ways in which how supervisors think about themselves and their supervising work are being reshaped as a result of changes occurring at international, national and institutional levels. I will also explore how those of us who stand in a dissident relation with the new imaginary might contest it in our daily lives, individually and collectively, by assembling ourselves differently.

The theoretical framework of the study is broadly posthumanist (eg Haraway, 1991) and eclectic. In this particular paper, I will draw on new materialist accounts of social life (see, for example, Bennett, 2009; Rose, 1996) to explore the entanglement of things, selves and contexts in doctoral supervision in an effort to sharpen our critical sense of what is happening around us as well as deepen our thinking about what else might be possible.

Method

As a methodology (or, more accurately, a raft of related methodologies), postcritical ethnography turns “the tools of ideology critique on critical ethnography itself” (Noblit, 2004, p. 184) to address the tension between critical theory’s commitment to an objective reality that can be positively represented and interpretive ethnography’s claim that all knowledge is socially composed. Postcritical ethnographers presume the absence of either fixed foundations for making sense of social life or a rational individual human as the origin of coherent meaning-making. Instead, they seek to make space for ethnographic practices premised on an understanding of social life as “never simply rational, and thus acting responsibly [as a researcher or as research participants] is filled with unanticipated consequences, irony, discontinuity, and contradiction” (Noblit, 2004, p. 197). Postcritical ethnography proceeds via a bricolage of methods to produce diverse data, followed by reflexive interpretations that are always entwined with provisionality and uncertainty. The large study I am undertaking comprises novel as well as familiar methods for producing and collecting textual, visual, sensory data. The methods are designed and negotiated in collaboration with the key informants. The basic architecture of the ethnography is as follows: • Three fully-funded 4-day residential meetings for researchers and key informants to engage in collaborative data production eg through object/image analysis, photo-voice, memory work, responding to texts, individual and collaborative writing, group discussions, and other ‘experiments’ as proposed and agreed either key informants. • Individual semi-structured, in-depth interviews to explore the above research questions in depth with each key informant. • A shared blog running throughout, with occasional collective activities as negotiated between researchers and key informants. • Two site visits by the researcher to the key informant’s work place. • An occasional journal to be kept by each key informant. In this paper, I analyse data comprising objects as well as spoken and written texts from key informants to explore how they think about themselves as doctoral supervisors. These data came out of a collaborative workshop undertaken during a three-day residential retreat that took place in the scoping stages of the ethnography.

Expected Outcomes

The interpretation offered in this paper discerns doctoral supervisors as assemblages of human and sundry other elements, many of which are relatively new to supervision. We see how a human person, in becoming a supervisor, is tethered to objects. Some are ‘chosen’, although not necessarily freely; some are imposed but may still be helpful resources. Supervisors are also impressed by forces, such as institutional regulations and training, and impelled into new practices, some of which are welcome while others are not. Through supervisors’ talk about a small number of representative objects, we are also offered insights into the emotions produced through their collisions (Ahmed, 2004) with their institution, other supervisors, imagined selves, students: their hopes of supervision, their pleasures in it as part of academic work, and their griefs. In the data, we can see a densely entangled and heavily freighted domain of academic work, penetrated by changes happening at national and institutional levels. These ‘outside’ changes are not really outside at all: they are relayed into the dynamics of supervision via ever-renewing and proliferating objects, including resources like handbooks and funding, and forces, making supervisors more and more accountable for the outcomes of supervision and, we can imagine, more likely to pass those changes and pressures down onto the students.

References

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barney, D. (2010). Miserable priests and ordinary cowards: On being a professor. Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 23-24, 381–387. Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Davies, B. (2005). The (im)possibility of intellectual work in neoliberal regimes. Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 26(1), 1–14. Gill, R. (2010). Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. In R. Ryan-Flood, & R. Gill (Eds.), Secrecy and silence in the research process: Feminist reflections (pp. 228–244). London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2006). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. In J. Weiss, J. Nolan, J. Hunsinger, & P. Trifonas (Eds.), The international handbook of virtual learning environments (pp. 117-158). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Harley, S. (2002). The impact of research selectivity on academic work and identity in UK universities. Studies in Higher Education, 27(2), 187–205. Noblit, G. W. (2004). Reinscribing critique in educational ethnography: Critical and postcritical ethnography. In K. B. deMarrais, & S. D. Lapan (Eds.), Foundations for research: Methods of enquiry in education and the social sciences (pp. 181–201). London: Routledge. Petersen, E. B. (2011). Staying or going? Australian early career researchers’ narratives of academic work, exit options and coping strategies. Australian Universities’ Review, 53(2), 34–42. Rose, N. (1996). Inventing our selves: Psychology, power and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sparkes, A. C. (2007). Embodiment, academics, and the audit culture: A story seeking consideration. Qualitative Research, 7(4), 521-550.

Author Information

Barbara Grant (presenting / submitting)

The University of Auckland

Critical Studies in Education

Auckland

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