This paper challenges the traditional relationship between a doctoral student and ‘supervisor’ in terms of its power differential, often characterised as an asymmetric, hierarchical expert/novice dyad, which can trap supervisory relationships in a ‘transmission’ or ‘training’ mode, with students receiving ‘instruction’ from ‘experts’. I consider how we can rethink, disrupt and disorient dominant conceptions of doctoral pedagogy, to build a more collaborative, collegial ‘decentred’ approach to supervisory work. This paper, drawing on interdisciplinary resources from cultural sociology, anthropology, organizational studies and education, argues the liminal spaces students pass through offer opportunities for productive, decentred pedagogies, where supervisors construct ways of valuing their students’ expertise, and facilitate critical inclusion into the academic community. Doctoral pedagogy should aim to develop repertoires of successful members of the discourse community - mirroring professional ways of being, and doing research work. A student’s doctoral repertoire will be indexical and biographical, reflecting who they are, where they come from, and their contribution to their research, grounded in the plethora of networks, communities and resources they learn through, and forming a distributed patchwork of competencies, dispositions and values. The paper discusses recommendations for doctoral pedagogic practices, and the implications such decentring orientations have for decolonizing doctoral pedagogies.

n/a