Bodies of knowledge and doctoral identities

Abstract

Reading the articles in this special issue of Innovations in Education and Teaching International (IETI) reminded me that it is ten years since Gina Mercer and I edited the volume Postgraduate research supervision: Transforming r/elations (2001) in an effort to build on the fascinating work emerging at the time by Alison Lee and Bill Green among others. Gina had also been my supervisor only a few years before. I suspect your supervisor remains your supervisor forever: I still think of Gina as my supervisor, no matter how many bemused looks she gives me when I introduce her as such, and which I am reminded of whenever I am introduced as someone’s supervisor. No matter how much this relation is steered in another direction, its formativeness sticks. Perhaps it’s another form of Luce Irigaray’s maternal debt (1985), one that we might call supervisory debt. The continued existences of the people who supervise us are material reminders of the symbolic weight of our constitution as postgraduate subjects in relation to them and within the administrative matrices of the university. Whether the relation ends in celebration, ambivalence or hostility, whether we still look to them for guidance or acknowledgement, or refuse to, we owe our supervisors this debt of relation, of validity as postgraduates. Gina and I collaborated on that volume as a way of re! ecting on our candidate-supervisor relation, prompted by my disastrous rst supervising experience, and providing an impetus for others to do the same. As white women in our thirties working in the humanities but living with scientists, we were keen to forge a different kind of working relation than what we saw re! ected around us during my candidature which was hierarchical, competitive and often con! ictual. After graduation we were both located in regional universities in northern Australia, and felt isolated from the thriving metropolises of intellectual activity we imagined in the south. And, as feminists, we wanted to bring our theoretical politics to bear on our supervisory relations during my candidature and through re! ection afterwards. The subtitle of Transforming r/elations gestured toward the transformative process of supervision for both candidate and supervisor, and to the changing relations that happen over the course of a candidature. The elations part of the relations was not always elating, but sometimes more rev-elatory in opening up ssures in institutional discourses and speaking sentiments that might be surprising or discomforting. The front cover itself might be regarded as one of those discomforting