Desiring Solidarity with Doctoral Students: Ethnographic Fragments from Women Supervisors

Abstract

Abstract Doctoral supervising (advising) is an asymmetrical but institutionally mandated power relation in which supervisors’ and students’ interests apparently converge. In fact, those interests often, and necessarily, diverge. Nevertheless, women academics in an ethnographic study of doctoral supervising, hailed at least in part by feminist critiques of institutional power, talked in many different ways about their desires for solidarity with their students. Engaging with elements of feminist thought about solidarity, in particular María Puig de la Bellacasa’s formulation of “committed attachments”, this paper closely reads two detailed memory-stories of supervising work. The view of supervisor solidarity that emerges through connecting the theoretical elements and the memory-stories is one of momentary affinities in the middle of things rather than any kind of purposive trajectory towards institutional transformation. My argument is that, despite its imperfections, this commitment to small acts of solidarity in the present not only makes the daily life of higher education more liveable for self and others but also thickens possibilities for institutional change going forward.