Negotiating academicity: postgraduate research supervision as category boundary work

Abstract

While doctoral education and postgraduate supervision might be heavily researched in the context of ‘effective supervision’, this is still an acutely under‐theorised field. This article responds to the call for more explicit theorising of postgraduate supervision by exploring doctoral education as academic subjectification, and supervision as a process of ‘category boundary work’. It is argued that postgraduate supervision entails a relationship in which the boundaries around what constitutes culturally intelligible academic performativity, ‘academicity’, are negotiated, maintained, challenged and reconstructed. The concept of category boundary work is put to work in a brief analysis of the ways in which it is performed by, respectively, a supervisor and supervisee within the social sciences. The article aims to provide a perspective and an analytical tool which can be applied in context‐sensitive ways, across disciplinary, institutional, biographic and national settings, to produce significant insight into how academic cultures and subjectivities are re/produced.