Subjects of Western education: Discursive practices in Western postgraduate studies and the construction of international student subjectivities

Abstract

This paper focuses on discursive practices of postgraduate research as a crucial element in constructs of international student subjectivities when they undertake postgraduate studies in Australian universities. As such, it focuses on a discursive field emerging within domains of internationalisation, globalisation, and resistance. It examines processes and protocols in a number of Australian universities’ postgraduate divisions’ practices in the conduct of postgraduate supervision, in the context of increasing pressures towards internationalisation within frameworks of globalising influences. It takes issue with Western custom and tradition as privileged within the field of supervision of postgraduate research studies and suggests a model of postgraduate research supervision as intentional and systematic intervention, based on literature deriving from research in postgraduate supervision which acknowledges the problematic natures of cultural relationships as to teaching and learning and knowledge production, and student resistances within these fields. In doing so, it examines issues of discursive practices and the problematic natures of power relationships in supervisor-supervisee protocols and possibilities suggested by alternative models of postgraduate supervision of international students.