The traditional master-apprentice architecture of doctoral supervision is undoubtedly undergoing change. In the anglophone world, the father's house of supervision with its almost exclusively male occupants was first established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It persisted, largely undisputed, until the final decades of the…

Graduate supervision is a pedagogy that remakes students into the disciplined subjects of scholars and researchers. While the supervision relation is structured by the fixed and asymmetrical institutional positions of supervisor and student, pedagogic interactions between the two can also have a dynamic, playful and more mutual character. At these…

Graduate supervision is a puzzling pedagogy requiring a thoughtful response from its practitioners. In this article, I reflect upon teaching theories of supervision produced through my own research with the aim of galvanizing the imaginations and practices of supervisors. I address a curious reluctance to introduce those theories that require…

When exploring the supervision of indigenous doctoral students, a focus on teaching and learning hides as much as it reveals. Explicit descriptions from students of helpful teaching and learning practices mostly highlight everyday Western academic culture in action and do not illuminate the ways in which indigenous identities impact on, or are…

Academic developers work in zones marked by uncertainty and ambiguity. One response to the uncertainties about who we are and our place in the academy is to assert and defend a particular identity. I critically engage with such a response from a "mourning after" standpoint that values an unsettled identity. There I find the possibility for a less…

In higher education the supervision of graduate research students is an uncertain practice. When given the opportunity, supervisors and students ask what it means and how it should be done. In this paper, the author interprets the uncertain state of supervision affairs as an effect of many competing and contradictory social discourses that offer…