Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision

Reimagining time, place and knowledge

Catherine Manathunga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136280511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The impact of globalisation and aggressive marketing by universities has increased the flow of international or culturally diverse students enrolling in postgraduate research degree programs outside their own countries. As access to postgraduate education widens, more local culturally diverse and Indigenous students are also enrolling in higher degree studies. As a result, significantly more academics now engage in intercultural supervision or supervising students who are culturally different to themselves.

This book argues that empowering intercultural supervision can result from more nuanced, critical and theoretically-based understandings of time, place and knowledge. It shows how a range of 'Southern' theories (including postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theories) about history, geography and knowledge can offer fresh insights into intercultural supervision.

The author suggests that by using the conceptual tools offered by these Southern theories, the more complex but potentially rich aspects of intercultural supervision can be better understood and grappled with. In particular, these theories enable us to challenge assumptions about the universality and timelessness of Northern knowledge, and to create space for the recovery and further development of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges within intercultural supervision.

This book will be of value to academic supervisors and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in intercultural supervision, as well as researchers and scholars in the field of higher education.

1 Introduction

Reimagining time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision

This book is about the pressing need to reimagine the central roles played by time and history, place and geography, and knowledge and epistemology in intercultural doctoral supervision. This is particularly important at a time when dominant discourses about doctoral supervision characterise supervision as a form of project management. It is also significant because more academics now engage in supervision across cultures within the present context of globalisation, aggressive university marketing, widening access and increased student and supervisor mobility. This book aims to investigate the concepts of time, place and knowledge pedagogically to enrich and unsettle current thinking about supervising students across, between and within cultures.

My attempt to rethink intercultural supervision pedagogy will draw upon an eclectic mix of postcolonial, Indigenous, social and feminist and cultural geography theories about time, place and knowledge. I will describe these broad theoretical resources and then seek to read them pedagogically in order to see what they have to offer us to deepen and trouble our understandings of intercultural supervision. My analysis will serve as a conceptual framework through which to interpret some interviews conducted with supervisors and students working across cultures in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and science at an Australian university.

I have chosen to use the term ‘intercultural’ because I am particularly interested in the interaction that occurs between cultures when supervisors and students from different ethnicities work together. As Fazal Rizvi has stressed in a number of keynote presentations, where he is asked to speak about the issues surrounding ‘When East meets West’, the critical factor is not the East or the West, which are already over-determined categories, but the ‘meets’ that is most significant. So this book focuses on supervision across, between and within cultural difference. This book seeks to theorise the in-between cultural spaces where supervisors and students meet and negotiate their scholarly identities together – the ‘inter’ in intercultural.

This is where the postcolonial concept of the contact zone is particularly helpful. For some time now, I have applied Pratt’s (1992; updated 2008) concept of the contact zone to intercultural supervision (Manathunga, 2007; 2011). As outlined in detail in Chapter 2, the contact zone was the term Pratt used to describe ‘the social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 2008: 7). A number of other authors have also found it an apt way to theorise intercultural supervision and research (e.g., Kenway and Bullen, 2003; Somerville, 2010). This re-theorising of colonial frontiers enabled the full range of intercultural encounters to be investigated, incorporating not only the exploitation, violence and appropriation evident in contact between different ethnicities, but also the opportunities for creative exchange, ironic mimicry, sharing technologies and practices and developing innovative ideas. Thinking about intercultural supervision as a contact zone allows us to investigate both the challenging tensions and deconstructive possibilities evident in the spaces across and between cultures.

By supervision, I mean the practice of educating postgraduate (graduate) students about how to conduct research in a particular academic discipline or several disciplines, in order to become credentialled as doctors of that/those disciplines. As this book has been written in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, I am especially referring to the original English model of doctoral education that our countries inherited, rather than to models developed in North America. This traditionally involved one doctoral student working independently on a substantial research project under the guidance of one experienced academic. The level of guidance provided by the supervisor varied hugely according to disciplines, personalities and practices and ranged from very close surveillance to ‘benign neglect’ (Lee and Williams, 1999).

In grappling with the idea of pedagogy, I am inspired by the work of Lusted (1986), Lee and Green (1997) and Grant (2003). They have all sought to emphasise the complex interplays of power and desire circulating between supervisors, students and knowledge. Their work seeks to take pedagogy beyond simplistic, everyday understandings of teaching-and-learning practice to deeper investigations of the ways in which knowledge is produced through the dynamic interaction of supervisors and students. This reading of pedagogy acknowledges that any form of teaching and learning can never be innocent, but is implicated in ideologies, social relations and cultural and geopolitical power.

Significance of my argument

Although there is a huge body of literature on intercultural supervision, it remains a pedagogy that is not fully understood. Many of the existing explorations of intercultural supervision take the form of practical guidebooks written for supervisors and/or students. In the majority of cases, these texts offer helpful tips about how to work together. The ‘solution’ posed in these guidebooks to the ‘problem’ of working interculturally comprises clear and explicit communication and negotiation. Although these strategies are helpful, they tend to cast cultural difference as a ‘problem’, a deficit (usually on the part of the culturally diverse Other) that must be ameliorated in some way. They do not address the pressing issues of power in supervision pedagogy and the ways in which the social, cultural, historical and geographical context shapes intercultural supervision. Supervisors’ and students’ bodies, emotions, desires and tensions are tidied away, and the role played by knowledge is assumed but rarely engaged with.

Underpinning some of these guidebooks, many of the university policy statements about supervision and some of the scholarly articles on supervision is the framing of supervision as project management (Grant 2005). This dominant discourse about supervision unproblematically depicts it as an essentially commercial transaction between two or more equally powerful individuals (one novice and one, or several, more experienced) who carefully construct a tidy Gantt chart outlining the logical, sequential steps required to bring the student’s research project to inevitable and successful completion. Such a construction of supervision excludes the unpredictable, creative or surprising outcomes and obstacles possible in research. Issues as complex and messy as culture, bodies, identities, histories, geographies and epistemologies do not belong in this neat supervision picture. This dominant discourse is particularly aligned with disciplines, such as science and engineering, where knowledge construction may be perceived as rational and objective. In our increasingly networked world, where the knowledges and skills of working across, between and within cultures, histories, geographies and epistemologies are vital to our socially and ecologically sustainable future, such absences in the vast literature on supervision are problematic, even dangerous. This book seeks to address these silences.

Supervision and culture

In particular, I locate this book within the substantial, but still marginalised, body of poststructuralist research into doctoral supervision that has emerged since the mid 1990s. This research has sought to uncover the disruptive and productive role of the body, culture and identity in supervision pedagogy (e.g., Green and Lee, 1995; Johnson et al., 2000; Grant, 2003). It has also opened up more complex readings of doctoral pedagogy, which include the operations of power flowing between students, supervisors and knowledge (Lusted, 1986). However, these explorations need to be further enriched and unsettled by applying postcolonial theory to intercultural supervision. This book seeks to extend this work in order to foreground the role played by time, especially colonial history, which continues to shape our world, and place in intercultural supervision. These investigations of supervision have not excavated the Western/Northern construction of disciplinary knowledge either to any great extent (with the exception of the work by Johnson et al. in 2000), which this book will address.

This book seeks to extend the emerging literature drawing upon postcolonial and Indigenous theories to interrogate intercultural supervision. This work will be described in detail in Chapter 2, but, in summary, it investigates the possibilities and challenges involved in Māori and Indigenous doctoral supervision, the ways in which race and gender shaped the experiences of international women postgraduate students, and the supervision experiences of South African women in Australia (e.g., Venables et al., 2001; Bullen and Kenway, 2003; Kenway and Bullen, 2003; Grant, 2010; McKinley et al., 2011; Ford, 2012). The majority of this work, to which I have contributed (see my discussion below), has been in articles and book chapters, which do not allow the complexity, contestability and deconstructive possibilities inherent in these (re)readings of intercultural supervision to be fully grappled with.

This book is designed to extend my earlier research on intercultural supervision. My work has drawn upon postcolonial theory to unpack the operations of culture and identity in intercultural supervision pedagogy. Using the overarching trope of the contact zone, I have sought to investigate how the postcolonial concepts of assimilation, unhomeliness and transculturation have shaped the experiences of students and supervisors working across and between cultures at an Australian university (e.g., Manathunga, 2007; 2011). I have summarised this work in a book chapter called ‘Culture as a place of thought’ (Manathunga, 2013). In this chapter, I concluded that postcolonial theory assists us to think about the ways in which culture can become a generative place of thought in supervision, because it provides us with opportunities to interrogate how assimilation works in Northern knowledge construction and encourages us to create spaces for Other ways of knowing. It also allows us to think about the unhomeliness that we may experience in intercultural supervision and acknowledge both the discomfort and also the deconstructive possibilities unhomeliness offers us. Finally, it opens us to the possibilities of transculturation, where we can help students blend their cultural ways of knowing with Western knowledge to create new knowledge (Manathunga, 2013). This work also forms the basis of Chapter 2 in this book and lays the foundation for my new explorations of time, place and knowledge.

‘North’ and ‘South’: the limitations of language

Because I am seeking to explore large-scale and abstract conceptions of culture and identity, especially in Chapters 2–4, I am having to rely on highly problematic and binary terms, such as Western and Northern and non-Indigenous, and Eastern, Southern and Indigenous, to develop my ideas. Even where I deal with the empirical part of my book, in Chapters 5–9, I have to deliberately obscure the specificities of ethnic identities in order to protect the anonymity of my participants. This is especially difficult as I am seeking to move beyond the universalising discourses so characteristic of much of the literature about doctoral supervision (and Northern epistemology generally) and to foreground time and place. Therefore, this requires some justification and explanation here.

Following the lead of Connell (2007) and postcolonial scholars such as Chakrabarty (2007), Al-e Ahmad (1984) and Chen (2010), I am trying to foreground the colonial relations of power that continue to shape the geopolitical realities of our contemporary world. I am drawing upon our imagined constructs of categories such as ‘Northern’, ‘Southern’, ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ and ‘Indigenous’ in the way that Chakrabarty (2007) draws upon the ways we imagine and position the idea of ‘Europe’. I am seeking to investigate how these relations of power condition the political, historical, social and cultural context within which we supervise. I am also attempting to understand how these relations of power form the historical legacies and resources that we bring into the pedagogical spaces of intercultural supervision.

So, I am not unmindfully glossing over the very real problems with these essentialising, generalising and binarising terms. We are always limited by the categories that we work with and the language that we use. I have not been able to find satisfactory alternatives that would allow me to fully capture these relations of power. I am not alone in this failing. For example, Connell (2007) speaks about her use of terms such as North/South, centre/periphery, West/East, developed/underdeveloped, metropole/periphery. She locates each of these discourses in UN debates, in postcolonial and dependency theories and in the language of Orientalism (Connell, 2007). Indeed, each time we seek to name the Other, to use the dangerous pronouns of us/them, our/their, we are engaging in the work of essentialising and binarising.

I draw on Trowler’s (2013) argument for the need for what he calls moderate essentialism in social science research. Trowler (2013: 6) suggests that we need to incorporate some form of essentialism ‘for reasons of clarity’, so that we can describe and investigate particular phenomena, and ‘for reasons of explanatory power’, in order to show how different categories are related to each other in some way. Critiquing some of his own work on disciplinary differences, he shows how strong essentialism is problematic, because it argues that phenomena have particular, specific and unchanging characteristics. He also highlights how strong essentialism is unhelpful, because it suggests that these fixed and bounded characteristics ‘have generative power’ to shape people and knowledge in reductive and deterministic ways (Trowler, 2013). Instead, he recommends a form of moderate essentialism, which he links with Wittgenstein’s (1953) idea of family resemblances, where family members will share some, but not all, of the same features and characteristics, making them recognisable as a group (Trowler, 2013). He argues that moderate essentialism acknowledges that these resemblances are contingent on contexts and change over time and in different places (Trowler, 2013). So, I hope that what I have displayed in this book is a moderate type of essentialism that tries to capture the complexities, blurriness and messiness of categories such as Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern and Indigenous. I also argue that my empirical data problematise these categories to some extent, even though I have had to be vague about the precise ethnicities of supervisors and students, so as not to identify them.

Boundaries of this book

This book is not a work of theory. It does not seek to contribute to the ongoing refinement of the theories that I work with here. Rather, it seeks to draw upon these theoretical explorations of history, geography and epistemology to further enrich and complicate our understandings of intercultural supervision. I have brought together a selective and eclectic group of thinking resources in order to theorise the contact zone of intercultural supervision. I have sought to read these resources pedagogically, to extend our understandings of how time, place and knowledge shape intercultural supervision pedagogies. In Chapter 4, I have sought to draw upon the writings of Southern, Indigenous and Eastern scholars to gaze back at Northern knowledge construction from a different angle, in order to make space for diverse readings of epistemology. In doing this, I am indebted to the work of Connell (2007) on Southern theory, as well as the postcolonial work of Chakrabarty (2007) and Dube (2004) and the Indigenous work of Smith (1999) and Nakata (2006).

This book does not grapple with linguistic diversity or the exact ways in which language constructs both our interactions in supervision. Although language issues emerge in supervising students for whom English is a second, third or fourth language, I am not a linguist or a TESOL expert and have never foregrounded language in my investigations of intercultural supervision. This is partly because of my intellectual background as an historian, who has dabbled in cultural studies and sociology. I am also embarrassingly monolingual, in spite of many attempts to learn other languages such as German, Russian and Japanese. I also agree with experts in intercultural communication who highlight the role of culture over language when exploring intercultural pedagogies.

This book does not seek to offer unproblematic lists of tips about effective intercultural supervision or easy answers about the complexities and possibilities of intercultural supervision. It is a work of problem-making rather than problemsolving (McCarty, 2001). Although some supervisors and students may find these explorations of time, place and knowledge helpful in further understanding and interrogating their experiences, it is not designed to be a practical guidebook on effective intercultural supervision.

This book may not appeal to supervisors and students in all disciplines, especially those in the sciences and engineering, although I would encourage them to read it. I deliberately collected interviews with students and supervisors in science and engineering in this study, but have really only just begun the conversation about how discipline impacts upon experiences of time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision. These issues are particularly addressed in Chapter 9, where I show that there are a surprising number of similarities in the intercultural experiences of supervisors and students included in this study. I have also linked this analysis with some of the intriguing work coming out of feminist, postcolonial and Indigenous investigations of science and engineering and the philosophies of science. There is still a great deal more that needs to be said about this. It is likely to be a particularly fruitful area for further research and exploration.

Reading time, place and knowledge pedagogically

Drawing upon a range of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theories, this book argues that time, place and knowledge play significant roles in shaping intercultural supervision. By using these theories as thinking r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Postcolonial theory and supervision
• 3 Time and place in intercultural supervision
• 4 Knowledge in intercultural supervision
• 5 Two studies of intercultural supervision in Australia: Context and methodology
• 6 Assimilation
• 7 Transculturation
• 8 Unhomeliness
• 9 Disciplines: Do they make a difference?
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index