Women Supervising and Writing Doctoral Theses: Walking on the Grass 9780739182161, 9780739182154

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Women Supervising and Writing Doctoral Theses

Women Supervising and Writing Doctoral Theses Walking on the Grass Edited by Lia Bryant and Katrina Jaworski

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books Chapter 4—Reflections by former doctoral students printed in this chapter appear with their knowledge and consent. Chapter 8—The University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee has indicated its approval of the usage of interviews, blog posts, and comments on blog posts by MaryHelen Ward in her research and publications thereof. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-0-7391-8215-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-7391-8216-1 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Lia Bryant dedicates this book to Katerina Bryant Katrina Jaworski dedicates this book to Louise Waiblinger (née Marshall)

Contents

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Introduction: Daring to Walk on the Grass Lia Bryant and Katrina Jaworski

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I: Supervising Doctoral Students 2 Honor Bound Lia Bryant 3 Passionate Activism as Academic Labor: The Emotional Body of Pedagogical Politics Chris Beasley and Katrina Jaworski

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II: Writing Doctoral Theses 4 “Cutting the Mustard”: Standing your Ground in the Process of Producing Doctoral Dissertations Judith Gill 5 Stuck between Two Languages: The Ethics of Writing a Doctoral Dissertation in the English Language Katrina Jaworski 6 Caring Labor and Caringscapes at the Margins of Academic Work Valerie Adams 7 The Emotional Space of the Doctoral Supervisory Relationship: Safe to Feel Vulnerable Margaret R. Rowntree 8 The Liminal Space of PhD Candidature: Becoming Doctor Mary-Helen Ward

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Conclusion: Walking on the Grass Eighty-Four Years Later Katrina Jaworski and Lia Bryant

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Bibliography

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Index

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Contributor Biographies

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Chapter One

Introduction Daring to Walk on the Grass Lia Bryant and Katrina Jaworski

When Virginia Woolf approached the manicured lawns of Cambridge University she was told to stay off the turf as “Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here” (Woolf 1977, 7–8). Reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own evokes an image not of neat lawns but of nineteenth-century women writers traipsing along a newly etched path carved among rugged hills and strewn with small rocks, rocks that lodge in your shoes, making you pause and stumble. Woolf reminds us that women writers were largely absent from history and scholarship and that, indeed, for women to write was considered “unnatural.” Hence the path had to be carved by women without recourse to previous leadership, scattered with stumbling blocks needing to be surpassed. In the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe women began to create their own spaces at universities in the mid to late 1800s. Girton Women’s College, Cambridge was established in the 1870s in the United Kingdom but was not recognized by the wider academy. By 1910 women had entered academic spaces but were considered transgressive simply by being students. “Their actions, too, were transgressive, either because no one told them what correct practice was, or else the practices were designed with men in mind” (Davies 2006, 500). The modern university was entrenched in Enlightenment traditions and thus universities were not only built by men for men but became sites for white, middle-class, masculine culture ground in Cartesian rationalism, where notionally knowledge and truth were to be found, tested, and recreated (Lee and Green 2008, 267; Lee 2009, 267). Rationalism, that is, a priori knowledge, was understood as being revealed from reason and logic not myth, emotions, or superstitions. 1

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Rationalism became the epitome of the white and middle-class male scholar, and women were represented in this binary as emotional beings unsuited to the academy and academic work. In contemporary times we rarely hear expressions of outrage about women’s location in academe. Within today’s neo-liberal universities there is an assumption that women are able to compete equally with men for doctoral places and academic positions; however, this is rarely the case across the majority of western economies (Davies 2006). The neo-liberal university shares with its early institutional formations similar hierarchical and gendered structures (Acker 1990; Weiner 2008). Thus, women now dare to walk on the grass but remain in unequal positions when entering the academic profession. As Lynch argues, “The relative absence of women from senior management and professorial posts is in part a function of inequalities arising from gender-based discrimination, direct and indirect, institutionalized and personalized” (2010, 56). Women continue to remain largely in junior academic roles and are especially under-represented in professorial positions. There is overarching evidence across academic contexts that women continue to carry out the care work in universities, like management of student needs, have greater teaching loads or are in teaching-only roles, and undertake a range of administrative work to enhance the day-to-day running of the university (Lynch 2010; Haake 2011). While this work is important for the learning and well-being of students and the smooth running of the university, it is not counted in developing career pathways or promotion. Lynch (2010, 56), drawing on Husu’s (2000) data from Finland, has argued that, when it comes to promotion, for women’s publications to count equally to men’s they have to publish two and a half times as much as their male counterparts. In part the explanation for this lack of gender equity is that in some cases where women publish and what they publish is given less credence. This appears to be especially so in the humanities and social sciences, where women tend to write about gender or less mainstream issues published in journals that tend to have lower impact factors. The prestige and ranking of journals is another complex and gendered accounting feature in academe that favors men. The separation of women’s interests and women’s work from the idea of men’s work and the culture of “rationalism” has continued to be reproduced over time and continues to bleed into the modern-day university, shaping gender inequities. When it comes to doctoral study women remain under-represented in most disciplines including those in which women would be expected to be in the majority, such as education and the humanities (White 2004; Leonard 2001). These patterns of candidature and work are occurring across a range of international contexts, in particular the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and New Zealand (Leonard 2001; White 2003; Jackson 2008; Haake 2011; Brown and Watson 2010; Gardner 2008).

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In this book we examine the emergence and ongoing development of women’s scholarly subjectivity from the perspectives of both doctoral candidates and academic supervisors. We are interested in the process of becoming academics, that is, women’s journey of transition or transgression into academe, as well as understanding supervisory practices, experiences, and emotions in shaping the doctoral journey. Our motivation for engaging in this subject is twofold. The first comes from attempts to understand our own encounters as both supervisors and students that emerge from discussions and experiences of our writing and that of others which have left us bewildered, emotional, at times angry or annoyed, and interspersed with moments of joy. These emotional experiences are inscribed on our bodies and have shaped our academic selves, our writing, and our continued practice as supervisors. Hence, this book reflects our own personal journeys as well as those of our fellow contributors. The second motivation stems from turning to academic literature and finding that practices of supervision and scholarship remain under-scrutinized both in university settings and in academic writing. This is despite the fact that articles published in journals like Studies in Higher Education have increasingly examined the philosophical, political, and discursive constructions of the academy and its implications for doctoral study. Only a few have drawn adequate attention to the multiple, lived, and emotional journeys scholars take to become academics from both student and supervisor perspectives. On the one hand this is surprising, given the demand for doctoral qualifications in a highly competitive job market inside and outside the university sector. On the other hand, why would lived experience and emotions be considered significant when the “ideal” rationalized masculine culture of academe is the antithesis to the lived and emotional experience of academic work? As Hey aptly states, “‘getting affective’ has from the outset to contend with the Academy’s positing of ‘emotion’ as its ‘Other’” (2010, 1). Placing rationality and emotion in opposition stems from an understanding of emotion as affecting judgment and as a reactive response. It emerges from correlating emotions with feminine traits, traits that transgress academic culture. As Ahmed argues, “Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ‘closer’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement” (2004, 3). This edited collection focuses on women and analyzes the affective politics of academic knowledge production, addressing the importance of emotions in the development of academic work identities in the humanities and social sciences. Deploying feminist perspectives, we critique the notion of an academic as an “autonomous rational subject” in the context of supervising and writing doctoral dissertations. We argue that knowledge production visà-vis thesis writing is not a disembodied activity, removed from questions of gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. Knowledge production is articulated by hegemonic understandings of autonomy, knowledge, and power. Emo-

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tions such as risk, fear, and trust are the antithesis to being a “good academic,” and are explicitly and implicitly understood as signs of individual failure and vulnerability. As powerful as they might be, such emotions are addressed infrequently, despite their presence in the constitution of academic identities. This book contributes to further understanding the emotional politics of the production of doctoral dissertations. It also extends our understanding of the mundane everyday practices through which academic work is emotional work. Emotions are critical not only to the production of ideas and dissertations, but also to the gendering of higher education, in which gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality play a part. This introductory chapter sets the context for a critical analysis of doctoral study and supervision by examining the governance of doctoral education in western contemporary universities, which are largely neo-liberal institutions. It examines the concepts of supervisor and doctoral student and the supervisory relationship. Whilst providing a framework for the chapters that follow, our identified themes enable us to consider how understandings of doctoral study and supervision may be advanced. Following this conceptual overview we introduce the chapters to this volume. THE NEO-LIBERAL UNIVERSITY Reoccurring across a steady stream of literature is the reflection that in the twenty-first century universities have transformed into corporate commercialized institutions (Giroux 2002; Rutherford 2005; Davies et al. 2006; Lynch 2010). There is also a frightening conformity in what commercialization looks like in higher education practices in relation to students and academics across global spaces (Dill and Soo 2005). Specifically, commercialization equates with a set of operational values that centralize the market by systematizing approaches to the delivery of teaching and research. Slaughter and Rhoades (2000, 73) suggest that these values are enmeshed within what have become key practices driving academic institutions such as “academic capitalism” and “professional managerialism.” Academic capitalism involves the marketization of research outputs, in which subsidiary companies may be developed or products produced for profit. Hence in this context the institution values the production of knowledge that is tightly bound to market requirements, and in such an institution an “entrepreneurial” academic gains esteem. The neo-liberal entrepreneur, as Bryant and Garnham explain, is linked to a particular mode of subjectivation. . . . As Foucault (2008: 272) explains, this is “a form of a subject of individual choices” whose freedom to pursue individual interests through investment (that will garner the greatest possible profit for the least possible cost) is compatible with the interests of all

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(economic growth). In neoliberal political economy, . . . [the subject] is free to act in accordance with his 1 own interests in relation to external elements over which the subject has no control (Foucault 2008, 272). As such, the freedom of the subject is a delimited freedom since possibilities for action are shaped in advance through broader social and political structures and processes. Within a neoliberal political economy, the subject is therefore compelled to form as an “entrepreneur” in seeking out opportunities for strategic investment and managing actuarial risk. (2013, 3)

The academic entrepreneur works within “a triple helix of university-industry-government” (Meyer 2003, 107), using public or industry funds to more closely align what are often scientific products such as biotechnologies with commercial needs. Indeed, there is a new generation of research that considers the qualities and conditions necessary for success as an academic entrepreneur (e.g., D’Este, Mahdi, and Neely 2010; Stuart and Ding 2006; Hoye and Pries 2009). Collectively this literature discusses academics’ ability to “recognize and exploit” market opportunities, requiring the entrepreneurial academic to be closely aligned with industry and understand the needs of the marketplace and end users (D’Este, Mahdi, and Neely 2010, 1). In the context of doctoral study, valorizing entrepreneurship results in the provision of social and economic value to some disciplines over others, and indeed this is positively encouraged by government and industry underwriting doctoral grants for market-driven topics. As Lynch so aptly states, “New Liberal thinking in education has succeeded in doing what classical liberalism did not do: it subordinates and trivializes education that has no market value” (2010, 62). Hence, disciplines like the humanities have received few resources within universities for some years now, humanities departments have closed around the world, and disciplines like biotechnology and petroleum engineering have thrived (Rutherford 2005). Candidates will continue to study topics they are passionate about; however the question is why should the market, as opposed to human and social values about growing community or challenging existing regimes of power, determine what deserves not only social worth but also financial support. The concern of “individualised academic capitalism” (Lynch 2010, 63) is that education becomes a utilitarian process driven by values of the neo-liberal subject or “homo aeconomicus” (Foucault 2008). The second key driver in neo-liberal universities is the rise of managerialism and professionals who are required to supervise, regulate, control, and discipline academics and students through ongoing audits and inspections (Lorenz 2012). Lorenz summarizes the outcomes of managerialism: “The unstoppable rise of league tables—the ranking of citations, individual researchers, research groups, institutes and whole universities—is an integral part of this development in the direction of an audit culture and audit society” (2012, 607). And as Shore observes, league tables simultaneously produce

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winners and losers, and “the policy of naming and shaming failing institutions has become an annual ritual in humiliation” (2008, 286). For doctoral candidature managerialism extends to measuring and monitoring student progress in attempts to manage timely completions. In some countries like Australia the parameters of doctoral study are regulated, particularly as government funding to universities is aligned to completions (Firth and Martens 2008). As Lynch argues, “Surveillance, and the unrelenting measurement of performance, are institutionalized and normalized in everyday life” (2010, 55). Research education is increasingly framed within technocratic discourses, which define and shape practices of knowledge and knowledge making (Lee and Green 2009, 616). Technocratic discourses place concepts and practices of education, learning, and teaching as secondary to “research,” with research becoming a product, an outcome of doctoral study (Lee and Green 2009). These discursive constructions, embedded in funding and managerial relations, shape culture and experiences of students including supervisory relationships, to which we will turn shortly. We are not suggesting that the neo-liberal university is a monolithic regime with no differences across and within countries. Nor are we suggesting that the requisite forms of governance are accepted without question or resistance by staff and students. However what we are saying is that increasingly the values and practices of the neo-liberal university have been given moral legitimacy. Lynch (2010, 57) has conceptualized the values that drive universities in terms of “carelessness” or “care-less.” For Lynch a care-less university is not a product of neo-liberalism as its origins lie in Cartesian thinking, that is, scholarship or knowledge remains disconnected to emotions and personal values. However, one of the ways in which neo-liberalism exacerbates carelessness in education is by establishing a culture of less care to others especially via the notion of academic work as ongoing without time boundaries or care responsibilities. This includes living an international lifestyle, being able to migrate to more prestigious universities or positions, and travel regularly to participate in transnational research. As Lynch so aptly argues, “A care-less academic culture sends out a strong message also to graduate students and post-doctoral scholars as to who is and is not an appropriate candidate for academic life” (2010, 58). Whilst men are increasingly taking on care work, women remain overwhelmingly responsible for the primary care of children and/or aged parents and by being “time bound” remain disadvantaged in the academy (Probert 2005). Women are less able to be care-less academics.

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DOCTORAL SCHOLARS Doctoral scholars have in recent decades become a more diversified group (Petersen 2012). A PhD student today is likely to spend some time in paid work during or throughout their candidature and may have spent many years between completing undergraduate study and resuming postgraduate study. She or he may or may not have a scholarship, may be raising children or be retired, may be studying away from their home country or state, and writing their doctoral dissertation in a language that is not their first. However, women in many countries like Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States remain the minority of doctoral students (Brown and Watson 2010). In the United States in colleges like UCLA (Berkeley), for example, there has been a significant decline in the numbers of women represented in undergraduate and those moving into postgraduate degrees (Brown and Watson 2010). The body of literature that examines women’s participation in doctoral programs suggests that women face a number of barriers including entering postgraduate study later than their male counterparts, often studying part-time due to commitments associated with primary caring, and feeling excluded, unsupported, or marginalized in academic culture (e.g., Chesterman 2001; White 2003; Kantola 2008; Brown and Watson 2010; Haake 2011). Indeed, some authors suggest academic cultures more so than age or caring responsibilities are responsible for lack of retention of woman in doctoral study (Kantola 2008; Xu 2008; Gardner 2008). Haake (2011), in her study of Swedish doctoral education, focused on disciplines that traditionally have been constructed as male-dominated like physics and engineering; mixed-gendered like history and English; and female-dominated disciplines, like nursing and education, to examine gendered disciplinary admission and values. However, Haake (2011) does not provide a detailed examination of cultural practices in disciplines but shows how particular key practices like admission constitute differences in the numbers of women and men taking up doctoral education. She found that specific disciplines explained their gendered profiles in relation to the gendered history of the professions in which they offered degrees. Moreover, professions with higher status tended to be seen as male and those with lower status female. Modes of teaching and researching were also linked to gendered epistemologies, with disciplines that were highly quantitative attracting men and those that were more qualitative in approach attracting women. Further, admission to doctoral education by gender was explained in female-dominated disciplines, like nursing for example, as stemming from universities choosing candidates based on their lived experience and the “right” personal traits, in particular caring. Traits like caring were also considered when judging the merit of the thesis and its benefit to society. Male disciplines tended to address the need to increase the numbers of women enrolled in their discipline by providing

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mentoring by women to women and establishing equity goals for admissions and completions. Male disciplines had equity measures focusing on attracting postgraduate students; however there was a lack of reflexivity about the impact of the disciplines’ culture on women once they had entered their programs. Research specific to disciplinary culture suggests that everyday norms are critical in shaping inclusion and exclusion within disciplines. Much of the literature on gender and inclusion in academe focuses on disciplines like mining engineering, showing that cultural practices in the associated industry sectors are translated into academic study. Women who enter the engineering profession are often confronted by the cultural imaginaries of the “engineer,” sustained by masculine norms within organizations whereby diversity is not easily tolerated or tolerated with resentment (Evetts 1998; Eveline and Booth 2002; Bastalich et al. 2007; Franzway et al. 2009). Bryant and Jaworski (2011, 2012) have argued that, unless cultural practices are scrutinized in organizations and the universal bodiless worker ideal (Acker, 1990) is challenged, gendered power relations that shape some jobs and their associated disciplines as male and others as female will remain. Understandings about what it is to be a doctoral scholar vary, are multiple, and overlap across time and countries. The oldest of these constitutes the student as apprentice or protégé, whereby the role of the student is to learn by modeling their supervisor’s research and writing practices and by listening and taking on instruction. In apprenticeship mode the doctoral student takes on a passive and unequal role to academic supervisors. The roles of “novice and expert . . . position the doctoral researcher as a diminished scholar” (Kamler and Thomson 2008, 507). This unequal representation of power and knowledge reverberates in the tone of dissertation advice books. Kamler and Thomson (2008) in their analysis of DIY doctorate texts found that their ethos was to provide a “survival guide” by reproducing four common and untheorized ideas about what constitutes a doctoral student and doctoral study. These four themes were: sanctioning the expert–novice relationship; reducing the writing of a dissertation to a series of linear steps; providing generalized rules about thesis writing; and providing advice to deflect fear. This advice reduces complexity and aims to provide certainty associated with the research and writing process. Hence, the doctoral scholar is constituted in these texts as a receiver of knowledge guided by authoritative moral tones like the word “should” to represent the authority and wisdom of the author and academic who have successfully completed doctoral study (Kamler and Thomson 2008). Further, in these texts research and writing are depicted as a singular, orthodox, and pragmatic exercise. This pedagogic practice and style of supervision are gendered and emerge, as stated earlier, from a Cartesian view of education.

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In the last decade, more attention has been given to the process of doctoral study as being intermeshed with an ongoing negotiation of identity (e.g., Green 2005; Petersen 2007). In other words, what it is to be a doctoral scholar is not simply about the production of knowledge or a thesis, but also about subjectivity and the development of academic identity. Petersen asks “How does this ‘supreme classifier amongst classifiers,’ to use Bourdieu’s terminology (1988, p. xi), come into existence? How does this being come to know how to act, speak, think, write and feel as an academic: how is ‘academicity,’ or academichood, produced?” (2007, 477). The concept of academic used by Petersen and in this book is broader than a reference to those who work in the academy as lecturers and/or researchers; it refers to the process of engaging in postgraduate scholarly study and the outcome of that process on one’s subjectivity. Frequently, scholars who examine academic subjectivity turn to Judith Butler’s (1990) concept of subjectivity and Foucault’s (1984) concept of power to understand how we negotiate and reconstruct our sense of selves through the doctoral experience (e.g., Green 2005; Petersen 2007; Cherry 2012). Our subjectivity is constituted through and by power, and at the same time we gain agency in the way we take on power or overcome aspects of it (Butler 1990). Therefore, as Petersen suggests, “In this way we would understand the academic subject to come into being by being appropriated by, and by appropriating, available enactments and desires that are recognisable as ‘academic’” (2007, 478). Essentially, the doctoral scholar performs a subject position of academic by taking on, acting against, and negotiating the values and practices of their discipline and broader academic community. In practice this means that we embody what it is to be an academic, that is, how to deliver an argument, lecture, how to write an article, and as Petersen says the “tacit knowledges; how to talk, laugh, sit and feel, how to express recognition of competence and how to express that what someone does or says falls outside the domain of the appropriately academic” (2007, 478). The academic self however, while reflexively built from discursive academic sites like faculty meetings, seminars, and reading texts, is also constituted from individual and social experiences of gender, class, race, age, (dis)ability, and sexuality (Cherry 2012). Doctoral study is personal. As qualitative researchers in particular have argued, our values and histories expand and limit our research horizons (Denzin 2010). They bring ourselves into the questions we ask, into how we interpret, construct, and deliver arguments. Feminist scholars have for some time articulated the significance of personal history and have argued for the necessity of acknowledging one’s presence in the research and, indeed, writing and situating oneself in the research design and analysis (e.g., Haraway 1998).

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SUPERVISORS AND THE SUPERVISORY RELATIONSHIP The nomenclature for the role taken by academics guiding doctoral scholars to completion of the dissertation differs according to global context. For example, in Australia the term “supervisor” is used; in the United States “supervisors” are referred to as “graduate advisors” and in the Netherlands “promoters.” This small selection of terms indicates a difference in meanings associated with the academic role of doctoral support, ranging from the monitoring of progress implicit in the term “supervisor” to advice and assistance encapsulated in the concept “advisor.” As this edited collection focuses on Australian examples we examine the concept of “supervision” more closely, while recognizing that processes of “supervision” are similar in the way knowledge is shared, transferred, and produced in doctoral studies particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Central to “supervision” is the idea that the doctoral scholar’s work is being closely watched/monitored (Johnson et al. 2000). Lee and Green have argued that “the pervasive visual metaphor at the heart of the conceptualization . . . [suggests] a ‘pan-optics’ of pedagogic power . . . and the metaphor of ‘super-vision,’ a heightened or enhanced vision, materially realized, brings into play a watchfulness and a certain artfulness” (2009, 626). Green (2005) points out that the term, while implying that students are being watched by supervisors, also implies that they learn by watching their supervisors. Hence, the term supervision is closely aligned to earlier understandings of supervision being associated with the dynamic of expert and novice/apprentice. As we have argued earlier, this model of supervision has clearly defined boundaries that diminish the role of doctoral students as both learners and producers of knowledge. Moreover, the expert–novice method of supervision draws on a historical masculinized construction of teaching and learning that is inherent in the notion of being taught by one’s “master” or being a “master’s apprentice.” There is an extensive body of knowledge examining models of doctoral supervision (Engstrom 1999; Grant 1999; Davies 2006; Petersen 2007; Lee 2008; Halse and Malfroy 2009; McCormack 2009; Haake 2011; Cherry 2012). Much of the academic literature has focused on pragmatically listing the tasks and skills required to undertake and receive good supervision. Hegemonic views of supervision often assume a technical rationality, that is, a direct practice in which the supervisor regulates the planning and output by training the candidate to meet goals and learn specific research skills (Grant 1999). Others have argued that “good supervision” occurs if the “appropriate” personality traits are embodied and practiced by the supervisor, like the ability to be empathetic, and provide counseling and role modeling (White 2004). However, increasingly academic analysis has recognized the importance of moving beyond ideal descriptions to theorizing the roles and processes involved in supervision (e.g., Davies 2006; Lee and Green 2009;

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Cherry 2012). Doctoral supervision is complex. Often in the humanities and social sciences doctoral study begins for students with endless possibilities: What topic to choose? What theories to draw on? How to draw boundaries and make judgments about existing bodies of literature? What methods to employ? How best to design the research? For supervisors a constant question is how best to teach a way of working and thinking through these multiple possibilities without directing the student. Given the expansiveness associated with many of these questions and subsequent choices, doctoral study is certainly an amorphous process. When it comes to supervision, this obscure, tentative, and ever-developing relationship is even harder to get a handle on. As Cherry aptly poses, how do student and supervisors work this out when the key questions are “how do I learn to create something that does not yet exist? How does a skilled person help me to do this without doing the work for me?” (2012, 6). Drawing on Schon (1987) she asks, “how does a person learn something that cannot be fully explained even by other skilled professionals?” (2012, 6). Mowbray and Halse (2010), grappling with the complexity of the purpose and the learning outcomes of doctoral study, suggest that three sets of skills or functions and emotional contexts in combination are at work in constituting doctoral study. These skill sets or capacities and emotions include research skills, emotional capacity, reflexivity, resourcefulness, critical thinking, experiential knowledge, intuitiveness, and risk taking (Mowbray and Halse 2010; Cherry 2012). Given this list of somewhat intangible (but yet, as many of us who have completed doctoral study are likely to agree, crucial) components for successful completion, “how will supervision make a substantial contribution to the formative development of a capable, rounded and confident practitioner, and at the same time result in the timely production of an artefact called a thesis?” (Cherry 2012, 8). It is understandable that in trying to navigate this complexity supervisors and doctoral scholars are often trained or provided with tools to attempt to reduce complexity and provide certainty for what is an uncertain process. Firth and Martens (2008, 281) suggest that as universities become more technical in relation to doctoral processes they also become distant from developing supervision and support for research scholars. As we have argued earlier, academic literature is increasingly focused on the becoming of an academic and the ways of knowing and practicing (e.g., Lee and Green 2009; Petersen 2007; Davies 2006). Consequently, supervision of doctoral students is the development of the becoming scholar but equally is a process of development or continuing development for the experienced academic. In response, academics have suggested that “good supervision” takes into account our humanness, our emotions, and values, expecting that conflicts will arise and that the relationship will require management of emotions and clear communication (Acker et al. 1994; Cherry 2012). However, despite this

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understanding this collection clearly shows there remains a complexity to supervision: being attuned to the needs of the candidate and sensitivity by both parties alone will not itself produce “good” practice. Fundamentally, there are power relations involved shaped by identities and transforming identities as well as emotions, desires, and intersubjectivity (Grant 1999; Lapping 2006; Lee 2008; Brown and Watson 2010; Cherry 2012). The disjuncture associated with the lived complexity of doctoral study and supervision, and attempts to reduce complexity in academic systems to acknowledge and provide space for the subjective and intersubjective, is at the heart of the problem of doctoral training. INTERSUBJECTIVITY, EMOTIONS, AND DESIRE To further examine this evolving list of emotional, embodied, imagined, and intellectual aspects of the self which are embedded in power relations we will turn to subjectivity and intersubjectivity in relation to desire in supervision. The supervisory relationship may be understood as an intersubjective relationship, which in the discipline of psychology commonly suggests that the self is constituted through language and dialogically co-constructed from multiple perspectives (and associated tensions) in relation to others (see Bakhtin 1981). We suggest that intersubjectivity is more than a dialogical construction but a relation of power whereby subjects draw meanings in relation to other subjects. We identify ourselves in the context of social categories and these are differentiated from the “Other.” In particular this is evident in the context of gender and in this way gender is also intersubjective (Crossley 1996). In supervisory contexts this means an attempt to read the “others’” emotions, attitudes, values, dialogical meaning, and body language. Following Butler, we suggest that the relationship between supervisors and doctoral scholars is an ongoing accomplishment, a reiterative practice in recognizing, repeating, and recontextualizing subjectivity and therefore intersubjectivity (Petersen 2012). Thus supervision is in part an intersubjective production of subjectivity, that is, through ongoing encounters each subject recognizes the other, allowing the possibility of identifying with the other and the possibility of being shaped by the other. In the process of research supervision desire has been conceptualized in relation to intersubjectivity (Grant 1999; Lapping 2006). Indeed, Cherry, drawing on the work of Grant (1999), encapsulates these interstices and reiterative practices in the following argument: She [Grant] argues that identity understood in terms of social position, gender, power and politics, is not only being constantly contested in the relationship, but regenerated. Supervision “interferes with the way people are, how they understand themselves to be, and what they strive to become” (Grant 1999, 6).

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Desire is present for both supervisor and student: “desires to please, to challenge, to do well, to demonstrate independence, to push toward independence, to resist, to be respected by, to be recognized as clever, to become like, to become authoritative. . . . These often unconscious, sometimes confused and changing desires produce behaviors both from supervisor and student that are not amenable to rational explanation.” (Grant 1999, 4; cited in Cherry 2012, 10)

It is not surprising that desire in doctoral study and supervision is ever present, particularly as “the doctoral degree represents [or has come to represent] the pinnacle of achievement” (Wall 2008, 219). Desire is not always rational. Lacan (2006) argues that desire is beyond language and is part of the imaginary and the idealized. While what is desired may be articulated in language as a demand, this demand cannot quite express the desire. As Lapping expresses it, “There is, then, a gap or a remnant, between appetite and demand, and this gap is the position of desire” (2006, 425). Hence, if desire is more than language, it is also constituted from emotions. Academic scholarship over time has demonstrated that emotions have a crucial impact on subjects: we experience emotions through multiple sensory perceptions and emotions allow us to transgress material and imagined spatialities, enabling agency, resistance, and transformation (Livholts and Bryant 2013). Given the importance of emotions in shaping us as subjects, how can we understand the role of emotions in shaping our academic selves or becoming academic selves during doctoral study? Understanding how emotions enter the doctoral and supervisory experiences depends upon how emotions are conceptualized. Emotions can be difficult to name (Bondi et al. 2005) and, while we often speak of emotions in absolute terms, they are nuanced rather than universal and any specific emotion may be felt and experienced differently by subjects within or across populations (Ahmed 2000, 2004). Additionally, one emotion may have further meaning in relation to other emotional referents or effects that are referential so that, for example, shame is a feeling that often is further related to feelings of failure and often contrasted to pride and self-worth (Skeggs 2004; Probyn 2005; Sayer 2005). Probyn’s (2004, 2005) extensive analyses show emotions as both physical and social. Commonly sociologists concerned with theorizing emotions have tended to avoid biology and theorizing the body, especially given concerns about biological reductionism in relation to women; however the body has increasingly been “captured in and by the social” (Probyn 2004, 232). Probyn interrogates the physical and feeling body and suggests that emotions are informed by a “tripartite integration of the physiological-psychological-sociological” (2004, 234). In short, Probyn is alerting us to the complexity of emotions, the existence of innate emotions, of memories that are lodged in our brains and stimulate emotions, of a myriad of ways we experience and express emotions, at times understood and at

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others incapable of acknowledgement by the human subject. Thus, she emphasizes that we are embodied physiologically, neurologically, and cognitively, and our bodies are marked by social discourses and practices. The point is that the body and its emotions are not exclusively discursively constituted. Probyn uses the imagery of layers and folds to draw attention to the complexity of the habitus as a “way of figuring the body and its beliefs, customs, practices and cultural meanings as analog layerings of different kinds of distinction” (2004, 240). In relation to supervision and doctoral study, in this volume we draw on theorizations of emotions that are embodied and social in specific contexts. Across the text there are exemplars of emotions as mechanisms to regulate and control behaviors in the workplace (e.g., Hochschild 1983), as constituting social and spatial landscapes shaping possibilities and behaviors, and as possibilities for transformation and failure (Moss 2006). These emotions emerge from socially constructed power relations (Barbalet 2002; Ahmed 2004; Skeggs 2004), which are always political (Anderson and Smith 2001; Bryant and Pini 2011). Ahmed provides examples of how emotions are politically produced and work to “shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies . . . [whereby] Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others” (2004, 1). Hence for Ahmed, in relation to race, emotions are produced and take on meaning through historical and contemporary discourses that construct the white body as the norm and the black body as inferior and othered. Thus narratives that “other” ascribe emotions to “the other” but also to the white subject as superior and deserving. Chapter 2 draws on the work of Beverley Skeggs (2004) to further examine how emotions are constituted and ascribed in relation to gender and class in the context of higher education. The chapters that follow draw on a range of theoretical perspectives on emotion to examine the effect of emotions in shaping doctoral and supervisory experiences. A common theme in the theorizing of emotions across the volume is the centrality of power in the making, content, expression, and practice of emotions. By including analyses of emotions the autonomous rational academic subject, the “universal bodiless worker,” is brought to account and the body is firmly placed back into social analyses of higher education (Acker 1990). This collection demonstrates the heterogeneity of doctoral experiences for women and for women who supervise, and underscores the centrality of emotion in shaping how we become scholars and transform our selves and our scholarship in the process. The theorization of emotions as central to academic work enables us to consider doctoral study and supervision in new ways.

Introduction

15

OVERVIEW OF TEXT We have divided the book into two parts. The first focuses on women academics who have supervised female doctoral students (chapters 2–4) and the second on women’s experiences of doctoral study (chapters 5–8). Together these sections examine how women negotiate their journey into “becoming academics” and collectively they emphasize emotions as intertwined and molded into the processes of learning, teaching, academic writing, knowledge production, and discovery. To uncover the deeply affective investments in what it means to be an academic in contemporary times, authors throughout this book use life writing to guide their analyses. We chose life writing as a method as it allows emotions to emerge. Life writing allows writers to “move into normative and dominating structures via the fragmented subject and to confront the complexity of the lived and imagined” (Bryant and Livholts 2015). A diary entry, a memory, or poem, for example, allows the writer to focus on a particular scene and to analyze the fragmented and situational. As Bryant and Livholts suggest, “a particular memory constitutes an image of the mind and writing becomes an embodied textual activity of documentation” (2015). In this book the authors engage with different formats of life writing including memories, diaries, excerpts, poetry, blogs, and stories, and each author employs relevant social theories to understand academic identity formation and the process and nature of academic writing. This methodology enabled data to emerge that captures the emotional and sensory within writing, teaching, and learning practices. In chapters 2–4 supervision is presented from the perspective of supervisors, with each author using a different approach. Common to each chapter is the examination of the intersubjective nature of supervision. In chapter 2 Bryant uses poetry to examine her experience as a supervisor and her gendered and classed relationship with the doctoral scholars she supervisors. She explores how gender and class shape intersubjective encounters in supervision. Her focus is on working-class women and belonging in academe, particularly focusing on the concept of self-worth in relation to moral discourses of “honor,” which shape doctoral study and expectations for and of doctoral scholars. She shows the myriad ways in which discourses of honor tied to success, pride, intelligence, ability, and worthiness are woven into entry into doctoral study, feedback during supervision, writing, participation, and of course completion of a thesis. Bryant uses poetry to explore questions of honor, desire, and belonging, bringing forth inherent understandings of gendered and classed subjectivities that are at odds with the cultural context of the academy. Bryant also shows that emotions, while providing stumbling blocks along the path of doctoral study, also provide the

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potential for agency and change, and she therefore examines the transformation of the self during doctoral study and in particular supervision. Chapter 3 is based on an in-depth conversational interview about supervision between the co-authors. Beasley and Jaworski examine the ethic of “social flesh” to explore the practice of supervising doctoral scholars. They engage in a dialogue to discuss the autobiographical and scholarly interchanges that constitute the emotional body of their pedagogical politics. The chapter interrogates the universal and neutral claims of the neo-liberal ethos of knowledge production as achieved through competitive yet disembodied atomistic individualism. The question of supervision in chapter 4 is approached via storytelling with excerpts from doctoral scholars supervised by the writer. Gill examines how meanings associated with what constitutes data in a doctoral thesis change over time and how her feminist doctoral scholars questioned the right to speak about their lived experience as “data,” that is, as embodied subjects whose experiences are overlaid across the text of a thesis. In this chapter Gill also explores how doctoral scholars wrestled with how to write their theses to account for their emotions and also the emotions of their participants. Gill’s chapter illustrates the linking of the personal and political which is corporeal and therefore emotional for the writer, the supervisor, and research participants. Chapters 5–8 are written from the perspectives of doctoral scholars reflecting on the practice of writing a doctoral dissertation. Authors use different methods to examine the question of women’s experiences of writing a doctoral thesis. Jaworski (chapter 5), Adams (chapter 6), and Rowntree (chapter 7) draw on specific memories inscribed by emotion which they experienced as powerful in shaping the doctoral journey while Ward (chapter 8) analyses women’s stories obtained through thesis blogs to reveal the emotionally complex space of doctoral writing for women. Chapter 5 by Jaworski examines what she refers to as feeling stuck between two languages when writing a dissertation. She explains that as a migrant who came to Australia in the mid 1980s, she could not grasp the idea of how one simply wrote their findings up or how her first language, namely, Polish, would not inflect her writing. Jaworski in this chapter renders visible what it meant for her to write and how her dissertation was a work of ethical practice, contoured performatively by cultural norms and emotions. She draws on memories from her primary and secondary schooling about how she learned to write in the English language in Australian educational settings. Her memories reflect that writing for her is an embodied practice, shaped by her past and re-articulated in the present—through which the present speaks back to her past. Chapter 6 by Adams examines caring labor and the situatedness of caring which is left on the margins of academic writing and also rendered invisible

Introduction

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for women who study and write theses. For Adams caring as a theoretical concept and lived experience were critical to the writing of her doctorate. She explains her politics of location as a working class mother caring for two young children and an ill partner, and alongside providing care at home she was caring as a nurse for elderly and frail residents. For Adams writing was intertwined with caring and interdependencies, infused with largely invisible emotional labor. Caring was essential to her production of knowledge throughout her candidacy, and in this chapter she examines the interstices between multiple areas of work and analyses feminist conceptualizations of what she terms as “care producing academic labour” which clashes with homo economicus—the rational economic man at the heart of her discipline of economics. Chapter 7 further examines the emotional journey of the doctoral candidacy and Rowntree examines the shifting emotional spaces that can open or close within supervisory relationships. She brings to light the way in which the tenor of supervisory space influences her learning, her trajectory through the doctoral journey, and her identity formation. Rowntree describes her emotional space of her supervisory relationship as one where she feels safe to feel vulnerable and draws on memories to understand how this emotional space of acceptance around vulnerability came into being. She shows that doctoral scholars are able to contribute to spaces being vulnerable despite the uneven power relations, which constitute supervisory relationship. Chapter 8 focuses on the experience of occupying a liminal space, like doctoral candidature. Ward in this chapter examines the writing of women doctoral scholars, recording their lives, and commenting on each other’s blogs over an extended period of time. For Ward a liminal space is a recognized socially or psychologically significant and identifiable state, in which a person has neither the status they had before they entered that space, nor have they attained the status they will have when they leave it. A social grouping in a recognized liminal state may create a condition called “communitas” or unstructured community. Ward argues that internationally, doctoral scholars demonstrate a sense of communitas through online forums and blogging circles and that by examining women’s doctoral stories she ascertains that doctoral work is complex, difficult, messy, and defying rational notions of progress and non-progression. Ward’s chapter brings to life the liminality of doctoral experience across geographical borders. The final chapter of the book (chapter 9) by Jaworski and Bryant visits what it is like to walk on the grass eighty-two years on from Virginia Woolf’s attempts to cross the turf at Cambridge University. This chapter illustrates that the nature of writing is forever layered by personal histories and experiences and underlying these stories and memories are researchers whose lives are at the center of writing research, whether from a supervisor’s or doctoral scholar’s perspective. Women are as much under construction as

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their writing and supervising and although women now have access to education, certain assumptions and ideals still influence what it means to be a “good academic.” In this concluding chapter we examine what theoretical learning emerges from considering emotions, academic writing, and identity formation to further understand what it is to be a woman who is a scholar and academic worker. NOTE 1. In Foucault’s work and in neo-liberal discourse the subject is uncritically constituted as male.

I

Supervising Doctoral Students

Chapter Two

Honor Bound Lia Bryant

Obtaining higher education is commonly perceived as gaining moral worth and honor and this is particularly so for women and the working class (Reay 2003). In our culture a doctorate is considered a noble enterprise, for the brightest of students, the elite. Success in the form of a passed doctorate bestows honor on the self, the supervisor, the department, and university. On closer inspection the concept of “honor” and its multiple meanings reflects a worthiness to enter and participate in academe and gratitude for the privilege. The Oxford English Dictionary defines honor in multiple ways, as “great esteem,” “high respect,” “a rare opportunity bringing pride, pleasure and privilege,” and “a thing conferred as a distinction” (Oxford English Dictionary, undated). Many working-class candidates and women undertaking doctorates are the first members of their family to attend university and as such feelings of being given an honor as opposed to being entitled to further education often shape and color expectations of the self (Reay 2003; Skeggs 1997). In the social sciences and humanities many women and in particular working-class women come to doctoral study as mature-aged students. It is not uncommon for women to expect to “work out” what they perceive as their “own problems” about belonging and participating during candidature. Working-class women commonly feel a lack of ability and self-worth in the masculine and middle-class settings of the academy. As such, in this chapter I focus specifically on the concept of self-worth and its relation to “honor” to explore the emotions derived from these powerful concepts that shape women’s belonging. My aim is to give credence and voice to emotions in doctoral study and supervision, and equally to shift the focus from individual responsibility and struggle associated with lack of worth experienced by women and in particular working-class women to an understanding of the structural 21

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conditions giving rise to discomfort and disbelief in the self. These structural conditions emerge from culturally and historically specific “moral judgments” around gendered, raced, classed, and sexual bodies and practices that discursively render the masculine and middle-class body “natural” and “normal” in the academic sphere (Anderson and Smith 2001; Probyn 2005; Bryant and Pini 2011). Bodies that are “othered,” that is, transgressive bodies, are required to transform. In this chapter, I examine transgression and transformation around shared experiences of gender and class in the context of the intersubjective nature of doctoral supervision. As Grant aptly states, “in the intimacy and privacy of supervision, student and supervisor respond to each other as more than student and supervisor, as embodied beings who are gendered, aged, ethnic, sexual, different, same” (1999, 8). I use autoethnography to draw on my experiences as a female academic from a working-class background who predominantly supervises working-class women. Consequently, these supervisory experiences are my experiences, and the emotional and intellectual readings about class and gender form my part of the intersubjective relation of supervision. To examine the emotional aspects of doctoral study and in particular achievement and belonging in academe I have written two poems, “Once Like You” and “Honor Bound.” The poems suggest a commonality of feeling and/or experience among working-class women in academe. However, I do not assume a monolithic experience or a monolithic working-class woman. I have chosen recurring intersubjective feelings from my supervisory experience, alongside academic knowledge on gender, class, and higher education to bring to the fore the importance of gender, class, and emotion in shaping doctoral and supervisory experiences. As chapter 1 indicated, it is important to raise the emotional and intersubjective and how they color supervision, as these important dimensions of learning and teaching are often lost in the instrumental goals of universities. University cultures tend to use as their frame of reference compliance frameworks and models of “successful” doctoral study and supervision (Grant 1999; White 2004; Kamler and Thomson 2008; Lee and Green 2009; Cherry 2012). Given the compliance and funding determinates of neo-liberal universities, the bound doctorate becomes the finite goal of doctoral study, thereby separating the development of the scholar from the achievement of a thesis. Scholarly development becomes synonymous with, and at times secondary to, the goal of a completed thesis. Therefore, building skills in relation to academic writing, teaching, presenting research, communicating with interested parties outside of academe, collaborating, gaining confidence, and working through what is sometimes a transformation of self are areas of learning and teaching that can be overlooked as integral to doctoral study. These arenas of learning present themselves in supervision and occur well before the submitted thesis. An understanding of doctoral supervision that

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more fully acknowledges the overall experience of the doctoral scholar is likely to be a more emotionally and intellectually productive experience and also one that is potentially more aligned to university completion requirements. To reiterate, the doctoral pathway is where emotional histories of both candidate and supervisor are lived and revived in fragmented moments during a range of doctoral study spaces, whether it is supervision meetings or via written and verbal feedback. As such emotional landscapes come into being in the arena of doctoral supervision, shaping subjectivities but also communications and miscommunications between supervisor and doctoral scholar. Notwithstanding the emotional investment and desire for success for one’s doctoral students, for supervisors there are also expectations about their “ideal” emotions. An ideal supervisor or teacher “is known to emote feelings of enthusiasm, happiness, confidence, self-assurance, and passion about and satisfaction toward teaching” (Zhang and Zhu 2008). Similarly, doctoral scholars are expected to show passionate attachment to their topic, feel gratitude for the opportunity for higher study and the supervisory input they receive, while providing emotional support to their peers. The metaphor of survival is often used to portray the doctoral experience, suggesting painful emotions from which candidates are expected to emerge stronger and with greater knowledge. Moreover, within this emotional mix there are emotions that are at times submerged or, when they do emerge, are considered inappropriate or deviant from the “good supervisory relationship,” “good academic,” or “good doctoral scholar.” Specifically, I am referring to emotions like anger, failure, shame, annoyance, inadequacy, superiority, frustration, and a host of others. Hence, it is not surprising that the supervisory relationship is complex, changing, and at times emotionally fraught. What is apparent, however, is that there is a silence around the supervisor relationship and questions of power, politics, and emotions that occur in supervision within the white, middle-class, male hegemonic cultures of universities. This may be due to the discomfort of academics in examining emotions in relation to supervision but also may be a consequence of an emotional and also material necessity to regulate one’s behavior, to perform professionalism through controlling emotion in the workplace of the neoliberal university. To analyze specific moments infused with emotion in doctoral supervision I use life writing through poetry to provide a retrospective portrayal of the structural, institutional, and subjective conditions shaping doctoral and supervisory experiences for women. Poetry as autoethnography enables me to explore moments of biographical lives within everyday contexts where both power and empowerment intertwine (Denzin 2002). Hence, I begin with a discussion of poetry as interpretive ethnography and then focus on two poems, “Once Like You” and “Honor Bound.” The central themes in the

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poems are the desire of working-class women to belong in academe and at the same time resist belonging, and the moral discourse of honor and worth that shapes the emotional landscape of the doctoral and supervisory experience, providing a set of meanings that obtaining a doctorate represents. POETRY AS INTERPRETIVE ETHNOGRAPHY Narratives may bring forth and clarify what emotions are being felt and at times the reasons for such feelings. McCormack (2009) has argued that doctoral supervision may be improved through doctoral scholar and supervisor writing their stories as a way of developing an understanding of how they communicate, teach, learn, and practice as academics. For McCormack storytelling or autoethnography sheds light on the supervisory process and provides a tool for supervisor development: “[they] enlist a narrative way of knowing to construct knowledge through the lived and living experiences. . . . Stories can do this foregrounding because they are complicated, ambiguous and infused with emotions” (2009, 150). Stories may provide an approach to collective knowledge to enable examination of particularly the risky and less pleasant emotions, which at times are masked but nevertheless shape the way supervisors and their students engage in teaching and learning and may inhibit the development of both doctoral scholar and academic supervisor. Whilst narrative approaches and examination of emotions have become more evident in academic literature about supervision, the ways in which emotions emerge, and are expressed or hidden during supervision, have received scant attention. In part, this may be because emotions, as Ahmed (2004, 3) suggests, are placed within a hierarchy of “elevated” and “lower” emotions, and participants in research studies avoid naming the emotions that are socially constituted as “lower” as they seem unprofessional and undignified, and the antithesis of the “good academic.” In this chapter I use poetry as a process for bringing forth emotions about supervision as poetry provides a truncated and immediate manner in which to express emotions. As Jaworski and Scott argue, “For Heidegger in particular poetry beckons what feels impossible to say, to name, and in so doing ‘brings the presence of what was previously uncalled into nearness’ (1971, 196)” (forthcoming). For me poetry allowed the expression of emotions that may have been curtailed by lengthier prose, providing a possibility of reconfiguring the narrative as I wrote, that is, editing out emotions that were confronting or less pleasant. Writing poetry also brought forth ideas and feelings that were not completely evident to me before I began writing. Writing poetry enabled the story to unfold, to come into being. Importantly, it allowed those parts of the story not easily encapsulated through words to emerge. As T. S.

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Elliot writes, feelings and experiences are only “partially translatable into words” (1934, 17). Poems leave impressions and feelings with the reader. How poetry is expressed but also read is reliant upon the imagination, lived experience, and emotion of the reader. In one of my poems I use the concept of “honor” to encapsulate discursive and embodied meanings about entry into doctoral study, experiences of privilege, and the ability to produce knowledge. Honor has symbolic meaning, historical socio-cultural meanings that are not easily expressed in a linear way. Poetry brings forth a complex cluster of meanings whereby lived experience, emotions, imagination, and expectations leave the reader with an impression filled with feelings and thoughts. Referring back to Heidegger, this impression is bringing the “uncalled into nearness” (1971, 196). I chose to write my poems on key themes evident in the literature on higher education and supervision, especially intersubjectivity and its role in shaping supervisory relationships and outcomes. I also wrote in the third person, as Haug (1987) suggested, in an attempt to create some distance from myself as a supervisor to enable the emotional aspects of memory in this context to emerge. I analyzed my poems by focusing on key words or phrases that resonated with me from the academic literature on the topic and my experiences as a supervisor. As Bryant and Garnham (2014) have argued, analysis occurs coincidentally and inseparably from writing and especially in this case occurred alongside writing. As Richardson and St Pierre suggest, “writing is thinking, writing is analysis, writing is indeed a seductive and tangled method of discovery” (2005, 967, emphasis original). The poems are an amalgam of supervisory experiences and do not reflect supervision of any particular student. I have supervised a number of doctoral students as principal and co-supervisor. Most of the students I have supervised worked within the disciplines of gender studies, social work, and sociology and they have mostly been mature-aged women. DESIRE TO BELONG AND YET . . . In the supervisory relationship emotions occur within the historical context of the university setting and in contemporary times the neo-liberal university, which views the subject as rational and autonomous (see chapter 1). Emotional management is central to organizational expectations. In regard to doctoral supervision, emotional labor, that is in Hochschild’s (2003) terms the management of feelings to comply with rules and expectations, has in itself become a practice that is rarely criticized. Hence, emotional labor requires a suppression of emotions and a display of inauthentic emotions to fit organizational norms (Hochschild 2003). But emotions are shaped from and within politics; despite suppression they will emerge or, even if submerged

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and unspoken, they are likely to remain acutely felt by one or both parties. Therefore it is important to consider emotions in organizations, as more than an individual response and more than a part of the self that requires controlling. Inherent in Ahmed’s (2004) conceptualization of emotions are power relations and the differing social positions we have as subjects, rendering privileges to some and exclusion of others. In her words, “emotionality as a claim about a subject or a collective is clearly dependent on relations of power which endow ‘others’ with meaning and value” (Ahmed 2004, 4). The poem below, “Once Like You,” explores social conditions and relations in which emotions come to be for women supervising and studying doctorates. Once Like You I was once like you Trying to enter this club Felt I was wearing someone else’s coat Didn’t belong I was once like you Wanting my written word heard To be included in conversations Greeted at conferences not left awkwardly standing Heart pounding when it was my turn to speak I was once like you Thought that I would be smarter, better when I finished this That I could give something special to my children make their path smoother Believed I would belong in this place of beauty I was once like you But I can’t say that I have arrived, I belong some say, you think so But sometimes I don’t know and sometimes I can see that I don’t At times I care, at others I don’t Most of all sometimes I’m difficult Why should I belong? I speak now, mostly heard but guardedly, at times wearily Because I don’t speak like they want me to speak or stay silent when they want me to stay silent I was once like you Perhaps, I still am

The poem “Once Like You,” while it is about the desire to belong, is equally about challenging and resisting belonging in a culture foreign from one’s lived experience. It speaks to doctoral scholars and captures the intersubjective nature of doctoral supervision particularly where there are commonalities in gendered and class experiences in relation to entry into academe. The

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words “trying to enter this club” suggest a trespassing and transgressing of space for women as well as an embodied reading of class consciousness. As Hey contends, “social interactions between self and others are neither arbitrary nor innocent but positional, positioning and produce discourses of self positioning” (2003, 322). The poem brings forth an inherent understanding of gendered, classed spatialities and subjectivities that are known to be at odds. The reference to academe as “a place of beauty” and the idea that “I would be smarter, better when I finished” suggest not only a desire for something beyond oneself, something of value to be attained, but also that if attained one would be transformed. These feelings not only reflect “emotional politics of anxiety and doubt” about being working class in a middle-class environment, where the middle class operates “with a sense of entitlement to social space and economic rewards” (Skeggs 1997, 132) but also demonstrate that living the emotions associated with gender and class is social rather than individual. The feeling that a better self evolves from education is not uncommon for working-class women and men. After all, education is the natural preserve of the middle class. As Skeggs (1995, 2004) says, education is claimed by the middle class as a site of their legitimacy and to be working class is to be less than, to be less articulate, and less worthy. Further, working-class women who enter academe are often the first members of their families to enter this space (Gándara 1995; Reay 1998, 2005; Reay et al. 2001; Black 2005; Ellis 2004; Thomsen 2012). Indeed, as Reay has told in her own story of being a working-class academic, “we worked hard at school to redeem our parents, to prove our family was ‘just as good’” (1997, 22). Entering higher education, gaining entry to doctoral scholarship, and completing a PhD is only partly about the self; for women it is equally about carving pathways whether for their children or other working-class women. Virginia Woolf, drawing us into her world of women and writing, explains the importance of the carving of space by those who came before us: the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her. (1929, 108)

The carving of space, however, also requires the ability to communicate in the terms set out by those who hold power. The words “left awkwardly standing” and “I don’t speak like you” reflect how “the working class . . . [woman] has to work very hard indeed; at learning a totally new language, at undoing the silences of her childhood; at transforming key aspects of female

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embodiment” (Reay 1997, 19). For many working-class women their embodiment does not slot neatly into academic landscapes. We may not have, as Zandy says, “the quiet hands or the neutral faces of the privileged classes” and “survival in middle class contexts often requires developing a decorum and reserve that fits with middle class standards” (1995, 5). As Reay so aptly states, “it also demands a voice to replace the one that has so often been silenced in education contexts” (1997, 19). What this means for doctoral study and supervision is that for workingclass women feelings of inadequacy and of belonging are formed in relation to hegemonic social structures that shape life histories, emotions, and subjectivities (Bryant and Pini 2011). Ahmed (2004, 4) opens up a way of thinking about gender and emotions that enables us to consider “what emotions do” politically in constituting the social conditions and relations in which we live. Importantly, from this perspective emotions can be understood as not held solely within the self or as a “fault” of the self. Instead, emotions relating to belonging, exclusion, and self-worth for women in academe are framed by discursive and embodied constructions of what it is to be a woman, whether working or middle class. Hence, personal biographies and social and political histories are present in supervision. They shape how doctoral scholars respond to feedback, and how supervisors perceive their position in the university and in the supervisory relationship. There is a body of literature that follows the theoretical landscape etched by scholars like Skeggs (1995; 1997; 1999; 2004) and emphasizes the uneasiness of subjectivities and life histories that differ from the hegemonic white, male, middle-class cultures and values in relation to teaching and learning and simply ‘being’ at university (Reay et al. 2001; Black 2005; Hey 2010; Ellis 2004; Thomsen 2012). With regard to doctoral studies, while subjectivity has been brought to the fore as an important consideration in the doctoral process there has been limited exploration of the lived experiences of both supervisors and doctoral students. A notable study is that by Solorzano (2010) who focused on race and gender in shaping the experiences of doctoral study for Chicana and Chicano scholars in the United States. These quotations from Solorzano’s participants illustrate how in seminars Chicana and Chicano scholars were silenced and rendered invisible: I have a Spanish accent and it is pretty pronounced. When I spoke in class it’s as if I was speaking another language or worse, that I wasn’t saying anything important. People wouldn’t listen to me. But, when someone without this accent mentioned the very same thing, people would respond, “oh that’s so profound.” These people didn’t hear me and it continues to this day. [male] (Solorzano 2010, 129)

and

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I felt that my answers are discounted in discussions. I felt strongly that they are not taken seriously because I’m a woman. How can I say anything of any importance for the classroom discussion? Some professors and students act as if I’m not in the classroom and there are only five or six students in the seminar. [female] (Solorzano 2010, 129)

Similarly in the poem “Once Like You” the question of voice and the right to speak is pronounced. Who is allowed to speak, who is silenced, and who has visibility in academe is a reflection of the hegemonic culture. But this does not mean there is no resistance or challenge to these structures. In the poem the author questions whether she wants to belong and her “why should I belong?” is a challenge: she will continue not to conform and not to “speak like they want me to speak or stay silent when they want me to stay silent.” While it is crucial to understand how emotions work in ways that marginalize, it is equally crucial to understand how emotions are used to reclaim value and self-worth. Generic studies of class in particular demonstrate how subjects reconstitute moral judgments (see Skeggs 2011). However, in relation to doctoral scholarship and supervision there is a profound gap in research on the reclaiming of academic space and moral worth in relation to moral judgments about one’s race, gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality, and (dis)ability. EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES As chapter 1 has demonstrated, the higher education literature in more recent times has focused on the doctoral “journey” and the academic coming into being as a consequence of that journey (Johnson, Lee, and Green 2002; Maxwell and Smyth 2011). A critical part of the journey is to obtain constructive feedback from one’s supervisors to develop the thesis and intellectual self. The poem below, “Honor Bound,” captures the awareness of the supervisor of the strength and fragility of both doctoral scholars and supervisors in relation to giving feedback on the thesis. It emphasizes that in part what shapes this fragility is the socially constituted relation between the intellectual work of the thesis and the bestowing of honor in relation to entry into a doctoral program and ongoing candidacy. Hence, any feedback regarding the need for further work, questions around quality of the work, and potential impediments to completion are a threat to honor. The giving and receiving of supervisory feedback is imbued with emotion, much of which stems from the questions of belonging discussed earlier in this chapter but also from the potential revision of “honor” bestowed upon the candidate. In general these feelings around giving and receiving feedback may or may not be more acute for women; however, I would argue that the question of honor is likely to be more fragile for those who are on the margins of academic life.

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Honor Bound The printed page feels smooth, feels erudite Clean and fresh New with knowledge Ascribed positions, argument To mark with comments, is it to mar? To reshape, to proscribe? How to impart what is required? Because there are always requirements Read and re-read, Take forward to the ultimate goal The stated goal always the same Bound and embossed, Bestowed an honor, How then to say more to be done? When finishing is the doing and undoing When tears stream down her face And you know not what to say Comfort, give strength, encourage But what about the alternative? Say stop and rest Dare to say, why? Never to ask Honor too fragile, too entrenched, Not to be disturbed

The page “clean and fresh” suggests a hesitancy to mark the page. Aware of the line between guidance and intrusion, the supervisor is also caught between on the one hand standing back to allow creativity and, on the other, examination requirements. To mark the page is “to mar” it and therefore there is a hesitancy to be too directive, to overly shape and transform intended, but sometimes unintended, ways. Honor is tied to the completed and passed thesis, that is “bound and embossed” alongside a new sanctioned subject position of “intellectual.” Grant argues that supervision “interferes with the way people are, how they understand themselves to be, and what they strive to become” (1999, 6). Hence, the supervisor’s hesitancy is also guided by the emotion of fear, a fear of disturbing honor, which appears “too fragile, too entrenched.” A lot is invested in doctoral study: time, skill, money, emotion, and desire. Not least of all, education is commonly a source of social mobility, a desire for entry into the middle class. Indeed, feminist working-class scholars like Skeggs (1997) and Reay (1997) have given personal accounts of the struggle and tensions they have felt about fitting in within the academy. For example Skeggs states: “I’m also terrified of being

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identified as being unworthy that I work myself constantly into physical illness. It is an obsession. I cannot stop. If I stop someone may notice that I’m not really cut out for this job” (1997, 133). As working-class women enter the doctoral space they occupy a contradictory class location and some scholars have talked of the guilt they feel about moving away from the working class in terms of power, privilege, and lifestyle (Reay 1997; Wise 1997). Doctoral scholarship is an emotional landscape. As Livholts and Bryant have argued, emotional landscapes may be seen as “images reflecting possibilities that we want; in other words . . . [following] Moss (2006), certain moments in life appear as possible locations from where change becomes desirable. From such a perspective emotions can be understood as a form of action that promotes specific desired social values” (2013, 165). The poem also suggests that emotions provide the potential for agency and change, in that despite hurdles it can be emotions that drive doctoral scholars to keep going. Honor may be one of these driving emotions. Thus, emotions at times reflect desires, which may enable transformations of the self and social practices in academe. For women structures of inequality and power that are spatially and emotionally located are also potential sites of transformation. Brown and Watson (2010) in their study of British women completing a doctoral degree found that most of the women in their sample undertook doctoral study for affirmation and used the word “love” to indicate their passionate attachment to research, their topic, and learning. For some of the women, undertaking doctoral study was a form of resistance to gendered and classed roles they believed were expected of them. The following quotations from Brown and Watson’s participants exemplify this point: “It is a really strong personal emotion about proving that I could do this, this was the girl from the working-class place where what most girls did was go and work in the chicken-processing factory.” And in relation to respite from expectations that she remain in the household providing domestic labor, one woman stated: “it was something I was doing, yes it was for me” (2010, 391). The various doctoral spaces—whether it be obtaining entry into a doctoral program, reading, writing, supervision, engagement with other candidates, or seminars—are emotional spaces and are potential sites for transformation (Lee and Green 2009; McCormack 2009; Maxwell and Smyth 2011; Peterson 2012). One of the most obvious transformations of one’s self-image as an able academic occurs as a consequence of the emotions that emerge when learning, that is, the frustration of attempting to understand difficult concepts and the joy when understanding, the joy of thinking, of quiet and repose. Further, the landscape of academe can be a romantic one, that is, we can be touched by hallowed halls or invigorated by seemingly endless rows of books in libraries and these feelings can shape how we see ourselves in

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these settings. It is not a stretch of the imagination through these landscapes to feel the desire to become the intellectual subject. CONCLUSION Academic writing for even the most experienced is an emotional process. The poem “Honor Bound” could equally be read as a poem reflecting feelings about the feedback received on any manuscript. Academics share stories about manuscripts that have been “savaged” by referees, which are then put in a bottom drawer before the writer has the emotional capacity to read and revise. Marking any manuscript has the potential to “mar” not only the page but also the person. If we can relate to these feelings as academics, as supervisors, we collectively need to recognize the emotional, as well as the intellectual, aspects of writing a doctorate. Indeed, emotional responses to feedback are likely to be more confronting for scholars commencing their doctoral journey. The doctorate is embedded and infused with emotions about succeeding and pride, pride in oneself, to make one’s family proud, and not least of all, one’s supervisor. Whilst academic achievement enables entry into academe, for women and especially working-class women questions of self-worth, ability, and intelligence are embedded in emotional histories and politics. Women enter university from a position of those who are excluded from “walking on the grass” and this marginalized position is exacerbated for working-class women, women whose sexuality is not “neatly” encapsulated as “heterosexual,” women with (dis)ability, and women whose race and ethnicity do not reflect that of the hegemonic white middle class. Doctoral supervision is always complex and shaped by the “dynamics of identity and desire . . . that are inevitably intense, irrational and intersubjective” (Cherry 2012, 10). Intersubjectivity in supervision is in practice a common reading and misreading of each other, even when the doctoral scholar and supervisor share a common political and ideological position. Specifically, I refer to sharing the subject position of feminist. The feminist project, which becomes embodied, ingrained, and fundamental to practice for many female supervisors, is equally embedded in many emotions. Women who supervise experience emotions of care and emotions of conflict between the administrative goals of their university and their understanding of the lived experience of their students. Moreover, at times female supervisors are caught between the tensions of what may be appropriate for successful scholarship and, on the other hand, the well-being of the women they supervise. It is not uncommon for feminist scholars to struggle between university values and their own personal and ideological commitment to women and scholarship. Moreover, the project of feminist supervision can become fraught by personal and work boundaries between students and supervisors, which at

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times are not always in the best interests of the doctoral scholar. As with any supervision, including that with men and between men, there is a risk of wanting to “rescue” and there is a fine and at times blurred line between supporting behaviors and rescuing behaviors. Equally, feminist doctoral scholars also make assumptions about what a “good feminist” supervisor is and thus there are times when doctoral candidates may also confuse or blur support and rescuing. Within the emotional complexity of academic work for supervisors and doctoral scholars there are points of transformation and resistance. Women are continually making agentic choices about how to navigate the emotional journey of undertaking a doctorate and supervision, whether it is to change supervisors or to reclaim social and political space in academe. After all, as Black suggests, “one of the key features of an academic system is the space for debate and reflection” (2005, 145) and “unease generated from a variety of locations has been used by feminism to offer critique of structures from what might be seen as the marginalised inside” (2005, 136). In my experience, working-class women in the social sciences, many of whom are matureaged students, bring to doctoral study insights, knowledge, and critical reflections about their topic of study obtained through work and life experience. Thus, the very attributes that create varying forms of marginalization within the academy can foster skills, knowledge, insight, and depth in the women’s specific areas of study. Returning to the symbolic meanings of “honor” in doctoral study, I reiterate that it is enmeshed in socio-cultural and historical meanings of scholarship but also of the self in relation to scholarly work. To understand what it means for subjects to be “honor bound” requires an understanding that honor is part of the discursive life of academia in a number of ways. Doctoral students are often told that they will be in that 1 per cent of the population who hold a doctorate; hence they are set apart and have been given a special opportunity. They are being honored. In turn they are required to honor the scholarship, the opportunity to belong to academe, and the delivering and extending of the production of knowledge. Instead, perhaps we may work alongside our doctoral scholars to re-write this overarching narrative of honor and create a narrative that reflects an emotional and intellectual navigation of doctoral scholarship, a navigation of possibilities and transformations.

Chapter Three

Passionate Activism as Academic Labor The Emotional Body of Pedagogical Politics Chris Beasley and Katrina Jaworski

This interview took place on September 6, 2014, on opposite ends of the globe and in two different countries thanks to the technological wonder of Skype. At the time of the interview, Chris Beasley was in Karlstad, Sweden, visiting as a guest professor with Karlstad University and GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. Meanwhile, Katrina Jaworski (cultural studies, University of South Australia) was in Adelaide, Australia. While Chris was beginning her day by eating muesli at 9:30 a.m., Katrina was sipping a glass of white wine at 4:30 p.m. Our exchange was influenced by a history that belongs to those who live long enough in one place. During her undergraduate years, Katrina was taught sociology by Chris’s mother, Dr. Bev Beasley, who incidentally decided in her eighties to start and finish a masters in environmental politics with honors at the University of Adelaide. Katrina has known of Chris’s work since her undergraduate years and worked alongside Chris for a brief period of time after the completion of her PhD on suicide and gender. Alongside shared histories, the flavor of our intellectual friendship and rapport contributed to the synergies and exchange of ideas in this chapter. While we were conscious of the task we set ourselves to do by thinking through and preparing the questions, we also wanted to work through ideas about gender and supervision, extremely conscious of the sort of cultural environment supervision is framed by in Australia and beyond. The task we embraced to produce this chapter can be summed up as initially arising in relation to Chris’s work (in concert with Carol Bacchi) on an alternative political imaginary associated with social interconnection and “care.” This alternative perspective is a critical response to the rise of domi35

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nant neo-liberal understandings of sociality in terms of the market and as a matter of individual choice and “rational” (read: self-interested cognitive) decision making (Beasley and Bacchi 2007). The critique of marketization and the autonomous calculating individual suggested another vocabulary intended to go beyond moralistic altruism and led to what Chris and Carol described as the ethic of “social flesh.” This language provides a more substantive way of grasping together the corporeal (including its emotionality) and the socio-political. Katrina became interested in exploring the ethic of “social flesh” as an analytical technique for reflecting upon the practice of supervising doctoral students, as well as informing that practice. To capture the shared interactional character of social flesh—at its conceptual inception as well as in its analytical meaning and applications—in this chapter we present a conversational dialogue, in which we discuss the autobiographical and scholarly interchanges that constitute the emotional body of our pedagogical politics. Our aim is to challenge the supposedly universal and neutral claims of the neo-liberal ethos of knowledge production as achieved through competitive yet disembodied atomistic individualism. We wrestle with this individualism and, in so doing, take pleasure in working out how to evade, and even resist, its pervasive presence overshadowing our processes of supervising postgraduate students. KJ: Can we begin with something very simple, but something I think is very important to our autobiographical and scholarly interchange here? What was your first doctoral supervision experience like? In asking this question, I am being selfish because my second PhD student submitted her thesis for examination very recently and I am left wondering what kinds of labor I perform and to what degree a lot is invisible and gendered at the same time. CB: Well I suppose there would be two things. First, my first doctoral experience of course was being a student myself and so that does affect, I think, the historiographical and autobiographical effects in regards to what happens with the first supervision you undertake as the supervisor. I had a pretty awful experience. It was not a straightforward process to say the least, and as a result I was very conscious of feeling that I might be able to do better. Second, my first student also came from an experience of having a difficult supervisory set-up and wanted to escape, which has happened to me a few times now. So immediately you get into the gendered stuff, not because other people were necessarily male—the other previous supervisors were not, they were female—but there is a gendered thing about rescue and support. Of course men can feel this too but I think there is a sort of sense of a pastoral care role women take on much more

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thoroughly. So my first supervision had a strong pastoral element at its very basis. There are also other elements which have shaped how I have thought about things since then, and I think yours will have shaped you as well. For instance, my student was similar in age to me. She was an older student; so I think that shaped something. She transferred to me because she saw me as a supportive person as well as intellectually supportive. I mean, theoretically she wanted to talk about things that she felt I knew about. It was a very theoretical thesis—a thesis that could not be done now. KJ: Like mine, actually. CB: A seven year thesis—a high level of theory about Deleuze, Foucault, Irigaray, and so on. She was a trained therapist and wanted to talk about problems with Foucauldian models of therapy—Foucauldian-based models which she felt were insufficiently specified around physicality and women’s bodies. There were a whole series of difficulties precisely because it was not the neo-liberal model of a thesis. I could not really push her along. I could not really make it efficient. I looked after her as a supervisor for three or four years beyond the time that I was given any kind of financial support or any work provision. It was a demanding thesis. She saw the supervisory relationship as a personal relationship. We were sort of friends; we were certainly colleagues. It was not a kind of relationship where I was the boss. KJ: In other words, you were not the master and she the apprentice? CB: Not at all—I mean she was very well established in her own field and knew the theoretical stuff very well. We would argue around Freud, etc., but she also knew that she needed help. Of course there is the usual thing of you have authority in all sorts of ways, but nevertheless my first student was the epitome of that very scholarly Oxford-style exchange. Strangely, what that revealed to me was there were some advantages in the more neo-liberal model. So, while I have a horror of what is happening in Australian universities at the moment, I am also conscious that what happened before was not entirely the best model. I think as a woman I put in many more hours than the job was supposed to involve. It was nothing to do with money, it was nothing to do with my workload, it was nothing to do with anything. I just offered pastoral intellectual support that had nothing to do with my job. It has everything to do with my job as identity, mission, vocation—all of the things that are part of the scholarly model rather than the neo-liberal model of management. I was only a manager in a limited way, and wished at times I could have been more of

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one. In some ways, neo-liberalism could be said to help with that management of time when it actually does not, because instead of controlling your time you end up working all the time. Has your experience so far been anything like any of those things or different to mine? KJ: My very first student was a male and it was with another university even though he worked at mine. He was supervised by two women. He was brilliant. He came to his PhD as a professional and was already working in academia. He was young, which I think made the process very different. He listened differently. We treated each other as colleagues. He respected me greatly, and listened when my feedback was very tough. I was tough probably because I am and probably because he was my first student, and as an early career researcher I wanted to do well by him. He sought me out to be his supervisor because of my theoretical background and because we kept having really nice conversations about Foucault at the kitchen sink in the staffroom. The second student, a woman, came over to me because the previous relationships were not working out for her. There were doubts about whether she would finish her work. CB: Do you think women academics get those ones more? KJ: I am starting to think that we do! The student I have just mentioned has just submitted her thesis for examination. I also have to mention another female student I inherited most recently, whose supervisors had doubts about her completing her thesis. Like the previous one, this woman is a little bit older than me. She comes from a very different culture, different ethnicity, different everything! Within six months she has written her literature review and her methodology drafts, and she is now finishing her first analysis chapter. After we first met, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of learner she is. I figured out she is a visual learner, so I adjusted my teaching to that. I realized she wanted structure in a particular kind of way. For me, this begs the question of pedagogy—I mean, I sort of have my formula but then I tune it to each student. CB: It is difficult when people are passed to you from someone who kind of gave up on them. Sometimes it is a sign that the other supervisor, in my opinion, lacks certain pedagogical skills but sometimes it is because the student is very, very difficult. KJ: I am starting to feel like the rescuer around my department. The difficult ones come to me, whether it is topic wise or previous histories of supervision.

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CB: I think you are right. While I would put quite a lot of emphasis upon having some pedagogical skills, I actually think there are emotional skills in supervision as well. Pedagogy is essential and some of my colleagues do not have it. Their students survive on their own talent rather than their direction, which is quite common in the humanities and social sciences. KJ: I am interested in what you mean by “passionate activism” as academic labor. For me, this comes across as emotionally invested from the start at very grassroots and everyday levels. And of course the idea of passion across politics, sociology, and philosophy is always invested in particular kinds of meanings and histories, often disaparaged by the founding figures in those fields. Why passionate and why activism? CB: I think the language of passion is partly because, as we have been describing, you are working with someone quite closely for a long time. Close because of intense moments and also because you have to keep the person and the project going for a very long time in your head. You have to think carefully about how you can help them in whatever stage they are in. At the very least you have to perform passion at certain stages. If you look disinterested, they may not make it. You need to be there as the person who cares about their project in some sense. This process of caring is highly emotional and passionate and gets more emotional for them and less emotional for you. In some ways it gets more managerial and less emotional as you, the supervisor, go on. So the very nature of supervision requires an engagement emotionally. KJ: In other words, you cannot fake it. CB: You cannot do that. You have to perform it and you have to feel it for it to last such a long time. . . . There is a passion in getting that person through. And of course for us in our own area there is also intellectual and political passion, which is that you hope for someone to come to a more critical thinking space. In all teaching, including supervision, I always have a hope that something might open up or transform a little bit politically for that person. KJ: So is this where activism comes in? CB: The activism is kind of always there. There is an extra level for me. I am always asking: “Can I in any of the ways I do anything suggest to people that this is not the only way things could be?” It is a very simple agenda. The passion is there to not simply reproduce the world. There is a kind of larger, very amorphous goal that has always driven me, especially with undergraduate teaching where it is very obvious that you have them

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for a short time. This is a tiny patch in students’ lives, and hopefully they might remember something about thinking of things in a different way. The same thing applies to the research we do—it is about opening up something a little bit. This is a low-level kind of activism. I can remember going to a party. We were drinking quite heavily. A colleague of mine was sitting there. He sees himself in many ways as an environmental activist as much as being an academic. He was sort of saying, “What’s the point of what we do anyway? We don’t do anything. We should be doing something else.” I got really cross with him and said, “No. I think that’s bullshit. I think activists sometimes fool themselves that they’re doing really exciting things and sometimes they are but teaching is activism—permanent, forever. It’s activism you do every single day of the week.” In other words, this is my activism and you cannot tell me that it is not important. I think it is probably more likely to have an impact on a wider variety of people than activism in an NGO by yourself where you might affect a small number of people. Teaching is mass activism because these days we get thousands of students. KJ: We have been hinting at the idea of “social flesh” for some time. Can you explain this more, namely, how you developed it, why the term, and more importantly why do you think it can be more effective in challenging the neo-liberal ethos of producing knowledge in academia? CB: The language was developed by Carol and I to offer a different kind of understanding of the interconnection between people, instead of the neo-liberal model of individual atomistic individuals all rushing around separately, bumping into each other. The neo-liberal model does not really describe how people live—it is a kind of fantasy. Actually, I think it is a fantasy of isolated penises. The model is male. It is a science fiction fantasy. It is different from trying to have an imaginary—a political imaginary—that is is more reflective not only of how things are, but also of how things might be improved. So this is what social flesh is about: it is both what is and what could be. Social flesh says that we are constantly, inevitably, mutually, and necessarily interconnected with one another. Everyone has experienced mutual interconnectedness to be produced in the first place—to be made as a person in their childhood, through their friendships, relationships, and in education. Nothing can be done as a singular individual just bumping up against other people. KJ: Yes, it is impossible to exist without interconnectedness.

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CB: It is impossible. Atomistic individualism does not describe reality. So social flesh is there to say that academic labor is always about a corporeal sociality and there is no way around that. This includes the physical landscape around us—the environment we share, the air we breathe, the water we drink but also the way we are as human beings. You need and thrive with other people, and this is completely fundamental in every sense, physiologically, psychologically, and so on. For me, it is obvious that social flesh is a language through which we can have a better description of the political imaginary in academia. KJ: You can see this in the student–supervisor relationship. They are interdependent. They are not just these singular functioning units going about their business. They are woven into you because of how you are with them, and they with you, and yet there is also a level of independence. CB: Constantly woven. Social flesh is about trying to describe our supervisory relationships better, which then tells us something about how we need to be as supervisors. If the environment is understood as a social flesh environment, then this tells us where we could improve. Improvements relate to the recognition of social flesh: seeing how enjoined we need to be and in what ways we will be enjoined and by how much. The neo-liberal model does not help us much in solving complex problems in supervision. I stress this because I literally think neo-liberalism is not workable in relation to what people actually have to do, even in bad supervisory relationships. KJ: And you need to conceptualize something like social flesh for a bad supervisory relationship precisely to understand that kind of embodied dynamics happening between the supervisor and the student and the emotions that are circulating between the two. CB: Exactly, and if you do not face that, then you cannot do it in the long run. KJ: No. CB: The very things you described earlier about the relationship working out with one of your latest students is not a neo-liberal description. It is not masculinist. KJ: No, it is not. This is fascinating for me because it is happening within the neo-liberal, masculinist confines. This is the structure I have to operate and function in, and this is how things are in the universities we work

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for. However, the actual content is still something else, and I think this is where it is so important to think about how we operate within the structure even though there is only so much we can do about the structures. CB: I think you recognize, first of all, the dissonance between what ought to happen and what actually happens—how you actually do the postgraduate teaching against the language by which we are constrained to behave. There is an academic identity described by the regulations in relation to what we must achieve and then there are the actual practices of being an academic, which I think are totally dissonant from the atomistic individual model. So the challenge is both recognizing the dissonance but also saying how can I save that kernel that is about me—me having a sense of an academic “vocation”—and what really matters. What you are valuing in that sense of “vocation” is a political ethic. Being articulate about that political ethic is necessary for a supervisor. What you articulate is going to be different from what the neo-liberal model tells you to do. You are trying to work out the relationship between supervisor and student. I mean, you are trying to articulate a political ethic. KJ: And this is precisely the ethic that turns that person into a scholar. Gender is part of it, because, as a woman supervisor, I respond differently because of my gendered history but also I have a different experience because of how others might interpret my position. The body is at the center of social flesh, as are emotions. Can you spell out the analytical implications here before we get into thinking about practice? CB: I think social flesh is highly emotional and there are bodily things about that. For example, at the beginning of the supervisory relationship, when your postgraduates see you they are happy and their eyes light up, and then there is this later stage where you can see that they just want to leave the room. They just think you are an asshole and they think you are as boring as bat shit. They think everything about you is just so utterly tedious, horrible, and they just do not want to be in the same room as you. You can see them not wanting to be there. KJ: The body gives off what they are feeling. CB: They are just so disappointed with you and their body feels removed, far away. Having gone through that process now about nine times or so, I find that students, toward the end in particular, are in that deeply emotional phase and as a supervisor you have to attend to that even though they are just one small slice of your day. And I wonder whether the kind of

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woman that I am, what I give out, or what I represent might mean that more demands are being made of me. Those emotional demands come up in questions such as: “Have you read that? Why not? I need to have this in two days time!” Even though I can be quite thorough and blunt, there is still that real tug of war emotionally. Meanwhile I remind myself that it is okay because they are just in that space. So I do not react toward what is happening for them other than to keep the process going and contain it as much as I can because of course toward the end the process is like the worst thing ever. The trouble for us as academics is that the scholarly mode, which is still a vocational mode, makes us perfect candidates for the neo-liberal subject. The neo-liberal and the scholarly are in some ways the same mode in so far as there is never any stopping. If you are a scholar you are always thinking. It is your life; it is not simply about work. Neo-liberalism loves you for this. The scholarly model is high-minded and neo-liberalism is a productivity model. Unfortunately in academia there is a confluence— they fit each other perfectly. So the old model of scholarship does not protect us from the new one. KJ: No, it does not at all. CB: In fact, it makes us weaker. KJ: Yes, because I think the new model knows that we are passionately attached to our thinking, writing, and supervising. A lot of us will just keep going even though sometimes we know we have to pull back and say this is just not good for me. I just cannot keep up at this level. Regardless of what I do, the world will keep on going; the bureaucracy will keep on functioning. In fact, the moment I die, the university bureaucracy will forget me in five minutes even though it knew all along that I am so passionately attached to who I am and what I do as an intellectual. CB: Indeed, we are the perfect bunnies for neo-liberalism. I think we need another model because the scholarly “vocational calling” model actually only makes it worse in some ways. It does not protect us from neo-liberal managerialist demands for endless productivity. In gender terms there is a double whammy because women tend to give more emotionally to their students. Gender adds another layer to the whole problem, because as a woman you tend to think you should always care for other people, otherwise somehow you end up seeing yourself as a bad mother. KJ: A bad woman?

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CB: Yes, a bad woman . . . KJ: There is this thing about guilt, which feels problematically Freudian. I am becoming better and better about feeling less guilty but it takes a lot of effort. CB: It does. I think there is also this other emotional thing about supervision . . . I do not know if you have the same experience? In terms of process, the beginning part is all friendly, open, and chatty. It is all very lovely; they fall in love with you. It is a honeymoon. KJ: Yes, a honeymoon period, which lasts about six months. CB: Sometimes a year if you are lucky. To come back to what I was emphasizing earlier, then there is the middle bit which is boredom and irritation when somehow you fail them, when they discover that you are not the perfect woman you appeared to be. In fact, you are that black hole, one that needs to be able to solve everything or do everything. In actual fact, you cannot do everything. Then there is a period of disappointment and irritation because your apparent failings become more evident. After this, there is a second-to-last part where the student you are supervising hates you and is angry with you. In their eyes, you are a horrible and nasty person. They want to leave you but they cannot. They are furious with you. They are jealous of other people taking your time and your energy but they do not want to spend time with you because you keep on saying the wrong thing, the thing they do not want to hear. They definitely fall out of love with you. When they actually graduate, they remember your marvellousness, but it is never the same. It is a fractured thing: “you were good for me but I am glad I am over you.” KJ: This is probably why I always sit down with all my beginning PhD students in the first meeting to tell them that a time will come when you will dislike me or even hate me. This is why you have to have the second supervisor. There will be a time when I am telling you things you do not want to hear but you really have to trust me and listen, because I am going to have to believe in you if something is not happening at the right time. These students often think that this is me just being honest and open. They do not want to believe me. How is “social flesh” put to practice in supervision? By asking this question, I want us to continue to think through our experiences together. By listening to you, I want to think through how this concept might inform— if it does not already—my practices of supervising, especially because I

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want to supervise well within the current higher education research environment. CB: I often think of myself as a coach. Students have to understand that it is their thesis, which is very frightening in some respects. We are not there to write the thesis for them. The student plays football, plays with the ball. We stand on the sidelines and advise them. So there is a pedagogy. But also I agree with your earlier description of working with one of the students you inherited. When you described what worked, it worked because you were very attentive. For me, this shows that there was a very enjoined social mutuality; a reciprocity so to speak because you were listening to each other. Both of you produced situations in which there was considerable attentiveness. KJ: Based on a lot of reiteration. CB: This is not just about being a nice and caring person. It is actually much more than that. It is about having the skill to watch someone and take note of what will work for them. These are affective skills. KJ: Yes they are because I have to rely on my intuition and how I express my emotions as much as I rely on my skills and knowledge base. My sense is that “this is your project, this is your work. You have to exercise your agency but we are working together.” I like your metaphor of the coach because I often think: “This is something we are working on together to make it work. Criticism is there to make it work rather than me saying you are awful.” I often say to them: “you have to suffer it out.” CB: But in that process you are also developing things. Mary Holmes (2010) talks about emotional reflexivity. Enjoining emotional reflexivity is not just being altruistic and caring. Being altruistic and caring does not get you anywhere. You help the student with technical or pedagogical skills and with having some kind of reflexive emotionality. So those kind of interactions or reflexivities are really important and they are very invisible. KJ: In the article you published in Feminist Theory with Carol Bacchi in 2007 you developed a substantive account of social flesh as an analytical technique—as an ethic. Trust and care are important ingredients in this ethic. What do you mean by these two terms and how do they figure in your feminist thinking? Would faith somehow come into this? I do not mean this in religious terms, but I am wondering whether making some

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kind of leap of faith is part of our passions for supervising students. And I wonder whether trust and care inform the strength of this leap so to speak. CB: You have used the word faith. I would rather think of having to perform involvement passionately and actively even when we no longer have it. Attaching words like trust and care to social flesh might be part of some of the things that happen when we perform passionate involvement. I am nervous about both trust and care because I think they are insufficiently different from neo-liberal models. Trust and care both contain an individualized element, which does not talk sufficiently about the context and the interrelationality that is involved in some of the work we do with our postgraduate students. These terms also tend to be non-corporeal. Even though care has more corporeality attached to it, it still tends to include some kinds of corporeality and not others. So, Carol and I wanted a language that tried to really resist that neo-liberal tendency to construct people in ranked orders of “care givers” and “care receivers.” Kindness is not really sufficient either even though kindness is a good thing. You need to be altruistic, but altruism to me is asymmetrical. It gives us supervisors a pat on the back. It is a hygienic or sanitized kind of way of describing the relations between supervisor and student, which does not describe the fleshliness of the exchange. This is why I want a language that takes mutuality or reflexivity into account, and captures the corporeal interconnectedness. This language is not simply about naming cognitive skills or responsibilities. This language has a political possibility attached to it; it is not individualized and it captures what really happens between supervisor and student. Care gets closer to it even though it does not quite capture what I am trying to say in using the term social flesh. Care does not capture what we experience in practice and our political ethic, and most importantly the sort of political ethic that will be required of us to undertake the work of social flesh. KJ: In the same article I asked about a moment ago, your use of social flesh involved stressing “embodied co-existence, in order to develop a new vocabulary which brings together embodiment and the socio-political” (Beasley and Bacchi 2007, 285). I love this stressing because it is so active, but I do wonder why you steer away from shared vulnerability, which in my mind is fine too. I suspect this relates to larger theoretical underpinnings and convictions on your part. CB: It does. There are some very good writers who write about the importance of vulnerability because they stress connection, mutual reliance, and physicality. So I am on the same track as those kinds of people. I see what they are trying to do and I would not make light of it at all. But

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for me the stress upon vulnerability is actually not the right way to think about it. Interconnection and mutuality are not always about vulnerability. Sometimes it is about strengths, knowledge, and skills. Vulnerability makes us all needy. Yes, we are all needy, but not only needy. I think this reiterates a kind of Christian altruism aspect—the Christian suffering model which is always about being morally good. KJ: It is theological in some ways? CB: It has theological and moralistic elements that I find unnecessary. I am not saying that there is no ethical process, but this is different from having a moral edge. So I find the vulnerability language too limited, too individual, and still hierarchical even though everybody is vulnerable. If all students are vulnerable, then supervisors are simply looking after the needy. This is true, but it is not the whole picture. For example, my first PhD student was not especially needy. In fact, she had many strengths. I was working on some things that she knew more than I did. So the vulnerability, vis-à-vis suffering, does not sum up all sorts of interactions that take place. KJ: We have been coming to this question. How can we resist that competitive yet disembodied atomistic individualism through our application of social flesh in supervision? CB: There is no question that at times there is an attempt to put aside that real neo-liberal world and create another space. It is probably small but it can be counter-hegemonic in some sense. For me, I try to recover the joy in research by setting up practices that give you some sense of pleasure regardless of what else is going on. In some ways you have to set up these practices at the beginning in the honeymoon phase of supervision before you become more managerialistic. In this way, you can hold back the neo-liberal model of managing students at the beginning, bring it in slowly in the second stage when they are getting bored and irritated with you, then really thump it home by the end, only to take it away once they have finished and graduated. In other words, we have to work in a neo-liberal environment but we can also create a space that strategically will help the student and ourselves in that framework. KJ: Your take on resistance has reminded me of how writing becomes a practice of joy and resistance. In fact, I developed this resistance during my PhD despite the fact that I had to learn it the hard way. I had to face my insecurities around writing but this is precisely when I learned how to resist. Nowadays, I feel really free when I am writing. It is my space. The email is switched off and I do not feel guilty, at least in this space.

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Writing is such a practice of freedom and gives me a different space within the larger framework I have to operate. I tell my students to face their insecurities now because it can get easier with time. CB: I think that is a really nice way of putting it. I think this is a practice of creative freedom. It is about creating spaces in which you can practice creative freedom. Creative freedom is what we look to do for ourselves, and we have to show this somehow to our students even if it is not available for a while. This is not about being unrealistic or giving them false ideas. Rather, it is showing them what it is that they need to have as their kernel that they will carry with them if they want to be academics. Students need to learn how to create that space during their candidature because this is all they will have. Nobody else will give it to them. KJ: And that kernel will stay with them forever. CB: And if you do not have that kernel, then you will not survive as an academic in the long run. KJ: And the best part is that no one can take that kernel away from you once you get it. CB: Getting that kernel is an embodied practice. You have to do it to know it. It is absolutely social flesh. I have some techniques for enhancing that or building that up or making that more likely to happen, but everybody has to develop some version of that kernel based on social flesh. Otherwise you are in trouble and will not survive emotionally in academia. KJ: So you as a supervisor start the process, and then the students connect with it, graft or rearticulate it in their own context of writing the thesis, and then it happens in the future to someone else when your student is supervising another. CB: It is like a chain—you interact with them and the meaning of writing is revealed in that process, and then they continue to do this practice throughout their lives with others and pass it on, hopefully. This is where activism is, if you like. You create a chain of creative freedom, which is emotional as much as it is intellectual. KJ: I think this is how I survive in academia. CB: I think that is exactly how you survive and I think it is also how I have survived. When I look around me there are some of us who survive.

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I am not saying we are happy but we can do the job because I think we have managed to find these ways to resist. KJ: I am thinking of the fact that we have lots of differences. We belong to different generations of academic women working in universities. We are at very different stages of our careers. We are different feminist thinkers even though we share similarities and I for one have benefited from the kinds of work your generation of feminist thinkers had to do. What is your advice to me in relation to supervising doctoral students? Given that I do not have your lived history of the 1970s and 1980s, what can I do differently given that the neo-liberal and disembodied approach to knowledge production was in full swing by the time I began my career? CB: Yes, but this is not quite true because you were still in that generation where you could do your speculative thesis. KJ: This is true. As a postgraduate student I was still under a different model of supervising and writing doctoral theses. CB: So the neo-liberal model was not in full swing yet. So you did not have to buy into it back then. KJ: I was in between the older and more scholarly/speculative model, and the neo-liberal model of now. CB: You were on the way. The transition was there and you could see where it was going but I think you were still not quite in it, and this why you are interested in the problem now. KJ: That’s probably very true. CB: If we are right—if there is an acceleration and things happen faster than ever, and if this means neo-liberalism is even more powerful—then the problem is that, even though we began at different points in this history, you and I have both had experiences under the speculative PhD model. What worries me, or us, is that our students will not have the same experience we had. If they try, it will be difficult for them to find any kind of space for a thesis that deals with very difficult ideas in complicated ways. There is almost no space left for that kind of thesis. We are trying to tell them a way of doing a PhD which they no longer can experience. They will really have to fight to resist the current model which means they will have to struggle to find a place to do the kind of things we did.

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Every few years I see that it is harder and harder to hold on and to remind people of this kernel we talked about earlier—the kernel that you might need to keep you going despite the pressures. Increasingly, I am aware that when I try to describe this kernel to my students most do not know what I am talking about. KJ: I know exactly what you mean because I do get this delightful, polite, and stunned cat look whenever I try to describe how I learned to theorize, and have ideas, let alone heuristic analysis . . . CB: I mean, I think the speculative model is sort of still there but I think it is interesting that the students are a lot more commodified in terms of how they are treated by the institution and also how they perceive life and academia. It is not generational or periodized anymore. As I have said earlier, things are speeding up. So now we really have to start saying to people that you must publish at least one article or more, and you will probably need to finish in four years and will not have more time. KJ: When I get new PhD students, I am really conscious of asking the question: can this project be done in three years? I know you have to anyway, but it feels as if only particular projects can be done now and not the ones that could be tackled ten years ago precisely because of the speed and the quantification, and because of different regimes of supervising and funding postgraduate research. Anything intense, quirky, interdisciplinary, and philosophically engaged has little room. Now students will finish with a really nice project behind their belt and be a good project manager, but not much else. I feel constrained. Do you? CB: Yes, we used to be much more allowing and encouraging of speculative projects that we thought were interesting. We were very understanding of people taking much longer and now increasingly I find myself having to be more managerial. I feel that the shift in my role and identity as a supervisor has to be located within neo-liberalism. I do not enjoy it as much. KJ: So to come back to what we were talking about earlier, might it be harder for the new generation of graduates let alone supervisors to resist? CB: I think it is harder because they have not had the experience we had. You had a long experience, and very vivid and powerful experience, through your PhD. You know what it is like to get that creative freedom and hold onto it. KJ: This is definitely the case.

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CB: They are not going to have the same experience. We need to help them find a way to get some of it so they can sustain themselves in the future. So for me, we basically try and find some techniques to help them find their own practice of thinking and writing because it might be more difficult to do it once they get a job, if they get a job in academia. Learning how to find space for thinking and writing before you get the job is very important. KJ: Is this about well-being? CB: Yes, I think our task is to help them find a way to stay well because nobody else will help you after you graduate. This is about the longer term, and it is also about articulating what they could perhaps do or the mechanisms they could use to achieve their sense of identity and wellbeing. But this is also about reminding ourselves how we do it, how we survive. KJ: So there is hope in articulation and reflexivity still? CB: Yeah, well, I can only say there is hope in the sense that I see that people like you—we are sustained because we have our kernels—so it is not just an imaginary hope. KJ: It is real hope. And it is practiced as well. CB: It is not entirely protective. It is not a bulletproof vest but it is something. KJ: It is about a balance between thinking and feeling and, in my mind, about being honest with yourself and reflexive about who and what you are. I think reflexivity is a practice as much as a virtue or a principle. It is something that sustains me, and it is definitely embodied. Reflexivity is not simply something I think about in my head. It is actually embodied based on how I approach my academic life. I cannot live without this corporeality. CB: Exactly, it is absolutely a doing.

II

Writing Doctoral Theses

Chapter Four

“Cutting the Mustard” Standing your Ground in the Process of Producing Doctoral Dissertations Judith Gill

Thesis supervision is inevitably and properly challenging. Pathways have to be worked out in terms of people and topics and often the outcomes can be quite different from what might have been initially expected. The process involves a high degree of emotional involvement on the part of the student and also of the supervisor, whose responsibility it is to guide the thesis into an acceptable standard and theoretical depth in order to qualify for the doctoral award. The relationship between student and supervisor, often regarded as a central element in higher degree work, remains somewhat mysterious (McWilliam and Palmer 1995) and poorly understood (Grant 2003). Some writers note the need to establish the “difficult balance” (Delamont, Atkinson, and Parry 1997), whereas for others it is inevitably a “rackety bridge” (Gurr 2001, 81; Grant 1999, 9). This chapter takes up one issue arising from the supervisory role—namely the degree to which the student is free to challenge some of the accepted practices of thesis writing in the execution of the task. My specific focus here is what happens when the thesis writer wants to incorporate some of their own personal data into the written development of the thesis. This has caused concern for myself as a supervisor as well as for the students as thesis makers. In the older tradition of theses the writing was typically so depersonalized that this question would never have arisen. Undoubtedly there has been a sea change in thesis writing in recent decades. However I believe we still have to ask some key questions: Is this practice now legitimate? What are the constraints? How does one argue for the inclusion of personal data? And how do you proceed if your supervisor tells you 55

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that you cannot do it? Ultimately the position I take here is that debate and, to some degree, disagreement are both probably an integral part of higher degree study and hence they are also necessarily involved in the supervisory relationship. Some time ago a chance remark from a colleague, “Of course we always undertake to study issues that have been personally meaningful in our own lives,” made me stop and think. Was this true? Had I spent a good deal of time and energy on questions of gender and education because of my personal need to resolve gender issues in my own life? Was I still caught up in some quasi-Freudian dream wherein the gender relations of my childhood required working through? On reflection I decided that the answer had to be a qualified yes. In the role of younger sister I had spent a good deal of my young life envying the amount of parental attention given to my older brother, who always appeared to have more freedom, less responsibility, more excitement, less duty, more praise and reward, less blame and critique, and so on. Having grown up at a time when Australian society was much more obviously gender divided than now, I can offer clear evidence that my developing understanding of myself and my place in the world was marked by gender at every turn. Like the vast majority of my peers, my subjectivity, developed in terms of the discourses available in my social context, was profoundly gendered. And while current social worlds may be less clearly determined along gender lines, the older notions of difference continue to be refracted in social organization and discursive practice. Through the 1970s, along with so many of my female peers, I found the second wave women’s movement provided an arena for thinking through the constraints associated with gender. At last we were able to claim a space for ourselves in ways that were less limited by notions of “good girl” or “real woman” and to question rather than accept features of the familiar social context. This passion for re-thinking and challenge led me to engage in higher degree research in which I could examine some key educational issues. As a teacher with several years’ experience I had noted different behaviors and learning choices between the young men and women in the high school classes I taught. Consequently I was interested in investigating the ways in which schooling could be seen to be involved with the gendering of young people, and thus setting the scene for a process that continued throughout working lives across institutions and into retirement. Gender was and continues to be a key theme in my research and publications across a range of areas. Not surprisingly many of the people who came to work with me on doctoral projects expressed a clear and central interest in gender. They were also driven by the intersection between gender and other factors derived from their own lives. For example issues such as race, class, and employment were issues of importance to them, often as a consequence of personal experience.

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So they chose topics of particular relevance to themselves, usually with a high degree of emotional investment, but which also demanded careful theoretical investigation and intellectual involvement. In particular, the question of the degree to which those implicated selves might become part of the thesis argument has been a cause for serious concern and difficult and protracted negotiation. In preparing this chapter I contacted three former students who had grappled with how to write about their own lives and experiences in their thesis. I asked them to recall occasions when their commitment to writing themselves into the thesis had brought about considerable discussion and argument. In the following sections I discuss these three examples in terms of the ways in which the students were able to negotiate an intellectual space dedicated to their theses but which also included their own varying degrees of personal involvement with the topic such as the style of presentation, the method of data generation, and the data itself. Before proceeding to this discussion it seems important to note some of the changes in thesis supervision arrangements over the last two decades. THESIS SUPERVISION: A CHANGING FIELD Recent decades have seen profound changes in the work of supervision of higher degrees. For one thing supervision has become a site of more interpersonal involvement rather than the earlier model of solitary scholarship (often mythologized as Oxbridge) in which the student is left to write alone with few opportunities to discuss the work with anyone other than the rare supervisory sessions with a stern and distant tutor. Nowadays students are advised to choose carefully among potential supervisors and to select one with whom they find some rapport and with whom there is the opportunity to negotiate meeting times and responsibilities on both sides. In the social sciences we have moved from an academic culture that privileged the objective, statistically tight, depersonalized subject of “the researcher” to a convention in which there is a rejection of this position and a stance that insists on the subjective element being a part of any research enterprise, regardless of the methodology adopted. From this standpoint the selection of a multiple choice questionnaire and its subsequent statistical analysis can be seen as a subjective move, just as much as the choice of an observation session or a semistructured interview. There have been marked changes too in the language of thesis writing. Today writers normally use the first person so that thesis writers write of “My thesis” and “I have shown that, . . .” whereas once they had to hide behind the more depersonalized form of “the researcher.” The passive voice that once so characterized thesis style, for example “It was found that . . .”

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has been replaced by the active, personalized “I found that . . .” Nowadays thesis writers are commonly required to state their “position of interest” with respect to the question being investigated and the data being analyzed. Rather than see this as overly subjective, researchers learn that in declaring their particular view they alert the reader to judge the argument on its merits given their acknowledgement of interest. Moreover certain approaches such as autoethnography and some forms of phenomenology require that the writer’s self-consciousness be inscribed in the material of their studies, but most other research methodologies do not go this far. The central discussion here concerns problems that can arise when the thesis writer wishes to include some of their own experience as material to the study, beyond the initial “position of interest” statement. This problem provoked some struggles as my students and I tried to negotiate their desired inclusions within the acceptable tenets of contemporary research writing. INCLUSION OF SELF-REFERENCING IN THE THESIS The first occasion in which I was involved in this debate occurred a little over ten years ago in the course of a thesis that was designed to investigate the experience of Asian-Australian girls at school. The writer, Julie, was my first doctoral student and she became the first to graduate with a PhD in education from my university, a situation indicative of the high stakes involved in the task along with the emotional investment of both student and supervisor. At the time thesis conventions were much more conservative than now. In our discussions about the study Julie was drawn to share some of her own experiences of being a girl who was visibly different from her peers—a conversation that traversed the whole gamut of racializing and sexualizing practices that had colored her daily life as a young woman growing up in the UK. Where I had some misgivings was when she decided to write some of these reflections into the body of the thesis itself. One leading academic at the time had advised her to “get the PhD first and then you can explore some of your own stuff”—a “safe” position that she found less than satisfying in terms of her chosen project. As supervisor I sought to avoid another cautious let-down as I felt her keen disappointment at the advice she had been given and so I took the supportive role, albeit rather cautiously. At the time I felt and continue to believe that a degree of emotional investment is a necessary incentive for the successful completion of a thesis. As Julie argued long and passionately echoing the then familiar feminist credo, “after all the personal is political.” As a feminist she saw thesis writing as political action and hence to exclude the personal would position the writer as antifeminist, which was totally unacceptable to her. Even more to the point was the fact that she felt acutely that she as a researcher was using the material provided by her

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informants and that there was an ethical necessity to share her own experience rather than “othering” them as simply subjects in her writing. The dilemma as she described it was: “How to write the story of ‘their’ lives, that at times felt like the story of my life, without writing my story and without completely disregarding it? This question shadowed my study of Asian young women. The problem and its solution was worked out of the theoretical dilemmas and debates of 1990s feminist poststructuralism and postcolonial theory.” In her thesis Julie debated the very classification of people as “Asian,” as she had noted the term was used differently in the UK to the ways it was used in late twentieth-century Australia. Consequently the fragility of language and classification became a central element of the work. The mix of languages spoken by the girls was a further complicating factor: The girls spoke in English as well as Mandarin and/or Vietnamese, and/or Filipino and/or Khmer. Some were born in Australia, others were born overseas, not necessarily in the same place as their parents. Some, like me, had parents of different racial/cultural backgrounds. Although I was raised in inner-city UK of Anglo-Japanese background, I felt that I shared a similar sexualised/racialised existence and knew something about non-anglo/white difference.

Because this knowledge was central to her research Julie felt it necessary to involve her own experience in writing up her study. She supported her argument with reference to feminist principles that texts are always authored by somebody, and cited Nancy Fraser’s claim that views purporting to be neutral often actually express the partial and interested perspective of dominant groups (Fraser 1989, 181). While I agreed that she had made a strong case, I remained cautious about the wisdom of this move in terms of the accepted thesis style of the time. Only a year earlier a masters student of mine had been criticized by an examiner, who had commented that she should not have used the first person in the thesis but rather should have stuck to “the researcher.” What Julie was proposing was a good deal more radical than this and my responsibility as supervisor was to guide her through to gain the doctorate. While the standard methodological texts were of little use in responding to this question, the newly arrived and exciting phase of feminist post-structuralism allowed further development of the argument that the writer’s place in the text warrants recognition. Of course debates raged between feminists about subjectivity and feminist writing but within this furious clash of intellectual commitment there emerged a place for this study. Our long and protracted discussions about the issue made for increased complexity in the actual writing as Julie struggled to speak from a clearly articulated position. Years later in reflecting on the thesis journey she wrote:

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Judith Gill My discomfort with the responsibility and obligation of setting out a speaking and writing position as female (and/or “Asian”) led me to explore textual practices that did not require me to lose sight of the necessity to continue to claim and name what I/we experienced as female/as Asian female but which also challenged and deconstructed the essentialism and glossing of difference that standpoints epistemologies initiate. I needed to challenge the idea that the “best” views of the “margins” were represented by those who claimed its subjective standpoint and by those who claimed to be able to transcend subjectivity and attain objectivity.

As is evident in this comment, the central concerns of the thesis shaped its structure, while Julie’s writing mirrored the intellectual framework that she had established for the research itself. In summary Julie claimed that “From here I sought to open up others’ and my own practices of representation in textual strategies that avoid the objective disinterested positioning and the attitude of no author and the story of one’s life.” And so the thesis included some explicit intellectual work on the reasons for the inclusion of reference to her own experience—rendered as a repeated motif throughout—along with a detailed and extensive data analysis. In crafting the thesis this way Julie’s thesis broke new ground in the style of thesis writing as well as forging a doubling of its analytical frame. The work was ultimately a highly self-conscious construction in which the writer occupied multiple positions—that of scholar, of data gatherer, of data producer, of friend, of migrant, of “Asian,” of student, woman, mother, wife . . . all of which were acknowledged in its realization. By 2013 the concerns that we had shared about thesis writing appear quite strange in that the conventions have changed so much toward the sort of position that Julie was struggling for then. Now as I re-read the thesis I note that its argument is rendered more vivid and compelling as a result of the evident investment of the writer in its unfolding. Her emotional commitment to the work forms a constant background. I am embarrassed to recall my overly conservative concerns—but I am certain that Julie’s voice in her thesis is stronger for having grappled with them. SELF AS PART OF RESEARCH METHODOLOGY A few years later another thesis writer, Lana, wanted to investigate the ways in which cultural texts—novels, videos, and films—offered adolescent girls ways of imagining themselves as future adult women. Her chosen topic had arisen from her own reflections on reading a particular novel as an adolescent. The book was Jane Eyre—a classic tale for young girls, often a set text in high school. Lana proposed to include a chapter in the methodology section of the thesis comprising a reflection on herself as an adolescent respond-

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ing to this novel. In this task her emotional involvement was clear from the outset. She wrote convincingly of her former adolescent self finding ready identification with the poor, lonely, and generally put-upon Jane as she (Lana) put forward the construct she wanted to investigate with contemporary young women. But did this material belong in a thesis? Were her reflections of herself when young more likely to be an idealized fictionalized account rather than the stuff of theory making, that precious material data that we carefully construct in ways that still honor some notions of validity and reliability, even if we express them differently? Whether to include the chapter was certainly a topic of lengthy debate in our conversations around the thesis as it took shape. I was comfortable with the idea that her recollections inspired her thesis question, but I was less sure that the autobiographical trope belonged in the thesis proper. I asked Lana to recall some of the deliberations we had concerning this particular issue. Her reflections on the debates and her growing determination to maintain the personal chapter in her thesis are evident in the following: As a researcher concerned with understanding subjective gender from a feminist perspective, I wanted to take seriously the practice of making ambiguities and contradictions within accounts and between individuals in the research process both transparent and accessible to the reader. After much reading on feminist research methodologies in the social sciences, I realised that what I was attempting was a variant expression of what has come to be known as “feminist standpoint” epistemology. That is, feminist research not only located in, but also proceeding from, the grounded analysis of women’s material realities. (see Stanley and Wise 1990)

But, as Lana was soon to discover, adopting a feminist standpoint does not offer a totally unproblematic cover for feminist research. Standpoint has been critiqued for its lack of critical deconstruction of patriarchal relations embedded in language and thus risks accepting voice as representing truth rather than seeing it as laden with sexual patriarchal references. Lana had correctly identified that her problem related to methodology, which provoked lengthy engagement with methodological discussions, leading, in her recollections, to the following: Despite the criticisms levelled at the standpoint approach, I viewed it as a viable way of situating myself in the research and making available for ethical examination how I had come to view and understand the data. Nevertheless, I was uncertain about how this would finally manifest in the thesis. More importantly, I wondered how I could justify the inclusion of an autobiographical element in a study that was not ostensibly about me but about the developing identities of the adolescent girl participants. Eventually, I found the answer to my question in the very root of my research enquiry. My wanting to investi-

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Judith Gill gate the role of literary and filmic texts in constructing the subjectivities and imagined futures of adolescent girls emerged from the significance of particular texts in shaping my own gendered identity in my adolescence.

The debate about whether or not to include explicit reference to her own experience continued as supervisor and student took up different positions and trialled them for potential traps and dead ends. My main worry was that the thesis would look as though it was an intensely personal and almost therapeutic exercise rather than the investigation of current young women’s understandings of likely futures. Lana notes this in her recollections thus: Of course, I realised that extracting a memory from my girlhood was not going to be an unproblematic activity. Whilst it was methodologically necessary to analyse the fictitious worlds of adolescent girls in order to understand how their subjectivities and imagined future selves are fashioned and determined within and by these worlds, it was not as easy to justify the inclusion of that other fiction—the fiction of self, created by memory. One of the difficulties involved in autobiographical work is that past feelings and thoughts can become distorted by present-day value judgments.

As it happened, writing in her memory of herself when young enabled Lana to establish a comfortable sense of authorship at the same time as an identification with the young participants in her study. It provided an emotional connection that energized her analysis of the girls’ responses. As she sees it in her current recollection: Re-connecting with my seventeen-year-old self was the starting point from which I could begin to connect my individual thoughts and feelings to the larger shared ones of girls in contemporary culture. In this way, my adolescent response to Jane Eyre gave me both empathy for and insight into the subjective processes of the girls participating in my study. For example, it was the catalyst to my remembering how I, on the verge of womanhood, felt “pulled” between autonomy and dependence and how these feelings were the genesis of my identification with Jane. There were clear resonances between Jane’s struggle with desires for both love and freedom and my own.

It is evident from her current comments that the Jane Eyre episode allowed for a personal identification with the central issue of her research and became not simply an adjunct to her methodological approach but also a key feature in her analysis. My analysis of my adolescent identification with Jane also provided the groundwork for the development of theory about girls’ relationships with their favourite texts. For example, the girls’ penchant for “rags to riches”; “ugly duckling to beautiful swan”; and “girl finds love at last” kinds of texts could not be reduced to simplistic interpretations and theories about the vulnerability

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of young women to the ubiquitous nature of mass culture and its arguably deleterious images of femininity. My response to Jane Eyre compelled me to view the metaphorical as the ideal site for the negotiation and resolution of psychical struggle within which girls are active agents (both consciously and unconsciously) rather than passive recipients.

Lana’s concluding comment replays the position taken in Julie’s thesis—a refusal to treat the research participants as simply subjects but rather to respect their views and themselves as autonomous agents in creating the stories of their likely futures: “Above all, my autobiographical analysis served its original purpose and that was to leave open for ethical examination my ‘intellectual autobiography’ so that the reader could critically engage with how I had come to represent the young women participating in my study. In this way, ‘I’ was just as much a subject of the research as they were.” In this statement Lana echoes almost precisely the ethical concern Julie had raised earlier about the relationship between researcher and informants. This is a problem familiar to many social scientists in that we “use” participants’ responses, we need them as they comprise the data essential for our work, and then we subject these responses to our own analysis and make them ours, divorced from their origins and often positioned in such a way that they are beyond reach of the original contributors. While this concern is inherently ethical it is also experienced emotionally—in which fear and doubt feature. What gives us the right to do this? Are we being respectful of these people who have given us their felt responses to our questions? These are some of the many emotional issues that recur in the conduct of research and the experience of research supervision. The element that I found finally convincing was that the chapter did set up the ideas behind the whole investigation in ways that were clearer and certainly more accessible than if it had not been included. I still recall the long and hard discussions that we had as the thesis took shape. Certainly the exercise facilitated a great deal of thinking about the theoretical rationale for the thesis as a whole. The autobiographical section was moved around a bit—sometimes in, sometimes out— but it ended up staying in. In almost every case research supervision does entail surprise, passion, desperate disappointments, and euphoric breakthroughs, all of which provide some emotional sustenance during the long hard slog that is inescapable in higher degree work. In my view it is imperative for the discussions between supervisor and student to be open and mutually supportive (Styles and Radloff 2001). This means that both parties must be free to give real feedback to the ideas and writing that are the essential material of thesis production. And of course these interchanges inevitably arouse feelings on both sides. It is an

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intense relationship, one that can be at times wonderfully productive, and at others internally devastating, encouraging, difficult, and always hard work. Both of the examples discussed thus far involved issues regarding the way in which the thesis was being written. The students wrestled with how to construct the writing to give proper accountability to the complex of information and feelings generated by their studies. As is commonly observed, thesis writing is an angst-ridden time—possibly the most acutely so in the whole doctoral process. For both Lana and Julie it occasioned difficult choices about highly personalized issues. They were trying to operate in what I have termed the “belly of the beast” to indicate the intensity and inescapability of the writing phase, as they sought to render their studies in a way that avoided compromising their own involvement or their in-depth analysis of the data. In my recollection this was a time of high emotion, and yet I believe that through this process of debate, strong feelings, and changing opinion, the work emerged as more truly their own than had they not engaged with these issues. The next example describes a thesis in which the involvement of the researcher was part of the research plan from the outset. SELF IN THE RESEARCH PLAN, THE DATA, AND THE WRITING The degree to which the rules of higher degree research and thesis writing and supervising have changed within the past decade is evident in the third and most recent account of supervision. Ten years after the completion of the first thesis described above, the question of the degree to which the thesis writer can enter the text arose again, this time in an investigation of women and retirement. In this case the student, Trish, had consciously and deliberately decided at the outset to include herself as one of the group of women whose retirement responses were to constitute the data of the thesis. Using recursive interviewing the investigation had accumulated a huge amount of rich and varied data, presenting the usual terrifying questions about how to manage qualitative data, and then how to interpret and analyze it. Taking my habitual conservative line I had said “Try to stand back from your data— you’re so involved you probably find it hard to see the themes.” To which she replied “But I am my data—I’m in it and it’s in me. How can I stand back from myself?” To this I had no answer. But fortunately we did continue with the task of thesis production. From my position as supervisor my difficulty was trying to establish that the writer’s own investment in the study did not dominate her analysis of the data. Her struggle was similarly constructed— how to make sure the other voices were equally present in the analysis. Trish’s entry into the thesis work was very personalized, a feature that comes through in her subsequent account:

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I came to the topic of my thesis, women and retirement, through the circumstances of my personal life. At the beginning of 20XX, I was poised to leave paid employment and enter into what is constructed as the final stage of a careered life, that is, retirement. As I grew into being old, I wanted to understand my own experiences and to share those of other women. I chose to explore the impending journey through the rigours of a PhD.

Certainly Trish affirmed the role her own life issues had played in her choice of topic. She also demonstrated an awareness that it was the toughness of intellectual work that had attracted her to research: I chose a doctorate, in part, because I desired to engage with a genre that would force me to be critical, to justify my arguments, to be rigorous, and to persevere when the going got tough. I wanted an exploration that was not just my own self-serving reflections or discussions with others. I wanted my ideas and experiences to be informed by rigorous examination and exposure to existing theory.

And she sought a social benefit from her study that she hoped would be generalized beyond its immediate participants: In addition, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to explore how to shape possible futures that were different to the ones constructed by gerontology and everyday understandings of being retired that position retirees and the old as beyond productivity and value. My desire was to contribute to the possibility of a new narrative of retirement, not only for future generations of women, but perhaps more intensely, for myself. Undertaking the somewhat dangerous route of academic exploration was for me undertaking “life-affirming, sanctifying practices” (Richardson 1997, 185). With such motivations my decision to be a participant-researcher seemed inevitable.

Her thinking about the inclusion of her own responses in the data she was gathering about women’s experience of retirement echoed the concerns expressed by Julie and Lana about the problem of “distancing” between researcher and researched: While I took up the participant-researcher position in order to understand my own experiences of an unexplored aspect of women’s lives and to make visible and concrete that personal interest, they were not the only reasons. I also wanted to reduce, where I could, the distancing between researcher and participant. I wanted to re/form the interactions between the other participants and myself from question and answer interviews to conversations where each shared ideas, reminiscences, experiences and possibilities.

My role as the supervisor also appears in Trish’s reminiscences as somewhat between a coach and a policewoman:

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The question of the place of the researcher and the researched enters continually in Trish’s reflections: I believe that my struggle to identify what I called “my data” as separate from the other participants’ data arose out of my initial understandings of the processes of research and my belief that participant and researcher were separate identities. I believed that one individual, the researcher, collected data, that is, raw material from the other, the participant. Becoming a participant-researcher foregrounded the contradictions in such a position and threw me into turmoil. Through the journey of the research, I slowly began to understand that such a dichotomy is phantasmic, it exists only as a phantom, an idea.

Trish’s recollections include a vivid description of her work as researcher in dealing with the data, the transcripts of interviews, and rendering this data amenable to analysis: “I then took these now concrete words [transcribed from the tape-recorded interviews], the ‘data’ and played with them, selected passages, analysed them, read meaning into them, coded, territorialised and fractured them. Within such processes they became my data, my storying, albeit initially co-created with the other participants.” The balance between her self-generated material and her informants’ comments becomes rolled into one data pile in this accounting. At the same time she carefully theorized the framework of her analysis so as to create an intellectual arena consciously removed from the rawness of personal thoughts and feelings. Once again this thesis was a very self-conscious exercise, very much a product of the later phase of thesis writing—and it worked! DRAWING CONCLUSIONS In each case described above, the feminist project of linking personal and political action was made paramount. And in each case there was an evident emotional involvement on the part of the student and also on the part of the supervisor. While all three examples resulted in good outcomes—the award of the doctorate and, for two of the three, tenured academic positions in Australian universities—this is far from the totality of the range of emotional

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involvements encompassed by the task of supervision. In selecting three examples from students who had successfully completed their doctorates, this accounting does not include the emotional experiences connected with others who for a range of reasons have not been able to complete. Many of my students have been women who sought to study a gender-related topic. Some, like Trish, have been retirees, delighting in the work of serious scholarship, while others have been mid-career professionals for whom the PhD has workplace significance. For some the task of juggling study with domestic issues, including but not restricted to child care, has meant some really distressing withdrawals which have occurred at considerable emotional cost for all involved. It is gratifying to note the increasing proportion of women undertaking research at doctoral level. For so long males comprised the majority of higher degree students but in recent years women have dramatically increased their share and now number just over 50 percent at doctoral level in Australia (Dobson 2009). Change in numbers is one thing, but also of interest to this discussion is the change in style of doctoral work, especially but not exclusively in the social sciences. Practices associated with feminist pedagogy have led to a reformulation of the style of doctoral thesis writing and the quality of engagement between supervisor and student. As can be seen from these three examples there has been a serial progression in thesis writing from a situation where it was risky to allude to the writer as having a “self” to one in which the writer is seen as self-involved in the thesis material as well as thesis construction. This progression was not always a simple, smooth, linear journey but one more correctly characterized by continual debate, repeated trials of ideas about thesis structure, and passionate position taking on all sides. The question of the degree to which that feeling, responding, writing self will be seen to be properly part of the thesis as a whole will continue to be raised and will probably have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. There are implications here too for the relationship between thesis writer and supervisor. In all the standard texts this relationship is seen as having central importance to the successful completion of the thesis. Many of these texts offer helpful protocols about how to “manage” the relationship, often assisted by an increasing array of formal contractual undertakings. Supervisor and student are asked to sign off on detailed arrangements which set out responsibilities and expectations, along with procedures for altering the relationship if there are problems. This situation is undoubtedly an improvement on earlier models in which students were left to their own devices to research and write for an occasional and distant supervisor. But some features of this relationship may not be amenable to formulaic solutions. In the case of the questions raised here there is also the implication that the supervisor must know the student fairly well in order to help with the

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judgment about how much self to include in the thesis proper. There is a good deal of talk—and some writing—that attests to the idea that a sympathetic and supportive supervisor is an essential component of thesis development. I want to suggest that there are some other elements to successful supervision that are also key to the development of a thesis that is truly owned by the writer and that merit attention. I wanted to raise these stories to show that thesis supervision is more than having friendly supportive chats and sending on references. In my view supervision also has to involve real debate, raising questions that may be difficult for both parties. Disagreement is sometimes a key strategy in thesis production—by having to carefully justify a particular decision the writer is in a stronger position to make a clear and compelling case. One of the challenges for the supervisor concerns the capacity to be clear, supportive, and open to counter suggestions while avoiding dogmatism and discouragement at all costs. Ultimately though it is up to the writer to make the final decision about what to include and how to position herself in the text. If you have embarked on a new and radical alternative approach you will inevitably have to justify it in the thesis to your examiners—in which case having to argue the case with your supervisor can provide good grounding for your thesis writing. Ultimately then the supervisory relationship—like other important relationships—has to be carefully managed so that it can weather the fall-outs and disappointments, the lapses in communications, the writing blocks, and all the other crises that can occur. I think it is best developed in a spirit of mutual openness and commitment in which imagination can flourish along with the hard graft that thesis writing inevitably entails. While many people may think of the final outcome as being the moment of graduation, the time on the stage to be presented with the parchment, for me it will always be the dawning joy on one woman’s face as she read through an examiner’s response and looked up in wonder and delight saying, “My god . . . she really read it didn’t she . . . and she really understood what I was trying to say . . . !” It seemed to me that this was the most fitting conclusion of all. NOTE The three theses mentioned above are held in the library of the University of South Australia.

REFERENCES Carrol, Patricia. 2006. Times of Our Lives: A Longitudinal Study of Women and “Retirement.” PhD diss., University of South Australia. Matthews, Julie Mariko. 1996. Making Spaces: “Asian” Girls at School. PhD diss., University of South Australia.

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Zannettino, Lana. 2001. “The Metaphorical Mirror”: The Role of Cultural Texts in the Construction of Adolescent Girls’ “Envisionings” of Womanhood. PhD diss., University of South Australia.

Chapter Five

Stuck between Two Languages The Ethics of Writing a Doctoral Dissertation in the English Language Katrina Jaworski

I was stuck from the beginning, but did not understand it fully. Instead, I kept getting frustrated: frustrated that writing did not come easily to me, frustrated with what sounded like a lack of eloquence, frustrated that something about my voice kept getting lost precisely because I felt my speech kept getting stuck between two languages. Writing in the English language was never mechanical or neutral. I knew that English had its mechanics, but they were never a matter of fact. I collided with the view of writing as mechanical and neutral in the course of writing my PhD thesis. As a migrant Eastern European woman who came to Australia in the mid-1980s, I could not comprehend how one simply wrote one’s findings up. There was no “writing up” of my thesis “findings” because whatever I wrote felt stuck to me, with my first language, Polish, forever inflecting my use of English. This inflection was precisely what shaped how I wrote my thesis. How I wrote did not occur in a vacuum not only because of the context of my education, or the topic of my research, but also because of the emotions attached to my identity as a woman writer. 1 My sense of being stuck speaks to what Edward Said argues about beginnings. Said suggests that beginnings consist of “something one does and . . . something one thinks about” (1985, xv). While the two may not always go together, they remain connected because of the way we use language (Said 1985). For Said, beginnings are crucial yet not always evident, embodying activities that imply “return and repetition rather than a simple linear accomplishment” (1985, xvii). Writing my PhD was no linear accomplishment for 71

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me. I certainly did write myself toward the future in which I would have the title Dr. This future, however, was already marked by return and repetition— a temporality I could not escape entirely in the present. Language accompanied this sense of temporality, this sense of being stuck because memories, experiences, and emotions spilled into how I wrote each sentence regardless of whether this spilling was conscious or unconscious. Drawing on my past feelings of being stuck, my aim in this chapter is to perform a time loop metaphorically by rendering visible what it meant for me to write my dissertation after having lived in Australia for almost twenty years by the time I began my postgraduate studies. Selectively drawing on the works of Edward Said, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Sara Ahmed, and Elspeth Probyn, I will argue that writing dissertations is an ethical practice, contoured performatively by different cultural norms and practices, shaped by the past and re-articulated in the present through which the present speaks back to the past. I will begin by reflecting on one memory of an experience that took place during the early years of my formal education prior to coming to Australia. I will then reflect on three memories that capture some of my experiences with the English language and writing in Australian primary, secondary, and tertiary education settings: these were “beginnings” that directly influenced and attached me to the writing of my doctoral dissertation. Each memory will build on the previous one to articulate and re-articulate the contours of the argument. What I am about to argue is probably nothing new for those working with postgraduate students who speak in multiple languages yet write their dissertations in the English language. Nor is the chapter’s argument entirely novel since excellent research has been done on understanding the relationship between language and writing (e.g., Kamler and Thomson 2006; Lillis 2001; Richardson 1990; Richardson and St. Pierre 2005). Still, I think my argument is relevant because it is the perspective of a student who completed her PhD not long ago, and who considers analytically how writing a thesis was an ethical labor. In so doing, my purpose is twofold. First, I want to show reflectively and reflexively how language, emotions, and affect articulated the writing of my thesis. Secondly, I want to show how writing a doctoral thesis did not simply “happen” in isolation but instead, as Kamler and Thomson (2006, 19) insist, was shaped by broader cultural, social, and personal influences and discursive practices. It is important to make the student perspective explicit so that we do not take for granted the largely invisible emotional labor of writing doctoral dissertations—labor that is shaped by gender and ethnicity, as was clear in my case. Before going any further, I want to flag key concepts that will guide my methodological and heuristic use of performativity: ethics, emotions, and affect. I will draw on Michel Foucault’s (1985, 1986a) later works in which he develops ethics as arts of practice essential to knowing who we are.

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Foucault (1985, 1986a) draws on the idea of “techne,” which he refers to as practice. For Foucault, techne is key to understanding ethics. This, however, does not mean that we simply chart the daily “doing” of our lives. Rather, we have to think through rather than about past and present cultural assumptions and norms shaping our doings to understand how they work. I will also draw on Ahmed’s (2004) work on emotions and affect, both of which she frames through the idea of “stickiness.” For Ahmed (2004, 11), when something is saturated with affect, it becomes “sticky” with personal and social meanings and tensions. “Sticky” is important because it explains how we become attached to some things and not others, and how some things are coherent yet not others. In this sense, emotions are about movement. Ahmed explains: emotions are what moves us, and how we are moved involves interpretations of sensations and feelings not only in the sense that we interpret what we feel, but also in that we might feel dependent on past interpretations that are not necessarily made by us, but that come before us. Focusing on emotions as mediated rather than immediate reminds us that knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation; knowledge is bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble, all those feelings that are crucially felt on the bodily surface, the skin surface where we touch and are touched by the world. (2004, 171)

If affect, as Ahmed argues, is an effect of emotions, objects, lived experiences, and personal histories—in other words, an embodied history of emotions—then stickiness as affect is the effect those emotions, objects, lived experiences, and personal histories have on us—attachments that implicitly guide our actions and interpretations of the world (2004, 45, 56, 90, 93). What is important about stickiness in the memories I am about to analyze is that, as affect, it shows us how language works as a form of power, namely, how some words stick to us and, in so doing, work on us in the present even if they belong to the past (Ahmed 2004, 195). My use of memories comes with a caution. By using memories, I do not assume that my experience of writing my PhD represents the experiences of others. Rather, I hope my memories become entry points into conversations that may share similarities and differences with my take on writing as an ethical labor. Furthermore, as someone who was trained in Foucault’s critique of truth-inducing tactics, I am wary that my memories will be interpreted as some kind of “confessional” or a statement of some inherent truth. Working against the power of the confessional, Foucault was always trying to figure out how we can see things differently. As Probyn aptly explains, “within the strict confines of philosophical French traditions, Foucault experimented with different genres and styles in an effort to provide alternative visions and new spaces of freedom” (2005: 40). I invite the reader to read the

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memories as a form of experimentation on my part in an effort to see differently the often invisible embodied history that is part of writing a doctoral thesis. FUNCTIONAL It is a grey, cheerless late November morning. Surprisingly, it is not raining. The wind, however, is another matter. It howls without mercy, cutting through all the layers of my attire as I approach my primary school, Szkoła Podstawowa numer 62, im. Aleksandra Omieczyńskiego in Szczecin, Poland. My school is a large, square, grey, three-storey high building with large square windows. It is functional. It has to be. After all, it takes care of 800 students. My school looks particularly functional this morning with not a single leaf left on any of the bushes or trees surrounding the perimeter of the building. The time is just after 7:30 a.m. and classes will begin in thirty minutes. My classroom is located on the second level, right opposite one of the stairways. With very little regard for the fact that it is no longer warm outside, one of the school committees has decided to repaint the stairway walls overnight. To aid the drying process, the windows have been left open. My friends and I wait outside our classroom, making quiet remarks about the circumstances. At the age of eight, most of us seem to understand the lack of insight behind this particular interior decorating decision. We remark on how the new color is really no different to the one before. It is hard to identify it. It seems to be a combination of grey and beige. Very functional, indeed! In a way, the atmosphere the new color creates suits the portraits of Stalin and Lenin hanging alongside other Communist figures on the hallway walls. For some reason, I prefer Lenin. I am not sure why: probably because of the quiet adult conversations I was not meant to overhear the other day. As luck would have it—which by now seems to be rather diabolical—the door stops working soon after we enter our classroom to prepare for our teacher’s arrival. It is impossible to close it. What is worse, it has to be taken off its hinges. The head janitor is called in. He tells us he will fix it later on. When our teacher arrives, she is less than impressed. In small groups, she sends us downstairs to collect our warmer clothing. With our coats, scarfs, gloves, and hats on, we officially start the day. The first lesson is Polish and it is time for dictation. As our teacher dictates and as we sit at our desks writing, the wind moves swiftly throughout the classroom. The single, terribly outdated heater has no effect. All we can do is attend to our writing and steal glances at the clock above the blackboard. The sooner the day is over, the better.

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By beginning with this memory, I want to emphasize that this is one example of what it was like to be part of Poland’s 1980s primary school system. For the most part, the school I attended did not put its students through such unusual interior decorating exercises. In a slightly comical manner, I want to make visible one experience of learning how to write. The landscape of this experience is influenced by a particular geography, history, and political system, configured through a language quite different from English. Yet despite the differences, and the passing of time, I cannot separate this experience from my experience of being educated in Australia. The Polish education system, as well as Polish culture and society at large, is where I first learned how to speak, feel, read, and write, how to understand and use language. In some sense, my English language is infused with, and even exceeded by, the Polish language—something I was especially conscious of as I labored through writing my thesis. Quite often, while working through an idea or point, I would simultaneously think about the structure and flow of a particular sentence. I doubt very much that most of my friends and colleagues writing their own theses were able to avoid this experience. At the same time, perhaps they did not have to voice the question “Is this right in English?” or at least not as often or in the same way as I did, since the question of something being right in English for me suspended the possibility of ever seeing this language as neutral. I never practiced the ethics of writing my dissertation as something that was purely mechanical precisely because of the uncertainty attached to the English language for me (Wierzbicka 2007). My analysis so far shows that writing as a practice travels. Said (1983) pays attention to what travelling means in relation to theories and ideas. Said argues that travel as movement is useful because it can condition intellectual activities we might do elsewhere. Such conditioning is important because it highlights the circumstances through which theories and ideas take shape, and how they become incorporated and transformed as a result of people having to move between contexts. Said’s point is useful for two reasons. First, it suggests that, as Said puts it, “[w]e are, so to speak, of the connections, not outside and beyond them” (1993, 65, original emphasis). Secondly, travel indicates that what was part of writing my thesis was “a double perspective that never sees things in isolation” (Said 1994, 60). 2 Although Said does not pay specific attention to emotions or affect, I want to suggest that travelling is affective: through travelling emotions, as Spinoza (1959, 85) once argued, move through time and shape our bodies, our actions. My earlier experiences shaped my body as a writing body in so far as they made me sticky with a sense of toughness and perseverance, which propelled me to write my thesis when things were really difficult for me. If, as Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) argue, knowledge needs contingency to materialize, then my suggestion is that stickiness played an important role in my writing,

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informed by past histories in need of reflexive attention rather than passing acknowledgment. THIRTY WORDS In Year 6 we had spelling tests on a weekly basis. Each test consisted of thirty words in total. A week earlier, we would receive a new list of words so that we had enough time to prepare. I remember each list always started with simpler words that were a lot shorter and less complicated. To motivate learning, our teacher set up a system where if you spelled all the words correctly in a single test five times throughout the semester, you would receive a fridge magnet. These magnets were not just any magnets. They were often quite big and colorful; they seemed to have substance. Having one was like winning a prize; they were something you wanted to possess, to own— something that hailed achievement. And I really wanted to achieve. At that stage, I had been in Australia for almost two years. Preparing for each spelling test was a labor-intensive process as I still grappled with the English language. The most difficult part was recognizing the difference between how a word was spelled on paper and how it sounded when spoken. It confused me. Why was it that certain letters did not correspond to their particular sound in the alphabet? So two days before each test, I would sit down at my tiny desk in a house we rented with two other families and write out each word thirty times. I felt that two days in advance was enough time since each word would still be fresh in my memory, eliminating any phonetic confusion on my part. At the end, if I still did not feel confident enough, I would rewrite the word in question another ten times. During the week, I would also listen to how each word was pronounced by others. At times, if I plucked up enough courage, I would ask the teacher to pronounce some of the longer words for me. After finishing the writing exercises, I spent a few minutes verbalizing each word. I did not just want to learn the words by reading and writing them; I also wanted to learn by hearing and speaking them. I wanted to master the words, to possess their strange sounds, to make them sound like they were my own. I was afraid that if I did not know their sounds, I would not do well. And I would certainly not get the fridge magnet. I did not get the magnet as quickly as I wanted. I would start each test with a quiet measure of confidence. But the words were never pronounced in their pre-given order or how I thought they sounded. At times, I would not recognize them immediately because they did not sound familiar enough. Suddenly the test was over and there was not any time left for corrections. I would end up feeling disappointed and frustrated even if I only spelled two words incorrectly. I knew those words! I felt like I could spell them back-

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wards! So why did I still get some of them wrong? What was it that I could not remember, could not get right? The lessons I learned from the intensity of my labors as a twelve year old informed my postgraduate writing practices. If I needed or wanted to understand a theorist, I would shut myself away, read, and write copious amounts of notes. Once again, this was a labor-intensive process, particularly since my notes were almost always handwritten despite my being a regular computer user. There was something personal about this labor. To perform it any differently felt as if I would not understand the knowledge offered by the text I was reading. In this way, writing as techne, or practice of re-writing and rewriting, became my way of understanding knowledge and my research. In this sense, through my practices of writing, “a continuum emerge[d] between past and present; time and memory shape[d] each other” (Dijck 2004, 264). What once was became yet again through writing, renewed in quite a different context and never outside the past in the present. This is why I intuitively understood that “writing is thinking, writing is analysis” (Richardson and St. Pierre 2005, 967, original emphasis). My ethics of writing embodied something else, namely, a desire to prove myself to others: prove that I could get things right and prove that I could excel just like anybody else. This of course is quite common for children from migrant families for a variety of personal, cultural, and social reasons. In my case I wanted to fit in; I wanted to have a sense of belonging, and, importantly, have a voice in my PhD. Thus, writing as an embodied practice was my ticket to ride. Of course this practice was a corporeal activity because, as Probyn describes, “we work ideas through our bodies; we write through our bodies, hoping to get into the bodies of our readers” (2005, 141). I want to complement Probyn’s point by suggesting that writing is performative. If, as Judith Butler (1990) suggests, what is performative is constituted by repeated acts that over time come to make sense in regulatory ways, then my body was part of culturally rendering my thesis through the labor of writing. Such a doing, as Butler (1993) further argues, reiterates and cites different norms and assumptions through which something is named. In my case, the English language was enmeshed with the discursive operation of cultural norms. This, however, was not simply because English is an accepted language of mainstream Australia, but because certain norms take hold of our lives as we are compelled to “cite” them through our actions. As a twelve year old, I was compelled to cite particular phonetic norms so that “I,” hailed as migrant Other, could feel like “I” belonged by mastering the English language through writing. I want to suggest that this compulsion to belong was born out of a desire to feel less vulnerable and more in control. Although my desire did not compare with the difficulties experienced by my visibly “non-Anglo” friends in primary schools I attended, it still highlights

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the discomfort I felt as a result of “inhabiting norms differently” (Ahmed 2004, 155). Writing my dissertation was a movement not simply because I physically wrote it but because my emotions moved me to approach writing through discomfort. My discomfort disabled the view that the material act of writing is a neutral activity. DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO SPEAK ENGLISH PROPERLY? In Year 8 I was once asked by a teacher to read out loud from White Fang by Jack London, a text we were studying in our English class at the time. With some apprehension, I took to the task. Within a minute or so, I heard subdued laughter from two rows behind me. Part of my adolescent ego desperately wanted to believe that this had nothing to do with me, yet somewhere deep down I knew this was not the case. Shame and embarrassment filled me, and the longer I read, the more nervous I became. What probably consisted of no more than five minutes felt like forever. And to warrant my shame, I was teased soon after class. “Don’t you know how to speak English properly?” “What’s with the accent?” All this was followed by more laughter. At that time I had been in Australia for approximately eight years. Long enough to imagine that I was somehow part of its cultural landscape, but not long enough for my “strong” accent to disappear. After the English class experience, this was precisely what I wanted to happen. I felt betrayed by my mouth, by the sound of my voice. I wanted to fit in, to belong somewhere despite the futility of having this desire fulfilled with a surname like Jaworski in a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon high school. Growing up as a nonpork-eating, non-Catholic in an overwhelmingly Catholic Poland before migrating to Australia, I understood well enough what growing up “different” meant. And while I did not have a problem with being different to some extent, I was no longer prepared to endure its consequences by the age of fourteen. For the next two years, I managed to avoid public reading in most of my classes. In the meantime, I practiced reading out loud regularly in the privacy of my bedroom, with detailed attention to the sound of each word in the hope that somehow my “strong” accent would soften and disappear. These days I no longer feel compelled to engage with racialized elocution lessons; nor do I feel betrayed by the sound of my own voice. Quite frequently I actually long for that accent to come back, its loss evoked by remembering what once was and can never return. At the same time, I am also reminded of how much everything changed when I commenced my tertiary studies. It is only then that I began to understand my experiences of racism in a larger context. Yet I must admit that, even now, this is not an easy experience for me to retell because, as both Ahmed (2004) and Probyn (2005)

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argue, affects always have specific effects, which in my case meant feeling ashamed, humiliated, and embarrassed. Probyn captures the point I am making in her discussion on shame, bodies, and places when she argues that: “Most experiences of shame make you want to disappear, to hide away and to cover yourself. But the disjuncture of place, self, and interest can produce a particularly visceral sensation of shame. It is felt in the rupture when bodies can’t or won’t fit the place—when, seemingly, there is no place to hide” (2005, 39). This memory is visceral for even now I burn a little with the negation once pressed upon me. To draw on Ahmed’s emphasis on impression, shame presses upon my skin, as an intense feeling of being an abject object and subject—as outside the cultural intelligibility of whiteness that demanded that I look and sound properly (Dyer 1997; Frankenberg 1993; MoretonRobinson 2004). 3 Coming from an Eastern European background, I visibly appeared white, yet I did not sound white enough. Thus, as Aileen MoretonRobinson (1999, 30) points out, “if you speak English with an Australian accent” you are more likely to be readily accepted. Yet shame, as a scar in the present, does not always have to be entirely bad. Many writers, Said reminds us, “bear their past within them—as scars of humiliating wounds, as instigations for different practices, as potentially revised visions of the past tending towards a new future” (1993, 34) in which those who were once silenced can speak again. The manner through which I was once hailed illustrates that the use of language is articulated through cultural norms that in this instance speak of racialized understandings of what it means to speak. Such norms become embodied, and require bodily acts to sustain their power since “the body is not ‘outside’ the speech act” (Butler 2002, 115). How does this relate to writing in particular? Claiming that this experience is connected to writing my dissertation by virtue of being part of my history is not enough. What it suggests, however, is that earlier experiences with language conditioned how I came to understand the practice of writing, since I could never presuppose that anything to do with language—be it reading, writing, or speaking—was a neutral practice, suspended outside time, history, and culture. While the scars remain, in my case they instigated a reflexivity without which I could never have discovered my writing voice. The scars also instigated a passion for staying absolutely honest in my research and writing. Ahmed (2004) suggests that we can move away from hurtful attachments by acting on them without ontologizing such attachments. In my case, I did act on not being able to speak English properly because I wrote my dissertation in the English language. In so doing, I discovered that my shame informed my ethics as a writer. Having said this, I have to be honest by saying that perhaps I could grapple with my shame in the first place not only because I was given the opportunity to be educated,

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but also because, as a white migrant subject, I could put the past behind me more readily even though as a young woman I still felt the need to prove myself. MAKING SENSE OF ENGLISH AT THE KITCHEN TABLE I met Louise during my first year of studying at university through a network of friends. We became really good friends and by the time I commenced my second year Louise was my mentor. Despite a thirteen-year gap between us, Louise and I shared many common interests, amongst which was a strong commitment to feminism. I was particularly passionate about feminism since for the first time I could name the philosophy my mother instilled in me long before I identified it as such. The topic of feminism generated many conversations between Louise and myself, whether these were about daily living or the ideals our mothers passed on to us. Louise told me different accounts of her earlier life. I listened with interest as they granted me access to memories, landscapes, experiences, and histories that were so different from my own. Louise also listened with interest and enthusiasm to my accounts of growing up in Poland and Australia. Coinciding with my feelings about the university social environment in general, I felt like I was in the company of someone who recognized my difference in ways that did not make me feel uncomfortable, patronized, or disregarded. One of the greatest gifts I received from Louise was the time and effort she spent on explaining to me the mysteries of the English language. This included checking drafts of my undergraduate essays and providing useful and constructive feedback. For the first time, someone explained different structures of writing and how English as a language worked without making me feel lost and overwhelmed. And for the first time, I felt like I was a little bit more in charge of using a language that I had often thought would overtake me. One of the earlier “sessions” involved Louise checking an essay I wrote for sociology on the topic of gender and suicide methods in relation to the experiences of Australian young people. I was particularly worried and agitated about this paper. It was not so much that I had a vested interest in the topic. It was more about the fact that I could find little research and felt rather annoyed about it. Why didn’t anyone ask questions about gender that focused on why and how aspects of suicide were interpreted in particular ways? Sitting at the kitchen table, Louise read the paper from beginning to end and took some time to respond. In the nicest possible manner, she told me that the paper did not quite “gel” and that my writing was a bit vague and unclear. I did not quite know how to take it so I burst into tears. The darn thing was due in two days and this did not leave me with a great deal of time

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to perform a miracle! With me crying, Louise proceeded to ask gently about what I was trying to say and write, and then to make some changes, drawing my attention to areas I really needed to rework on my own. By the end of the “session,” I walked away still feeling agitated but with a quiet sense of determination. I was not going to walk away from this one. This last memory returns and connects to a number of things I have analyzed throughout this chapter. It returns and connects with sitting at a table; laboring through language; being confronted by the practices and norms of language; and trying to make ideas make sense through language and writing. In a sense, it shows that beginnings are historical rather than epistemological givens. But this kind of history is deeply affective. Toni Morrison (1990) captures this kind of affect when she describes her take on remembering. She writes: You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were. . . . It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of our imagination is our “flooding.” (1990, 305)

If writing is an ethical practice, performatively shaped by so much more than pure mechanics of its craft, my argument here is that, thanks to the affective histories I embodied, writing was, to some extent, like “flooding.” I could not separate myself from my memories and my experiences from how I wrote what I wrote during my postgraduate years. As a result, how I used language hardly consisted of processes that simply “happened.” While producing a dissertation did include a set of practices and rituals that could be described as “mechanical,” my use of language and writing involved labor-intensive, difficult activities, where what felt material could never rest outside cultural norms, meanings, and assumptions. If writing happened, it was because the happening was, and continues to be, oriented by my experiences and memories, as well as my vested interest in what I was pursuing in my research. If writing happened, it was because its practice was conditioned by the past and re-articulated in the present in ways that turned out to be enabling and productive. What this last memory shows is that, even though the workings of norms and of affects do not suddenly disappear, the manner in which “they are invoked and cited by bodily practices . . . also have the capacity to alter norms in the course of their citation” (Butler 2004, 52). Although my learning alongside Louise’s guidance did not alter past experiences, I was never-

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theless able to reconsider the past from a different place in which I no longer felt as if language and writing would somehow erase me. This is the resolve with which I began my postgraduate studies. In my case at least, perhaps the reason why language and writing were never neutral and mechanical practices was because both depended on so much more than me, or the activity of writing per se. As Butler explains, “[m]y reflexivity is not only socially mediated, but socially constituted” (2004, 32). This is precisely why my ethics of writing became possible. In this sense then, I am insisting that how language and writing operate culturally in the production of doctoral dissertations cannot be taken for granted and, when recognized, cannot be treated as obvious even when the most obvious thing about writing a thesis is that it needs to be written. CONCLUSION The English language continues to challenge me. With the passing of time, and the completion of my doctoral studies, I welcome this challenge a little more readily even though I still feel stuck. Feeling sticky with emotions, I want to emphasize the word “little” because finishing my thesis did not alter my practices of rendering words across the pages of my notebooks and the computer screen. I feel like there is always something at stake even though I fear the English language a lot less. Thus, I am calling for an ethic of approaching writing doctoral dissertations, grounded in a reflective and affective awareness of not only what is at stake when writing a thesis, but also what shapes and reshapes the practices through which a thesis is written. This kind of awareness is valuable because it allowed me as a student to develop a critical relationship with language and writing. This relationship, as Butler (2003) argues, is crucial to critical thinking since language and writing have the capacity to constrain thinking and ideas, which is precisely what scholarship should not incite. And perhaps my relationship between language and writing illuminates Foucault’s point that “[w]e do not live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light; rather we live inside a set of relations that delineates sides which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another” (1986b, 23). My research practices and everyday life continually remind me just how unnatural language and writing are. This is not because English in particular happens to be my second language, but because I am always reminded of the fact that norms and practices that shape its articulation also shape my identity as a woman academic writer with a migrant past. What I am also reminded of is that failure is not always entirely bad. While some experiences wounded and humiliated me in the past, the present may offer possibilities for re-

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rendering performatively what once was a mark of visible shame and failure. Do I want to speak English properly? Actually no, I do not, Kasia. NOTES 1. My thinking and writing on the topic of this chapter began earlier in Jaworski (2008). 2. This perhaps explains why, as Richardson and St. Pierre highlight, “students from diverse social backgrounds . . . are attracted to seeing the social world through two lenses” (2005, 964). 3. Ahmed develops the relationship between impression and emotions by suggesting that “we need to remember the ‘press’ in impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace” (2004, 6).

Chapter Six

Caring Labor and Caringscapes at the Margins of Academic Work Valerie Adams

When I first commenced tertiary study I was a mature-age student and married with two young children. I was also a registered nurse working parttime. I had decided to do a business degree, also part-time. I was probably not a typical business student to start with but I was too busy to be at all concerned about that. I completed a bachelor degree majoring in economics. During my final year I became aware of feminist economics and that economic outcomes were not always the same for women as men. Feminist economists had begun to develop a theory of caring labor in the mid-1980s, arguing that caring work could not be adequately explained by mainstream economic theory. Following an Honors degree with a thesis that examined aged care policy from a mainstream economic policy perspective, I renewed my interest in feminist economics by commencing a PhD. My doctrinal research was centered on an empirical investigation of the caring labor involved in nurses’ work in residential aged care facilities from a feminist economics perspective. The central actor in mainstream or neo-classical economics consumer choice theory is a character known as Rational Economic Man (Mr REM) or homo economicus. Mr REM is a rational autonomous economic actor who makes choices in the marketplace to maximize his utility or satisfaction. In the labor market he chooses a combination of work and leisure, again to maximize his utility in earning a living and having a life. Feminist economists in developing a theory of caring labor have critiqued the autonomous nature of Mr REM, who never experiences the dependencies of early childhood, sickness, injury, or frail old age (Nelson 2004, 5, Folbre 1995, Folbre and Hartmann 1988, Nelson 1995, 1996). 85

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The mainstream economics representation of an autonomous economic actor resonates in the academy with an autonomous, rational, abstract, and bodiless academic worker ideal. This ideal worker has historically been a man who is immunized from family responsibilities and commitments around caring and dependency (Collier 2002). Neo-liberal economic theory underpins the corporatization of higher education, with its business practices and managerialism. One result of this change has been the demise of the traditional idea of a university based on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. These changes in higher education across western countries have been depicted as “culturally masculinist in nature: aggressive, top-down, resistant to dialogue and exchange and lacking in empathy as to the human cost of the changes which have been (and are being) instituted in many institutions” (Collier 2002, 22). As a PhD candidate I was swimming against the mainstream of my discipline of economics and the culture of higher education. I was doing a feminist economics dissertation that critiqued both “rational” and “autonomous” and investigated nurses’ work in residential aged care facilities where the frail elderly residents are characterized by a high level of dependency and cognitive impairment. The rationality of the corporatized university is in stark contrast to notions of family responsibilities and care. It has been argued that the academy needs an ethic of care and that “the notion of an ethic of care based on mutual obligations and relations of trust is as applicable to the public sphere . . . as it is to social relations in the familial or domestic arena” (McDowell 2004, 157). A study of mature-age students with care responsibilities in a UK university found: Thus, the opportunities and risks associated with university were seen in terms of their identities as mothers, fathers, carers, husbands, wives, and daughters, and involved costs and benefits for resources, such as time, reproduction, and social standing. (González-Arnal and Kilkey 2009: 106)

As well as being a PhD candidate I was also a nurse, wife, and mother. My life was intertwined in a caringscape that spanned home, work, and study. The concept of “caringscapes” is based on the notion of terrain as a landscape. Various landscapes within this terrain represent alternative future ways of life. When using a caringscape perspective, spatial-temporal frameworks are included in the complex array of feelings and activities that people use to map their way through caring and working (Bowlby et al. 2010, 5–6). I was mapping my way through the caringscapes of caring at work as a nurse, caring at home, and caring about my research. Rather than three separate spheres, these caringscapes intertwined as an ongoing personal experience. In this chapter I firstly look at the feminist economics concept of caring labor. I then use three memories (Haug 1987) to explore the intricacies and

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the emotional labor involved in writing a dissertation on nurses’ work in residential aged care while connected (and very much not disembodied) to a partner, children, and nurses’ work. The term “emotional labor” was originally coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, who differentiated between “emotional labor,” which is sold for a wage and has “exchange value,” and “emotion work,” which refers to the same acts done in private where they have “use value” (Hochschild 1983). This distinction between emotional effort in paid and unpaid work has been critiqued as too simple a dichotomy of emotions in the public and private spheres (Brook 2009). The softer form of emotional labor, such as the relational work required in nursing, has been described as “the missing link in the chain of events that produces lower wages for jobs held primarily by women” (Guy and Newman 2004, 296). This form of emotional labor used to willingly provide support, nurturance, and empathy is common in nursing practice and has been described as “philanthropic” in the nursing literature (Lewis 2005, 568). The term “emotional labor” is now used widely across disciplines in various contexts. In this chapter I use the term “emotional labor” in relation to writing a thesis on nurses’ work and in relation to caring within my family more in the sense of Hochschild’s (1983) “emotion work” in that it was emotional effort expended freely, not the commodification of emotions required by an employment situation. In my nursing practice the emotional labor that I was involved in by being supportive to elderly residents and their family underpinned my understanding of caring labor as described by feminist economists. It is important that a positive relationship exists between the caregiver and the care recipient so that the care recipient feels cared for. The first memory is the start of my awareness of the culture underpinning nursing in the hospital-based system in which I had trained and its link to gendered stereotypes, which proved to be important for my analysis of nursing work. The second memory encapsulates my first journal article linking economics and nursing. The opportunity to write this article with an international feminist economics scholar was a gift that provided me with a framework for writing my dissertation. The third memory encapsulates the interdependence between doing a PhD and caring for my family. Between them, these three memories represent three significant areas of my life experience that needed to meld into the successful writing of a PhD thesis. THE FEMINIST ECONOMICS CONCEPT OF CARING LABOR Feminist economists, in developing the concept of “caring labor,” have defined it as “face-to-face services that develop the capabilities of the care recipient” (England and Folbre 2003, 64). Care services are labor intensive,

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require person-specific knowledge (Folbre 2001, 48), and are performed across all realms of the economy by households, businesses, governments, and non-profit organizations (Jochimsen 2003, 231, Folbre 2006, 189–190). Feminist economics theorists have sought to conceptualize caring labor in ways that differentiate it from the conventional neo-classical treatment of labor. Folbre focused on motivations and defined caring labor as “labour undertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, with no expectation of pecuniary reward” (1995, 75). This caring motive is necessary to meet the needs of children, the elderly, the sick, and other dependents, but is not restricted to these tasks. This definition excludes labor that is supplied only in response to money based on the premise that love cannot be bought nor adequately supplied only for money. However, Folbre did not see this definition as excluding all waged labor because some people do not work for money alone (Folbre 1995, 75). Himmelweit (1995) has described care as an ambiguous notion that stretches from physical care through to emotional care. While physical care may to some extent be provided independently of the relationship between the carer and the person being cared for, in the case of emotional care the person doing the caring is inseparable from the care given. This also applies to paid caring work, thereby giving it a different rationale from other work because it is based on a personal relationship of some degree between the carer and cared for (Himmelweit 1995, 8). In this way it differs markedly from the usual notion of work in which the work done can be readily separated from the person doing it (Himmelweit 1995, 9). Himmelweit later expanded her conceptualization of caring labor by looking at the way in which care in its unpaid domestic form is defined by the relationship between the caregiver and the care recipient. First, the motivations of the caregiver and the care recipient, and their beliefs about those motivations, are part of what being cared for means. In order for the care to be successful, the care recipient has to feel “cared about.” Second, the responsibility that particular individuals have to “care for” is usually assigned by social norms that are centered on specific, gendered relationships of kin. The process of caring in itself engenders the development of a particular caring relationship. This means that the identity of both the carer and the care recipient matter, and the relationship between them is either one of dependence or a mutually caring relationship in which both people reciprocate on an equal basis (Himmelweit 1999: 31). Because of this double characteristic of caring, involving both motivation and activity, caring labor is emotional labor in both senses. This means that caring specifically involves the development of a relationship, not the emotional servicing of people who remain strangers (Himmelweit 1999, 35).

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My PhD research was an empirical investigation of aged care nurses’ work based on the feminist economics theorizing of caring labor. An important aspect to writing my PhD thesis was uncovering the complexities inherent in paid caring labor and the undervaluing in market terms of this type of work. To do this, one of my first steps was to look at the gendered socialization inherent in nursing culture. Memory 1: Nursing Culture I was doing interviews with nurses working in residential aged care facilities for my PhD research. As the interviews progressed it became clear to me that the nurses were understating the difficulties they faced. When I told my supervisor she said I needed to look into nursing culture. I had been a nurse for many years and had not ever thought that there might be such a thing as nursing culture.

My investigation of nursing culture took me through an interesting terrain. Cultures convey codes of desirable attitudes and behavior interspersed with taboos marking certain attitudes or actions as not appropriate. People often feel self-conscious when even mildly transgressing these unwritten rules. Culture has been described as finding expression “in learned, shared and inherited values, in the beliefs, norms and life practices of a certain group, guiding their processes of thinking, decision-making and action” (Suominen, Krovasin, and Ketola 1997, 186). Modern nursing commenced with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War in the 1850s. Nightingale’s practices and teaching over several decades spawned a cultural legacy that lingered throughout the hospital-based training system in Britain, Australia, and other western countries (Madsen 2003, 43): nursing as a social responsibility, the sense of working for the public good, of nurses being self-sacrificing, patient, kind, and selfless. The general idea of this cultural legacy continues in Australia in spite of the fact that nursing education moved to the tertiary education sector in the 1980s (Madsen 2003, 44). The qualities usually associated with a good nurse, such as being caring, kind, and patient, are deeply linked to ideas of what it means to be female. In addition, aged care nursing embodies the traditional role of women in caring for sick elderly relatives as contrasted to some of the more technical areas of modern nursing. As a consequence, aged care tends to have less status as a form of nursing than more acute forms of both medicine and nursing practice (Brown 2000, Jones, Cheek, and Ballantyne 2002). Hence my doctoral research was situated in feminist economics, which has a low status within the economics academy and was centered on nurses’ work in aged care, another low-status area.

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Economics has a history of being a profession of predominantly white Caucasian men. In 2008 the Royal Economics Society reported that 22 percent of academic economists were female and only 17 percent were from ethic minority groups (Sunderland 2010). Feminist economics has remained marginal to neo-classical economics, which evolved from an historical perspective that viewed women as married, dependent, and mothers with a low productivity and irrational minds (Pujol 1995). Similarly, nursing was seen as primarily a women’s occupation and was positioned as a vocation based on devotion that was “natural” for women (Colliere 1986). Although with the advent of tertiary qualifications nursing moved to being a professional occupation, aged care attracts fewer tertiary qualified nurses than more acute areas of health care. Consequently, residential aged care facilities in Australia are grappling with a nursing shortage (Jackson, Mannix, and Daly 2003). My investigation of nursing culture led me to examine metaphors, which have been described as being pervasive in everyday life, not only in language but also in thought and action. The essence of metaphor is that we understand and experience one thing in terms of another (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 3–5). Since metaphorical expressions in our language are tied to metaphorical concepts in a systematic way, we can use metaphorical linguistic expressions to study the nature of metaphorical concepts and to gain an understanding of the metaphorical nature of our activities (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 7). The linguistic expression of conceptual metaphors may vary widely, but always involves a set of correspondences between two conceptual domains (Steen 2002, 20–21). Although metaphors can only impart a partial view, two separate but historically related metaphors have been identified that shaped the early days of nursing: a military metaphor, which appeared in both medicine and nursing (Kuhse 1997, Wuzbach 1999), and the metaphor of the virtuous woman (Kuhse 1997). The military metaphor has been pervasive in nursing, not only because modern nursing stems from the Crimean War, but also because nursing emerged at a time when medicine was framed by military metaphors. Disease was described as the “enemy,” medicine “combated” disease with “arsenals” of drugs and young doctors became house “officers” (Winslow in Kuhse 1997, 22). Applied to nursing, the military metaphor framed nurses’ work in terms of discipline, loyalty, and obedience to those of superior rank (Kuhse 1997, 22). The requirement for nurses to display “unquestioning soldierly obedience, self-sacrifice and ready subordination” to doctors evolved into nurses becoming the proverbial “handmaidens” of the medical profession; a role that has proven very difficult to banish. “The military metaphor had thus not only turned nurses into obedient soldiers, but had also put them under the command of medical men” (Kuhse 1997, 25). The presence of nurses in every major conflict since the Crimean War, and very notably in both world wars, while bringing much well-deserved credit and respect to the nurses

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involved, probably strengthened the flagging military metaphor by imbuing it with new life at regular intervals. The recurring connection between the military and medicine fostered the unequal gender relations between masculine medicine and feminine caring nursing by reinforcing the role of nurses as subservient to doctors as their commanding officers. Although the 1973 International Council of Nurses’ Code for Nurses shifted nurses’ primary responsibility away from doctors to patients or those in need of nursing care (Kuhse 1997, 32), and heralded the metaphor of the patient advocate (Kuhse 1997, 36; Wuzbach 1999, 95–6), there was evidence in the data I collected that nurses working in Australian residential aged care facilities were still soldiering on with inadequate time to provide the quality care they wanted to give, working unpaid time, and receiving lower remuneration and status than nurses working in acute care in public hospitals (Adams 2008). Having being subconsciously imbued with nursing culture in the hierarchical hospital training system as a young adult, I was also soldiering on, working in a residential aged care facility on the weekends, doing my PhD research during the week, and caring for my family. I included an autoethnographic interview in my PhD research where I talked about my experience of working as a registered nurse in a residential aged care facility. The analysis of that data showed quite clearly that, despite a more recent tertiary education in economics, I was still imbued with nursing culture and that “some forms of gendered socialization run deep” (Adams 2007, 13). The metaphor of the virtuous woman, which referred to good or virtuous Victorian women, was probably necessary in practice. Florence Nightingale saw a need to attract educated women into nursing as a necessary step to improving nursing practice and outcomes. If nursing was to become an acceptable profession for educated women and their daughters, then strict insistence on high moral character was necessary. The coupling of the “good woman” with the “good nurse” was successful in turning nursing into a respectable occupation suitable for “ladies”: “nursing was not only an acceptable occupation for women, it was a natural and highly commendable one” (Kuhse 1997, 28). Therefore modern nursing at its inception was brought into being with characteristics of dedication, self-sacrifice, submissiveness, and intellectual passivity. This meant that nurses were easily exploited and discouraged from forming their own ethical or professional judgments (Kuhse 1997, 23). At the same time, these nurses were claiming new ground for Victorian women. Their caring work moved to the public domain of the hospital and away from the private domain of home, the family, and male chaperones, but the compromise was that they were subservient to male doctors. Muff discussed the “angel of mercy” stereotype as creating an impossible ideal that “denies nurses important aspects of their humanness” (Muff 1984, 28). This stereotype has also been analyzed in feminist economics in the

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context of women’s unpaid care in the home (Nelson 1999). Known as the “angel in the house,” this is a white, middle-class notion that refers to the unpaid care women provide in the home for love, not money. This contradiction has been significant in the history of caring occupations because it has worked against caring occupations, predominantly comprised of women, attracting an income incommensurate with male “breadwinner” wages (Nelson 1999, 49). The link Nelson (1999) analyzed, in an economic sense, between the “angel in the house” and paid caring work parallels Muff’s (1984) “angel of mercy” in nursing, and connects with Kuhse’s (1997) metaphor of the virtuous woman. Although it was referred to as a stereotype by Muff and a notion by Nelson, Kuhse conceptually links the private (unpaid, the “good woman”) and public (paid, the “good nurse”) domains of caring work in her metaphor of the virtuous woman (Adams 2007, 5). In this way, women’s work in the private domain has been incorporated into nurses’ work in the public domain. Rather than transcending the dualism, this has meant that the valuing of the masculine over the feminine has positioned women’s work as nurses as less than men’s work as doctors, and devalued women’s work in both the paid and unpaid domains. Similarly, feminist economics research focused on the economic aspects of women’s lives and their performance of both paid and unpaid work is undervalued by the male-dominated mainstream economics profession. Neoclassical economics has traditionally only considered goods and services produced in the market as productive and largely ignored the social reproduction and unpaid work in the home that is necessary to sustain the labor force required for capitalist economies to function. To address this imbalance, feminist economists have developed the notion of the “care economy,” and argue that gender equality and women’s economic well-being require a new vision of economic life that counts women’s care work in statistics, explains the role of care, as well as commodities, in the working of economies, and integrates the care economy into policy (Adams 2010, 1). My research into nursing culture and the gendered stereotypes embedded in the metaphors of nursing became central to my analysis of nurses’ work in residential aged care facilities. The metaphorical analysis became part of the toolbox of reflexive methods I used to analyze my data, which consisted of 23 one-hour, semi-structured interviews with registered nurses and managers working in residential aged care. The notion of nursing culture and how gendered expectations played out in the everyday lives of aged care nurses became central to writing my PhD thesis (Adams 2008). I was fortunate in having the opportunity to co-author a journal article on the economics of nursing with an experienced American feminist economist whose work on caring labor I was using in my thesis (see Adams and Nelson 2009). The time had come to analyze and link the feminized culture of nursing and the mascu-

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line economics academy through the Cartesian dualisms deeply embedded in both economics and nursing. Memory 2: Economics and Nursing I had the opportunity to write a journal article with an American academic who had been at my university as a visiting scholar. This article involved the use of some of the data from my PhD interviews and focused on economics and nursing. My co-author had built up a network of professional people working in the health industry in the United States. When she sent out our journal article to them for comment, one emailed back and said “Is your colleague an Australian nurse economist? If so, I think she must be the first one in Australia.” I had never heard of a beastie called a “nurse economist.”

Both mainstream economics and nursing are plagued by Cartesian dualisms. Feminist economists, in seeking to differentiate caring labor from other forms of labor, have critiqued the dualisms inherent in neo-classical economics theory, such as the hard–soft, masculine–feminine binaries that limit a comprehensive articulation of the nature of caring labor: The definition of economics according to markets, individual agents, efficiency and “positive” questions excludes families, society and institutions, equity, and normative concerns, for example. The cultural connotation for what is favored is “hard” and “masculine,” while for the disfavored the connotation is “soft” and “feminine.” (Nelson 2004, 390)

Because the neo-classical economics assumption is that agents are self-interested, autonomous, and rational choice makers, any characteristics of concern for others and interdependency, or emotional or habitual traits that may affect economic behavior are minimized. Feminist economists argue that, as they do not fit the assumption that individual agents are autonomous, children and sick or frail elderly people are not recognized in the neo-classical model (Nelson 2004, 391). Masculinity and femininity are polarized as “separate spheres” (Nelson 1996, 40), and a “view of families which focuses only on the prime-age adults makes invisible exactly those activities that have traditionally been of foremost importance to women” (Nelson 1996, 65). The feminist economics challenge to the neo-classical framework is to value the notion of caring labor by uncovering those aspects of these dualisms that are either missing, or considered inferior, or are of no consequence in the neoclassical paradigm. The mind–body dualism conceived of by Descartes privileges the mind over the body. It has resulted in the identification of the body “with scientific descriptions of its anatomical and functional properties” (Leder 1990, 5 in Wolkowitz 2006, 15). This has resulted in an impoverished view of subjec-

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tivity, in which the mind–body divide is portrayed as natural, rational, and unconditional (Williams and Bendelow 1998 in Wolkowitz 2006, 22). In the workplace, mental labor is rewarded more than manual labor; pay differentials, working conditions, and status hierarchies distinguish between them (Wolkowitz 2006). In this way, care work, which often involves the use of the carer’s body to provide physical care to the recipient, has always been undervalued wherever it is supplied. In health care, nurses’ work and the embodiment of a relationship between the caregivers and care recipients has always been less highly regarded and rewarded than medical science. In residential aged care, the problems that nurses encounter through their work include the effect of caring work on nurses’ own bodies. Reports of fatigue, injured backs, and sore shoulders and hands (Adams and Nelson 2009) leave little doubt that nursing is deeply embodied. In our journal article my co-author and I demonstrated that nurses’ work spanned both the mind–body and knowledge–virtue dualisms but that the work’s status and economic reward was limited by these dualisms (Adams and Nelson 2009, 14–18). Our goal in challenging conceptions based on Cartesianism in both economics and nursing was to “open an analytical window into the holistic work that is nursing” with the hope that both economists and nurses would “further develop the economics of care” (Adams and Nelson 2009, 24). Following this article I incorporated a critique of the Cartesian dualisms deeply embedded in both economics and nursing, which result in an undervaluing of caring labor, into my PhD thesis. I then used the feminist economics concept of provisioning to provide a framework in which nurses’ work can be valued. Feminist economists have counteracted the separatist world view of neo-classical economics with the notion of “social provisioning,” which enables economic activities to be analyzed as interdependent social processes (Power 2004, 6) and focuses on the provisioning of human life (Nelson 1993, 32). “Provisioning” considers humans in relation to the world and is not limited to physical concepts. When the core of economic enquiry is human survival, “nonmaterial services, such as child care and supervision, as well as attendance to health concerns and the transmission of skills, become just as central as human shelter” (Nelson 1993, 32). I utilized the concept of social provisioning to overcome the limitations that a dualistic world view has imposed on understandings of the complexities of paid caring work. As I did so I was aware that I was involved in social provisioning at work as a nurse in a residential aged care facility and at home caring for my family while writing a thesis using a feminist economics lens to value paid caring work. Thus I was involved in a caringscape that encompassed the spatial domains of the academy, residential aged care, and family life.

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Memory 3: Home and Academia I was on campus on a weekend coding the last interview for my PhD research. The phone rang and my son told me that his father, who was a diabetic and sick with a viral infection, was feeling worse so he was driving him to see a doctor. I thanked him and said I would be home soon. The doctor diagnosed pneumonia and my son drove his father to the hospital to be admitted. I arrived home, soothed my daughter who was upset, and drove us both to the hospital.

Unlike homo economicus my life was full of interdependencies. The care of my family existed side by side with my research on nurses’ work in residential aged care. For the first half of my part-time PhD candidature I also worked part-time as a registered nurse providing care to frail, elderly residents in a nursing home, so for that period of time I was actually living the subject of my thesis. Paid work, writing a PhD thesis, and unpaid care in the home were intertwined on a daily basis. A sick, hospitalized husband and the need for me to be supportive to him, our teenage daughter, and adult son inevitably slowed down the pace at which I could write my dissertation. My partner’s first hospital admission for pneumonia, which occurred as I was coding my last interview transcript using N6 software, was followed by a second admission for pneumonia a year later despite the fact that he by then had had both influenza and pneumonia vaccinations. Some months later, due to neuropathy and a loss of sensation as a complication of his diabetes, he accidently burned his leg while using a heated wheat bag for relief from arthritic pain and required an admission to a burns unit for skin grafts. Some months later my husband of twenty-six years passed away suddenly just before Christmas in 2005. My son had just completed an Honors degree and my daughter had just finished Year 12 so they had both had a demanding year, which included a sick father and two hospital admissions that year. Like me, they experienced family care intertwined with academic work and were devastated by their father’s sudden death. For me, writing my thesis became enmeshed in dealing with grief and personal loss and, inevitably, my academic writing proceeded at a slower pace. By the time my husband died I had moved from working part-time as a registered nurse in a residential aged care facility to working part-time in academia as a research assistant. My colleagues, both academics and PhD candidates, were very supportive and my daughter, son, and I continued to spend emotional labor supporting each other. A high point was that both my son and daughter seemed to believe steadfastly that I would complete my dissertation, and complete it I did.

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CONCLUSION Looking back, my time as a PhD candidate was quite a journey. Although high stress levels and feelings of grief and loss come to mind, the main impression I have is of the centrality of care enmeshing home, work, and research as I wrote my PhD thesis. It was a dissertation full of emotional labor that argued for paid caring labor to be valued in market terms and much better resourced, particularly in terms of the aged care staff having enough care hours funded to have time to care. As the caringscape of home, work, and research melded together in writing my PhD, so do they continue to meld in my postdoctoral life and, I have no doubt, in the lives of other academics. Despite the centrality of homo economicus or Rational Economic Man in neo-classical economics theory and the centrality of the abstract, universal, bodiless researcher in the academy, the emotional labor involved in being passionate about your research and caring for family, friends, colleagues, and students is, in my experience, normal, ongoing behavior for many academics. The time has come for the caringscape of home, work, and research to be recognized and valued in the academy. With the increasing importance of higher education in the twentyfirst century, we need universities to value “being caring.”

Chapter Seven

The Emotional Space of the Doctoral Supervisory Relationship Safe to Feel Vulnerable Margaret R. Rowntree

This chapter brings the emotional space of the doctoral supervisory relationship to the forefront. For both students and supervisors, emotional experiences are always taking place, and yet are seldom discussed formally. Drawing from scholarship known as the sociology of emotions, my aim is to throw light on the way in which the tenor of this emotional space influences the student’s learning, their trajectory through the PhD, and the formation of their identity as a scholar. Describing my supervisory relationship as a “safe to feel vulnerable” space, I investigate how this tenor was produced by analyzing three memories of mine as a doctoral student using the method of memory work. I show that students can contribute to the tenor of this emotional space, despite uneven power relations in the doctoral supervisory relationship. “What’s emotion got to do with it?” some doctoral supervisors might ask rhetorically. Herein, according to sociologists of emotions, rests the roots of disregard for emotions in social life, buried in the dominance of western thought that seeks to separate mind from body, nature from culture, and private from public sphere (Holland 2007, 196). This epistemological divide is perhaps nowhere more acute than in academic life, with its traditional elevation of reason. Not just hierarchically subordinated, emotionality is feared, argues Ahmed (2004, 2). She observes that “to be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected” (2004, 3). Emotion has been inextricably associated with weakness, passivity, and femininity; it is risky (2004, 2–3). Yet what constitutes scholarly knowledge is being contested by some aca97

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demics quite passionately—that is, quite emotionally. In line with her argument, Ahmed (2004, 2) points out that the words “passion” and “passive” share the root Latin word “passio,” meaning suffering. I interrupt my argument by recalling a memory, an incident from my first year as an undergraduate social work student in 1980. It is of a time just prior to the introduction of grading of academic papers in the discipline. I have just picked up a marked paper of mine from the school office and am eager to read the feedback. I open the envelope and am shocked. My carefully handwritten paper in blue ink is blighted with big red biro rings. I imagine the flamboyant arm movements of the tutor circling the word “feel” each time I misused it as meaning “think.”

Certainly, I do not think that I have confused these words since. I refer to this memory, though, to point to the sensitivity that the word feel gives rise to in academe. Indeed, it has taken me almost thirty years to re-use the feel word, even in its proper context, and to reassess the value of feelings as a form of credible knowledge. Recently I felt particularly stirred to take action in this reappraisal of emotion when I came across the work of Raymond Williams on a “structure of feeling”: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. (Williams 1977, 32)

It seems that R. Williams thinks thoughts and feelings are more closely connected than did my tutor. So too does Skeggs (1995). As she acutely observes, “Ideas are emotional: they can be inspiring, satisfying, rage and guilt inducing, terrifying, etc. They involve you” (1995, 194). But now I return to my argument. Even based on reason alone, it can be deduced that the magnitude of a student’s investment in the PhD will produce some very strong emotions during the doctoral process. These emotions are likely to be felt most keenly in the supervisory relationship where the student’s investments are assessed and, in all probability, experienced as an evaluation of their sense of self (Green 2005, 154). No doubt, a similar emotional process involving the supervisor’s investments are likewise being evaluated. This is not to imply an equality of power in the relationship, but rather to acknowledge that emotional experiences are taking place for both parties—ones that are seldom discussed formally between supervisor and supervisee. Informally though, these emotional experiences are prime topics of private, personal conversations. Almost certainly, “a lot of emotion” is riding on the doctoral supervisory relationship.

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My aim in foregrounding the emotional space of the doctoral supervisory relationship is to draw attention to the way the tenor of it can influence the student’s learning, their trajectory through the PhD, and the formation of their academic identity. This emotional tenor, as I have already suggested, is not necessarily set by supervisors although they may have more power to influence it than students. To explore this emotional space in terms of theorizing how it relates to doctoral education, I draw on diverse disciplinary knowledge from the sociology of emotion, cultural studies, and higher educational inquiry literatures, and on an analysis of three personal memories of mine about the supervisory relationship. First though, I provide a brief synopsis of the concepts of emotion, space, and experience as I use them in this chapter. Within a sociological perspective emotions are not conceived of as innate inner feelings waiting to be expressed, but rather culturally constructed embodied complexes that arise from interdependent social relationships (Burkitt 1997, 42). In this case, the supervisory relationship is an interdependent social relationship. Quite simply, as Barbalet explains, emotions indicate “an experience of involvement” (2002, 1). Put even more simply by Skeggs, “[t]hey involve you” (1995, 194). And emotions are what move you to take action, or to become stuck (Ahmed 2004). Following Bryant and Livholts, I adopt their understanding of spaces as “meeting places formed by embodied social relations mediated by power, and . . . open to contestation, negotiation, restrictions and resistance” (2007, 29–30). Lastly, I do not understand the concept of experience as unproblematic truth but as particular knowledge marked by its origins, and thus as always partial, limited, and situated in time and place (Haraway 1991; Harding 1991). Thus, this exploration is from my perspective as a doctoral student during the latter stage of candidature in a particular time—2010—and in a particular place—the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. While I do not intend to generalize my ensuing insights to all doctoral relationships, they may well have epistemic merit for the doctoral education community, a point that I elaborate later. EMOTION, SOCIOLOGY, AND HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INQUIRY Sociology lost interest in emotions mid-way through the twentieth century, replacing them with the study of rational action (Barbalet 2006, 52–3). In this period, Hochschild claims, “social scientists avoid[ed] discussing feelings to focus more intently on cognition, increasing the scientific character of the work” (1983, 201). However, there has been a renaissance of interest in emotion, emerging in a body of work known as the sociology of emotions. Here emotions are understood as the crucial missing link between the person-

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al expression and the underlying public or social issue, and between other dualisms of western thought that seek to separate mind from body, and nature from culture (Williams and Bendelow 1998, xvii). As the medium between these dichotomies, emotions comprise both bodily sensations and cultural cognitive interpretations, combining to manifest instant experiential responses (Jagger 1997[1989]). Barbalet (2002) observes that the emotions people experience arise not from social relationships, but from the structure of the social power relations in which they are involved. He thus argues that “emotions are in the social relationship” (Barbalet 2002, 4, original emphasis). Emotions are experienced as a disposition in the body to act upon a situation through social interaction, and thus link social actor with social structure. Ahmed (2004) also makes this central point that emotions do things. It is this feature that makes the study of emotions so valuable for social researchers. In effect, emotions provide a portal into otherwise invisible power arrangements in everyday social relationships. It is, thus, a perspective that advocates bringing the body back into social analyses, arguing that embodied emotional experiences are a rich source of data for understanding the social phenomena of the world (Lupton 1998). If emotions are central in the pursuit of knowledge, as these sociologists proclaim, then there is little evidence of this theorizing in recent literature on doctoral education. Even in the higher education literature, emotions are considered a neglected dynamic in learning (Ingleton 1999, 1). Drawing on social theories of emotion, Ingleton (1999, 3) constructs a model for understanding the relationship between emotion and learning. At its basis, this framework conceives of emotions such as confidence and pride, or alternatively shame and fear, arising from the degree of solidarity or distance in the social bonds formed in past and present relationships between student and teacher, parents and peers. Ingleton (1999, 3) follows Barbalet’s (1998, 88) understanding of confidence as the “affective basis of action and agency.” Using this model to analyze data from memory work with postgraduate economics and mathematics students, Ingleton shows how pride and shame support or inhibit their learning through the social bonds between student and teacher. Her thesis is simple but clear: a person’s disposition to learn about the unknown requires confidence, and confidence emerges from solid social bonds in the learning relationship. While her focus has been on the general context of higher education, this work suggests value in paying far greater attention to the emotional dimension of specific contexts, such as the doctoral supervisory relationship. Some feminist academics have sought to highlight the emotional realm of doctoral supervision. Primarily writing in the 1990s, the focus of this scholarship, though, has been on the valorization of emotional care and labor undertaken by supervisors, and the extent to which these practices are gendered (Acker and Feuerverger 1996; Heinrich 1995; Hulbert 1994; Park

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1996). Hulbert (1994, 250) describes “emotional care” as practices at the “nurturant” rather than the “achievement” end of the continuum of supervisory functions. These practices involve notions of mentoring and advisement that are not just about advancing students’ academic prospects but about fostering nurturing relationships; the former is assumed to be more reflective of socialized masculine desire while the latter of feminine. Hulbert’s thesis is that a student’s development as a scholar is integrally linked to the affirmation they receive from a caring mentor. While the vocabulary of emotional care in doctoral supervision has waned, writers such as Acker have been interested in surmising “the combination of [social] characteristics—class, age, gender and others—that are at work to produce comfort and diffidence” in the supervisory relationship (1999, 89). As far as I can ascertain, she was the first author who touched, albeit briefly, on the issue of reciprocity in the supervisory relationship. She claims that “we need to pay more attention to the situations themselves, with their contradictory norms and negotiations around power, gender, reciprocity, and intimacy” (1999, 86). However, other writers such as Johnson, Lee, and Green (2000, 135) note the resilience of a form of doctoral supervision they consider is well captured in the motto “magisterial disdain.” Grant (2008) found strong evidence of the continuance of this “master–slave” configuration in her study of supervisor–student dialogues within humanities supervision. She argues that this “bondage” can be both productive and problematic; it can be useful for the goal of producing work of a high academic standard but not necessarily useful for the goal of producing independent work (2008, 23). The “bondage” identified here differs qualitatively from Ingleton’s (1999) “social bond” in that the student’s confidence is not necessarily bolstered. The role of doctoral supervision in the formation of the scholarly subject is a longstanding interest of Green (2005) and his associates (Johnson et al. 2000). Like me, Green sees “the practice of supervision as both embodied and situated, and as a reciprocating process although always structurally asymmetrical” (2005, 154). He further expounds: In invoking the subject of supervision, moreover, I am referring as much to the supervisor as to the supervisee: I see their relationship crucially as a speculary one—an interplay of images. Each looks at the other, and sees themselves, differently. We have all been perceived and positioned variously, fluidly, as “good” and “bad” subjects, caught between the Impossible and the Ideal. (2005, 154)

Green (2005, 154) conceptualizes supervision as “a field of identifications” compounded by complex investments by both supervisors and supervisees. Whilst he explores these investments as discursive constructions of identity, I am more interested in understanding them as emotional exchanges and in

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exploring their embodied effects within the supervisory relationship, ones that still nevertheless influence our identities as supervisors and supervisees. My focus here is as supervisee. As a woman supervisee with two women supervisors, I speculate that there is far more give and take in the emotional space of the relationship than is discussed in much of literature about doctoral supervision. Later I explore this hypothesis in an analysis of three recollections of the emotional space of my doctoral supervisory relationship. THE USE OF THE SELF AS A SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE There does seem to be an uncanny resemblance in academic traditions between the erasure of emotion and the erasure of what we conceptualize as the self, or author. In stark contrast to this purposeful elimination of the author in much conventional scholarship (Brigg and Bleiker 2010, 780), is an opposing trend toward their admission across diverse disciplines (see Brigg and Bleiker 2010; Hannon and Bretag 2010; Sparkes 2002). In some scholarship, such as feminist and postcolonial, the transparency of the self is foundational (Brigg and Bleiker 2010, 785–87). In higher education, the value of the self as a source of knowledge is acknowledged typically in the promotion of reflective practices that aim to turn experience into learning (Boud, Keough, and Walker 1985; Schön 1983). However, the most readily located literatures on the self as a source of data is in the cross-disciplinary bodies of knowledge known as autoethnography (Briggs and Bleiker 2010, 788) and memory work (Bryant and Livholts 2007, 32). Those of us who use the self as a source of knowledge argue that its legitimacy comes from revealing insights about social life that would otherwise remain untold (Brigg and Bleiker 2010, 796). As Bochner and Ellis argue, “If culture circulates through all of us, how can auto-ethnography be free of connection to a world beyond the self?” (1996, 24). MEMORY WORK In its barest form, memory work involves the writing, reading, and analysis of memories about the topic in question. The method is based on the presupposition that what is recalled is recalled because it had, and still has, significance for the recaller (Haug 1987). An example of this ongoing significance is my vivid recollection of the red rings around the word “feel” in my undergraduate student paper. For Grumet recalling a memory is “to see oneself seeing” and “to recall all of what I felt about it” (1990, 322). As Haug explains: “Our basic premise was that anything and everything remembered constitutes a relevant trace—precisely because it is remembered—for the formation of identity” (1987, 50). The method adopts:

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an active practice of remembering which takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, taking it not as “truth” but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation, to be interrogated, mined, for its meanings and possibilities. Memory work is a conscious and purposeful staging of memory. (Kuhn 2000, 186)

Memory work in the study of emotion has a rich feminist history. In a study of gender and emotion by an Australian collective, Crawford et al. describe memory work as “a method par excellence for exploring the processes of the construction of self and understanding the ways in which emotion, motives, actions, choices, moral judgements, play their part in that construction” (1992, 41). Educational researchers, too, have found the method particularly useful in furthering their understandings of the social construction of the self as student and scholar (Bird-Claiborne et al. 2009; Davies et al. 2001; Ingleton 1999). For example, Davies et al. (2001, 181) remembered significant moments of their education and their own ambivalent subjectification as they became schoolgirls. There is a strong tradition in memory work of researchers being participants in their own research. Memory work can be conducted in a group, as originally devised by Haug and her German Frauenformen collective (1987) and followed by other collectives (see Bird-Claiborne et al. 2009; Crawford et al. 1992; Davies et al. 2001), or individually as in this project and others (see Bryant and Livholts 2007; Kuhn 2007). While the protocols of the first studies in memory work involved exacting stages and collective rules for writing, readings, analysis, and subsequent rewritings of the memories, variations in these conventions are now quite commonplace. Nevertheless, Jansson, Wendt, and Åse et al. (2008, 228) suggest that three methodological decisions are particularly important for researchers: one is the theme; two is the textual practices of the writing; and three is the processes of interpretation. Given that the purpose of the method is to generate new insights and interpretations, these authors suggest avoiding writing on themes that are likely to reproduce conventional knowledge and choosing ones “displaced” from the theoretical problem under investigation (2008, 234–35). So while the investigation in this study was on the emotional space of the supervisory relationship, the themes chosen to prompt my memories were “uncertainty,” “recognition,” and “lack of recognition,” ones inspired from some of Bloch’s (2002) work on emotions in academia. Indeed, these themes prompted recollections of different significant moments during my doctoral supervisory experience. I adopted the convention of third person, a technique thought to encourage critical distance and to keep the writing descriptive rather than interpretive (Onyx and Small 2001, 776). Last was the dilemma of interpretation. According to Ingleton (n.d.), the researcher as participant is faced “with

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the complexity of moving between the subjectivity of their own experiences, emotions and interpretations, and the more distanced and academic processes of collectively theorising the meanings of those experiences.” This study followed other individual memory work in undertaking the analysis with a fellow colleague (from a different discipline) as a critical reader (see Livholts 2001, in Bryant and Livholts 2007, 33). The focus of this analysis was on the emotional tenor of the supervisory relationship, the conditions of its emergence, and its relationship to learning and scholarly identity formation. I will discuss these elements in the light of current educational understandings about learning. Uncertainty She is in the midst of analyzing data. Not drowning in it but a bit excited. It is about 3 in the morning. She is in bed with her beloved red laptop on her lap. Her beloved partner is snoring gently beside her and their beloved dog snuggled in between them. She has opened the window to let in the smells and the sounds of the night. She only does this when it rains, so it must have been raining. She imagines the frogs are croaking but can’t quite recall them. She loves this time of night and this kind of night, cocooned in her warm bed, but with the cold air numbing her nose and tips of her fingers poking out from her woolly fingerless gloves. Like most other nights at that stage of her research, she is analyzing her data—contradictory themes are emerging. Her head is hurting from all the thinking about what it means. Some ideas are forming and she dearly wants to talk them over with someone. She is used to being alone in the early hours of the morning, but there is no one available the next day or for another month or so: no one who seems the right kind of person for this kind of talking. One of her supervisors is on study leave, and the other has been very unwell for a couple of weeks already—she is also about to go on annual leave. It is frustrating, but there is no point in being frustrated. For some time she has sensed the need to set up networks outside her supervisors. On multiple occasions she has tried to set up a listening circle with fellow students, but each time is disappointed that it doesn’t quite work for her as a space for nurturing ideas. Her research topic is quite different from the others in the group. She isn’t sure what to do. Eventually it dawns on her to keep writing. She is always amazed at how ideas form and crystallize through writing. Writing is like her secret lover. She loves the way she can write words and then they seem to beg to be reworked and reworded until meaning and argument are distilled. Nowhere near ready to write the chapters of her dissertation, she decides to draft some papers of the ideas that are swirling around in her head. That way she figures, she can get feedback from other academics in her field. She feels relieved; she now has a direction. She turns off her laptop, and snuggles down to dream.

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Recognition She has two women supervisors. Thinking about the triad feels nice. She looks up the meaning of nice and it says pleasant, kind, good, polite, fine. . . . She realizes that it is the reverie that is nice, very heart-warming—the supervisory relationship feels far more vibrant than that. Somehow they have created an emotional space in which she feels safe to be vulnerable. She wonders what she means by this and whether she has specific memories as examples. She jots down some of these memories that come quickly to mind. She recalls telling one of them that she wanted to change her research topic from one based on extensive professional experience to one in which she would feel more personal connection: the supervisor responded by saying the new topic sounded far more interesting. She knows the change has risky implications for her career and tells them that it is a bold step for her: they agree. She experiments by writing in a more personal and reflexive way than she has previously: they tell her that it is just the right amount of personal content. She wants to include herself in the research as subject: no objection/no problem. She wants to review the literature as stories about women: they worry about the marker’s reaction. She explains and provides reference support: they accept. Her methodology evolves and changes: they give room for this growth. She feels no pressure to adopt their suggestions but often does. They tell her what they think of her work: she feels valued, supported, and encouraged. She hopes the markers will reflect their faith in her. Reading back over this, it does sound all very “nice”—as the dictionary says pleasant, kind, good, polite, fine. But nice just fails to capture what has felt to her to be a supervisory space where she feels safe to take risks, to experiment, to engage with the project in a creative and productive way. The word flourishing comes to mind. Yes, it feels like a flourishing emotional space for her. She wonders how her supervisors would describe this emotional space.

Lack of Recognition The markers’ comments have just come in. She realizes she has passed with revisions. There are pages of comments. She skims over them—most do not show the recognition she desperately hoped for. One of her supervisors has called her at home—she is sitting on the bed unable to answer, her words are replaced with silent tears. She feels her supervisor’s disappointment and distress in the silence too.

THE EMOTIONAL SPACE OF DOCTORAL SUPERVISION I delimit the discussion to two intertwining theoretical considerations. The first considers the tenor of the emotional space in the supervisory relationship in light of what is known about the role of emotions in learning. The second considers the supervisee’s contribution to this emotional tenor. Given

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that these two elements are theorized as in cooperation, I therefore also discuss them in combination. By setting these parameters for the terms of the discussion, I am not ignoring the contribution of other social factors such as class, gender, age, or ethnicity, nor the particular technocratic skills that might come into play by either party. Rather I am taking a new slant on what Green describes as “unfinished business, regarding supervision” (2005, 152) in order to focus on the emotional tenor of the supervisory relationship. Arguably, the tenor of the supervisory relationship in these three memories is suitably captured in my words “safe to be vulnerable.” At first glance, the absence of a supervisory relationship in the first memory suggests, by definition, an absence of emotional exchange. It is, perhaps, surprising then that despite the uncertainty of the situation it was not one in which I experienced undue anxiety. While my vulnerability is apparent, there is also a certain confidence on my part that “things” will work out. In the second memory, I am clearly appreciative of this “safe to feel vulnerable” tenor that has enabled me to learn through taking risks and pushing boundaries. As a student I cannot imagine anything more satisfying than an emotional space to flourish in my own learning, a sentiment that Whitehead elaborates upon: The atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energising as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes. Imagination . . . enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world, and it preserves the zest of life by the suggestion of satisfying purposes. (Whitehead in Ramsden 2003, 111)

Doubtless, the more interesting question is how this confident tenor in the emotional space has been nurtured. To explore this question, my colleague as critical reader and I surveyed my memories for insights into what might have contributed to this situation. Some scholars of doctoral education might read the first memory as a doctoral student learning the academic rules that disavow dependency on others and learning to become independently masterful (see Bird-Claiborne et al. 2009; Green 2005; Johnson et al. 2000). This reading would privilege the way in which I disciplined myself, managed my emotions by not allowing myself to get frustrated, and began to take up the subject position of autonomous scholar self. Our reading of it is quite different. It involves me, as supervisee, recognizing that my supervisors require leave to recuperate and to recover: it is more about an acknowledgement of their emotional requirements. Even in the bodily absence of my supervisors, this interpretation suggests that an emotional transaction is taking place, in this case from supervisee to supervisor. In the bodily presence of the supervisors, as illustrated in the second memory, the bilateral nature of the emotional transactions is clearly evident. In the third, the emotional exchange occurs in silent

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mutual commiseration. This interpretation is of course a familiar one in feminist analyses of women’s subjection into emotional caring roles (Heinrich 1995; Hulbert 1994; Park 1996). Building upon this analysis, our interest though is on the potential for reciprocity in emotional exchanges and its contribution to the social bonds of the supervisory relationship. Following Ingleton’s (1999) work on the link between confidence in learning and the solidarity of the student–educator social bond, I argue that the developing confident scholar self arises not from an emotional space based on disdainful supervisory bondage but based on close social bonds, ones that are influenced by emotional exchanges between supervisees and supervisors. Looking back now as a graduate doctor in the academy, I am even more convinced that the recognition I obtained from the solid social bonds of the supervisory relationship, and the confidence it provided me to flourish in my own learning, helped weather the anti-climax I felt in the lack of recognition from the reviewers of my thesis. If there is some veracity in this notion of emotional reciprocity, then it suggests a viable alternative to the master–slave dialectic commonly found in doctoral relationships, at least in the humanities (Grant 2008). Moreover, it suggests that the doctoral candidate has agency in contributing to the tenor of this emotional space. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have used memory work to extend current understandings of doctoral supervision to consider what I have called its “emotional space.” I have argued that the emotional tenor in this space may influence how the doctoral experience unfolds as a learning experience and how the student forms their scholarly identity. Above all, I have suggested that the student may contribute to this emotional tenor themselves in the way they approach the relationship, notwithstanding other forces at play that are too numerous to record here. While some educational critics will see using the self as a source of data as a serious limitation in this reflexive study, others will see it as a brave attempt to reveal the emotional dimension of doctoral education that is rarely open for discussion. It may be, still, risky to acknowledge emotion as a faculty that is as vital as reason in academe; it is emotion, though, that is the driving force behind the risks that are taken, and the vulnerability, the passion, and the suffering that is felt in the scholarly pursuit of knowledge. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to acknowledge Lia Bryant and Nicole Moulding who have generously agreed to the publication of my personal memories of our doctoral super-

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visory relationship. I am also grateful to Chad Morrison for his valuable contribution as critical reader.

Chapter Eight

The Liminal Space of PhD Candidature Becoming Doctor Mary-Helen Ward

From mid-2006 until the end of 2007, a group of eight women who were enrolled in PhDs using qualitative methodologies at a research-intensive university in Australia kept blogs about their experiences. They also read and commented on each other’s blogs. I was a member of the group; it was my PhD project from which I wrote an ethnographic study for my own PhD thesis. Their entwined stories reveal that undertaking doctoral work is complex, emotionally difficult, messy, and defies rational notions that underpin both the national discourse of “research training” and the institutional management of the process of becoming a doctor. In this chapter I will use writing from the blog project to expose how students experience doing a PhD, and specifically the experience of being supervised. The supervisory relationship, in place over several years and concerned with very personal issues of identity development, is a pedagogical relationship that resists managerial intrusions, although paradoxically it is partly through supervision that the university attempts to rationally manage PhD candidature. Additionally, as the purpose of the PhD is to produce original work, by its very nature the work of a PhD constantly transcends and escapes from limiting structures and boundaries. LIMINAL SPACE The concept of liminal space is used by anthropologists to describe rites of passage, most notably by Victor Turner (1969) who expanded its use to western societies, building on the earlier work of van Gennep in the study of 109

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symbolic ritual in indigenous cultures. A liminal space is usually understood as being a recognized, socially or psychologically significant, and identifiable state, during which a person is moving between two other identifiable states. In short, the person who inhabits a liminal space has only the cultural status conferred by the space; they have neither the status they had before they entered that space, nor have they yet attained the status they will have when they leave it. They are in a sense “between worlds”; they must leave the liminal space when they cross the threshold of a new phase of their life (for PhD candidates, this means graduation or discontinuing enrollment). It is a state that moves at its own pace, regardless of how much planning or work you do, because it is not a product of a rational plan (although having a rational plan may help you negotiate it). You will continue to inhabit this liminal space until you have worked out what it is you need to know or do in order to cross the final threshold. Only you will know what this will be, and no one can achieve your goal for you—although people may help, and there may be guides available, none will contain the complete answer. But end it must: the chief characteristic of a liminal space is that it is not possible to stay in it indefinitely, although it may last for years it must inevitably end one way or another. Liminal space is a useful concept for PhD candidature, because PhD students are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial” (Turner 1969, 95). The status, rights, and responsibilities of a “graduate student,” “PhD candidate,” “HDR student,” or “PhD student” may vary from one institution to another, 1 but in Australia it means the state between “not doctor” and “doctor.” “Doctor” being a lifelong state that brings status and membership to an elite group of people, although it does not, in itself, guarantee employment, wealth, or fame. To be in this liminal space in Australia means that you are assumed to be chiefly engaged in the task of writing a thesis, which reports the original research you have carried out. Talking about the liminal nature of PhD candidature, persisting as it does for years— usually in Australia without visible outward markers such as examinations, changes of subjects over semesters, or any other ritual signs of progress such as the All But Dissertation (ABD) status claimed by PhD students who have passed a series of exams in the United States—provides a useful framing for thinking about the status of PhD candidates. There are ways in which the liminality of PhD students is potentially serious. One student who was undertaking a “funded” PhD told me that when her supervisor “loaned” her to a lab at another university some years ago and she had an accident there she discovered she was not covered by existing policies or procedures concerning occupational health and safety, so was responsible for her own treatment. The postgraduate student representative organization at the University of Sydney (SUPRA) has found that students’

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liminal status can present a structural problem when students approach them to report supervisor bullying: The only bullying resolutions . . . cover staff and affiliates, not students. The University’s general resolution complaints processes . . . for “non academic grievances” and “resolution of problems” procedures for supervisory difficulties . . . are not robust enough to [ensure] that bullying complaints will be dealt with effectively and they will be protected. (Cardinali 2010, 18)

It seems that there are cases in which the students’ liminal status can put them at risk of harm in situations where they have little or no institutional power. The following quotations from the blogs of participants in my study illustrate very clearly the liminal nature of PhD candidature: they know they do not know, but they do not know what they need to know. I don’t know any other job where you work so hard to feel so dumb. (Kylie, blog post, 27 July 2006) There’s so many conflicting ideas and I feel like I’m just treading water at times, trying to cope with the massive and malevolent flow of information. (Grainne, blog post, 6 August 2006)

One of the worst things about being an HDR student is that many of the things that might help you if you knew them are somehow hidden from your view; the experience feels diffuse, riddled with myth, rumor, and false assumptions. Despite efforts by the government and by institutions to present a rational picture of what a PhD “is,” this swirling mist of inaccurate context persists, shrouding the process of obtaining the qualification in an atmosphere of mystery. Turner also postulated that a social grouping of persons or groups in a recognized liminal state—or indeed a whole society that is in a liminal period—could create a condition he called “communitas,” characterized as an “unstructured or rudimentarily structured . . . community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders” (1969, 96). I am not sure whether supervisors, deans of graduate studies, heads of department, and other academics whom students may encounter during their enrollment would describe themselves as “ritual elders,” but it is true that PhD students are inclined to assign an inordinate amount of power to their mentors and supervisors. One key informant reported that she was “absolutely sick of climbing down off the pedestal that students seem to want to put me on” (Susan, experienced supervisor and former faculty administrator, health).

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People who are engaged on the work of a PhD worldwide do feel some kind of camaraderie or fellow feeling that would fit Turner’s notion of “communitas,” despite the differences that might exist in both the kind of discipline they are working in, or in how the degree is structured, remunerated, or examined in their country. Barnacle and Mewburn (2010) explored informal face-to-face interactions between Australian PhD candidates using actor network theory. They explain what I am calling “communitas” as “scholarly identity distributed and com[ing] to be performed through . . . informal sites of learning” (2010, 433). Mewburn took this analysis further, demonstrating that the cultures of complaint that are evident whenever PhD students congregate are “surprisingly effective ways for PhD students to negotiate and manage the precarious process of ‘becoming academic’ within the contemporary academy” (2011, 1). She calls PhD comics (discussed below) “one practice for assembling a scholarly self,” and uses the “troubles talk” framing from psychological and counseling literature to demonstrate how the conversations that occur on forums associated with the comics allow students to make sense of and rehearse their present and future roles in academic culture. Mewburn has also encouraged student self-problem-solving, providing information to support students’ development of a clearer understanding of what a PhD means through her blog The thesis whisperer (Mewburn 2010–), to which I have been an occasional contributor (Ward 2010b, 2012, 2013). Within the blogging project that informed my thesis, communitas was demonstrated almost every day—as you might expect. In a sense the whole project was an extended living demonstration of how communitas can work for people in this particular liminal space. The following exchange, for example, was begun by Kylie (whose partner is also a PhD student). She demonstrated with unusually clear self-awareness how communitas was working for her. The devastating lows . . . There is a bit of an “in joke” in our house, where we refer to “the dizzying heights and the devastating lows” of PhD research. We invoke this phrase often when things are going badly or we are feeling a little glum about our research, to remind us that those feelings are all part of the journey, and are equalled out by the joyous moments of triumph you experience when things go right. This week, however, has been a new low. A most devastating low. Getting ready to go on this holiday has brought on feelings of depression (I haven’t done enough work), anxiety (I need to do more work, and fast!) and fear (I’ll never be able to finish all this when I come back . . . there’s just not enough time). Just add regret and guilt (I should never have planned this holiday), and stir. In anticipation of your kind words, can I preempt them by letting you know that I am inconsolable. Where others have tried, you will also fail. But, I am going to see if the process of writing this out helps nonetheless.

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Grmph. (Kylie, blog post, 23 August 2006)

Grainne responded with this comment: Oh, Kylie . . . and here I am, logging in because I’m about to write something very similar! I think part of it is the nature of the thing—so big, so amorphous. Try to be kind to yourself. I wish you luck. Take heart, don’t give up. (Why are consoling words always cliches?)

Kylie replied: There is a certain logic at play when PhD students talk to each other about their experience I think. Here I was, feeling very unconsolable. But Grainne has said she is feeling the same. So the logic goes—Grainne feels the same way I do, but I KNOW Grainne can get through this, so therefore I must be able to get through this. Logically, feeling awful bears little relationship to performing awfully. Still . . . I won’t put away that box of tissues just yet.

Dawn commented: Not to try and console you—but you will try and really enjoy the holiday, won’t you? Think about coming back refreshed, rejuvenated, ready to get back into it. Fantasy is good for the soul. :)

Kylie replied: Thinking about what I was going to post made me actually identify the range of feelings that I was running through. We all have “low points,” but I think it is really helpful to single out whether you are feeling depressed or anxious, because they are really two different feelings stemming from different kinds of pressures. So writing it down helped me because it forced me to name my demons (and in doing so yell, “be gone!”). And also when I post I do sometimes try to get a bit creative or infuse a little humour into the stories I tell or the feelings I describe, so in that sense the blog post is like a Riddikulus charm of sorts (know your Harry Potter, people—boggarts represent our worst fears, and are defeated by thinking about them as being funny and laughing at them). On the whole though, I’d have to say that this time the thesis crisis (no accident these words are so similar!) was tougher than the norms, and the blog only provided a brief reprieve.

On another occasion, Grainne shared her feelings about the positive aspects of doing her PhD: Esther, that is so reassuring! I’m glad you can see how much I care about all this, because sometimes I fear it doesn’t come out the right way . . . it’s so easy

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SUPERVISION For students enrolled in a PhD in Australia, an important (although certainly not the only) pedagogical relationship is likely to be with their supervisor. In the absence of formal coursework and a cohort of students, supervision remains the “primary pedogogical technology” (Johnson, Lee, and Green 2000, 136) for learning during PhD candidature. Although students learn a great deal from other people and from the situations they find themselves in during their candidature (Cumming 2007), their relationship with their supervisor will form the backbone of their experience. This relationship is the second most theorized element in the literature on the PhD in Australia, exceeded only by discussion of institutional provision for PhD students (Ward 2010a). As supervision is based in a relationship between two or more people, it resists managerial framings, as Barbara Grant discussed in her PhD thesis (Grant 2005), and participants’ blogs revealed many examples of the “messy and unpredictable” (Grant 2005, iii) nature of supervision pedagogy. Grant moved to the space of metaphor to discuss the pedagogy of the supervisory relationship; Lee and Green aim to bring together the “conceptual space of pedagogy and the productivity of metaphor” (2009, 616) in their discussion of supervision. In practice, however, the relationship is most often defined by the inherent power differentials, which means that students may find it difficult, at least initially, to understand and exercise their agency even if supervisors aim to encourage them. This was clearly shown in my blogging project. As an example, students often have a limited knowledge of the other responsibilities a staff member has, and may get very frustrated if their work is held up by apparent inactivity or lack of response from their supervisors. I see the Sups next Tuesday—will update you on that, I am sure . . . I’m not really looking forward to it—having to hear about how busy they are, how they couldn’t find the time to read my work, how I need to reduce the amount I write, how I need to make more frequent meetings with them—all the usual bullshit . . . What I want to tell them is to schedule some time in their damn calendars, sit down, and read my chapters because I need their feedback to move forward. I even wrote a letter stating I could read all my chapters in one day, with a critical eye—so if they just scheduled a Sunday or something to dedicate to me (after all I do pay thousands and thousands of dollars for them to do this), then

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it could be over with. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes . . . I am, of course, projecting . . . but basing these projections on past experience. I mean, really, I gave my Data Chapter to my Sups before summer vacation even started, and they still haven’t said a word about it. Useless, just useless . . . (Debra, blog post, 14 April 2007)

While universities may aim for “predictable outcomes and timely completions” (Grant 2005, 10), Lee and Green claim that “attempts to bring a contemporary rationality into the intensifying public discourse about supervision” are doomed because the supervisory relationship itself is a creature of “metaphor, allegory and allusion” (2009, 616). Some supervisors clearly do understand the liminal nature of candidacy, and express their awareness of it very clearly. Pedagogical basis: it’s like, having an idea of where students need to get to. And what I’ve found that every student—and you have all sorts of students— until someone’s done it they don’t know what the destination is. Sometimes I think that one of the problems that really, really good students have is that their supervisors assume that they can do it. Whereas they’ve never been there before. And I’ve had that case—where I’ve had really capable students . . . but they’ve never been there before, you know, so they don’t know where that endpoint is as well. So that’s a trap, thinking someone’s really, really capable, they don’t need the mentoring as well. Some people are new to this culture, so they have much less idea, but until anyone’s been there they don’t know where it is that they’re going. So I’d suggest having a sense of where the student’s got to go and what’s going to happen at the end and preparing your students as best you can for that . . . for want of a better word I’ll say for that moment . . . in terms of what they do, their project, how they write about it, and all those sorts of things. (interview with Peter, senior faculty administrator, social sciences)

Participants’ blogs revealed many examples of the “messy and unpredictable” (Grant 2005, iii) nature of supervision pedagogy. There were many demonstrations of the complexity of the supervisory relationship; some students require a delicate touch. I hate having my work criticised. I think I am particularly sensitive towards this in a way that could almost be called immature. I just can’t bear it because it’s so close to me—even if that criticism is mainly about the structure and order of what I am writing. I tend to overreact to criticisms—either I shelve the whole thing and procrastinate for ages, or I feel very argumentative even though I can admit that the criticism is justified. The reason why I’m thinking about this is that one of my friends has just had to change supervisors, and is having problems with her current supervisor as well, and one of the patterns that I can see is happening (and I have told her this) is that she is convinced that she knows so much about her topic area (as opposed to knowing so much about writing a thesis or about her field in general) that she is unwilling to

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Kylie wrote this comment in reply: It is tough though, getting “feedback”. It can be worse though, to get no feedback, and I have a few friends in that situation. Either not getting any feedback at all, or the feedback is glowing—very suspicious. My supervisors have always been encouraging, but I wish now they had’ve been more critical . . .

Some participants were more self-aware in their relationship with their supervisors. And on another note—I promised myself I wouldn’t bag on my Supervisors in these entries! And darn it! I already broke my promise. What is up with me? Geez—anyway, look—my Supervisors are actually not that bad. I have a tendency to look for their faults rather than see the good in all they do. I think maybe I’m just not good at taking their criticism, or something. So I try to put them down to make myself feel better. Please excuse me. They could honestly be so much worse than what they actually are. The truth of the matter is, I just want them to praise me and tell me how wonderful I am and that I am the best student they ever had and that my future will be remarkable—but they never do. So, boo hoo . . . (Debra, blog post, 23 July 2006)

Others were more robust, and responded well to a “kick up the bum.” I have had a pretty similar spiel from both of my supervisors recently given that I was really worried about not writing enough. Their general advice was that if I wasn’t thinking about the PhD at all, then the three of us needed to get concerned. As it was I was chomping at the bit to get stuff down which was a blessing when I had to write it. (Esther’s comment on a blog post by Dawn, 20 November 2006) I have a bizarre relationship with my Supervisors. . . . But I have come to terms with the perception I have of them as being not really interested in my honesty, or attempts to open up to them. When I do try to be honest, or open up to them, they just shut me down. So I give my Supervisors the quick simple answers so I can move on and move out with as little complication and confrontation as possible. This method has proven to work much better for me. (Debra, blog post, 22 July 2006)

What follows is the story of Grainne’s absent supervisor. I have presented it here because it encapsulates one of the effects of liminality for students: the difficulty of understanding your rights or the limits of your responsibility.

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This is a common situation for students, who sometimes find themselves given academic responsibilities (for example, supervising the work of honors students or inducting lab staff) as an integral part of their PhD work, without any pay or recognition. Finding herself without a structure and seemingly becoming unable to accept guidance of any kind in very complex circumstances, Grainne eventually became extremely distressed. GRAINNE’S STORY During much of the time that the blogs that informed my project were operating, Grainne’s main supervisor was absent on six months’ study leave, and no arrangement had been made for a replacement—or, possibly, no arrangement that Grainne found satisfactory. Almost as soon as the blogs began (at the beginning of her supervisor’s leave and in the middle of her first year of enrolment), she began to mention the absence; lack of effective supervision was a continuing narrative on her blog (although it was by no means all she wrote about). Instead of presenting all of the more than twenty posts and comments in which she mentioned this lack and to which others responded, I have summarized the conflicting emotions she expressed over several months. I will use two quotations to set the scene: they detail her history with her supervisor and her expectations of supervision. Yet supervision seems like such an elusive thing to describe. I know that I am really satisfied with mine (though I am lucky as I had the same supervisor for honours, and so I knew it would work well before starting the PhD), yet I can’t quite pinpoint why. Certainly my supervisor is reliable, answers emails, makes regular time for me—but I think the thing I like about my supervision sessions are, strangely, that they are quite unstructured—I always feel that my ideas are the ones that shape what I will do in the thesis, and that supervision is mainly about refining those and maybe throwing some more thoughts in and also having to spend quite some time reminding me of all the requirements and limitations and structural things. (Grainne, blog post, 21 July 2006) . . . I think I am a person who genuinely doesn’t need close supervision. This isn’t because I’m some sort of genius with an IQ of 220 or something, but I think it’s the direct consequence of having come in straight from honours. I knew what I wanted to do because it emerged out of honours. I knew how to structure my writing, and I didn’t have to relearn skills that I might have had to done if I’d been out for a few years. (Grainne, comment on a blog post by Dawn, 22 September 2006)

A few weeks later she commented that she was finding it hard to get feedback on her method and writing; her associate supervisor “isn’t really in my exact field” (7 September). A few days later, a post headed “Let us record that I am missing my supervisor” (10 September) appeared, including, “I’m

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finding that I really need advice about a lot of small things—well, things that are small now but may become not-so-small if I can’t figure them out— especially if I wind up writing poor drafts that have to be discarded.” (She ignored comments from the others that drafts are what you write in your first year.) Again, she mentioned that her associate supervisor’s advice was “too generic.” Other participants sympathized, and suggested various people that she might like to discuss the issue with, but she insisted she was fine: “I was whining about this to someone [in the faculty] yesterday who told me that I didn’t need a supervisor anyway.” An experienced voice responded to this rather shocking statement with advice to document everything, and to bring her concerns up at her progress review. Her continuing protestations that she was “fine” were overwhelmingly contradicted by her ongoing anxiety. Posts in the next few days indicated she was desperate for someone to talk to about her work. I have done some research assistant work for people, but that tends to be fairly impersonal and one can’t suddenly start ranting on about one’s work when it’s meant to be about theirs! (13 September) It’s funny, but in terms of my last post about missing my supervisor, I suspect the main reason I do miss her isn’t actually the technical supervisory stuff, but the ability to talk to someone about the whole process (this is where blogging comes in: talking to delightful people like yourself online!). My friends think it’s sweet that I’m so excited, but since they aren’t engaged in the same processes it honestly does feel very self-centred to blab on into infinity about it! (18 September)

At this point, a presumably well-meaning inquiry in the staffroom into her situation, giving her a chance to talk just as she had said she wanted to, set off a defensive blog post headed “Pleasant or Patronising????” (21 September). There was almost a touch of paranoia in this post; Grainne discerned implied criticism of her absent supervisor from a faculty member, and reacted very defensively to the feeling that someone “felt sorry for her.” Several weeks and many posts referring to her aloneness later, Grainne wrote a post entitled “In which I submit mediocre work” (6 November). A supervision meeting (presumably with her associate supervisor) had left her with the impression that she couldn’t write and was not making enough progress; she was “having a moment where I don’t feel especially competent or capable.” (At this point, less than one year into her enrollment, she had had two articles accepted for publication, had carried out several interviews to collect data and had written more than 20,000 words of her thesis.) She was confused about the direction and quality of her work, and she was overwhelmed with marking undergraduate assignments; there had been a suicide at her part-time workplace, and she was extremely short of money.

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Other participants suggested repeatedly that she find someone to talk to, but she never responded to their suggestions. While she was dealing with these stressful components to her life she received news that a close relative had gone missing in mysterious circumstances overseas, and on 21 November she received the terrible news that this person’s body had been found; they had suicided. Due to “red tape,” it took over two weeks for the body to be returned to Australia, but Grainne was still denying that she needed time off and refusing to ask the faculty (officially) for support (although she did mention in a blog post that a couple of staff members were being very supportive and that the faculty had arranged for flowers to be sent to her). In the absence of a supervisor she checked the university website for information about taking leave and learned that she would have to take a whole semester, which she did not wish to do, but appeared not to listen when other participants explained that other arrangements could be made. Her supervisor returned in January, but it seems that Grainne’s former trust in their relationship had evaporated. She was very concerned that nothing be known “officially” about her distress: “I hope that post didn’t sound like I do want my supervisors to hear all about my personal life! Because I don’t—you always want to appear as uncomplicated as possible to people who you know professionally” (21 January). “[The relative’s] death was in difficult circumstances that I am unwilling to discuss in any detail with my supervisor, for example. I did, however, feel offended when she told me to see a counsellor when I emailed her to notify her of it” (29 January). At the same time, she had been regularly seeing one of the faculty staff (who was a trained counselor) since she learned of the death, even phoning this person at home; this seemed, in her mind, to be acceptable. Having struggled through February, applying for part-time work and being very miserable, she posted the following on 1 March: Suspension I suspended my candidature yesterday. I spoke to my Associate Supervisor who was very supportive and understood my reasons. I haven’t been able to speak to my supervisor in person, although I mentioned over the phone to her the other day that this would probably take place. I’m just too tired to think about things and I’ve had it. I’m going to look for some [professional work]. I’m hoping to find some and I’ve had a couple of potential leads already. I’m quite excited about this new turn in things and think that what I actually need is a semester off so I can come back refreshed with a new attitude to it all. I spent last night celebrating about actually having made a proper decision about things. (Grainne, blog entry, 1 March)

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Grainne continued contributing to the blogs for three more months as she decided whether to continue her PhD part-time. She withdrew completely on 28 June, posting then for the last time. Grainne’s confusion and declining ability to function as a PhD student highlights the lack of clarity around the rights and responsibilities of PhD students, who are still, at least in Australia, understood to be largely dependent on their supervisors. Cumming (2007) and others have broadened our understanding of other forces at play in the formation of the scholar. But PhD candidature remains “a precarious achievement” (Mewburn 2011, 10), founded in a relationship that often veers from professional to personal, and thus resists attempts to rationalize and manage it. CONCLUSION Most Australian writing on the PhD is about institutional management of processes: overseeing supervision, meeting perceived skill gaps, monitoring progress, organizing examination. By contrast, in the liminal space of candidature students use communitas among themselves to attempt to make sense of their experiences. In this chapter I have focused on the experience of doing a PhD from the point of view of students, people living in the liminal space of candiature, the uncertainty of which continually undermines attempts by institutions and government to produce rational accounts of the process of “research training.” NOTE 1. I have not used the North American term “graduate student” in this chapter, because Australian institutions now offer a wide range of vocationally based postgraduate degrees by coursework. To distinguish these students from those undertaking research degrees, I have used both “HDR student” (which means higher degree by research student, and includes those doing masters degrees by research) or, more specifically, “PhD student.”

Chapter Nine

Conclusion Walking on the Grass Eighty-Four Years Later Katrina Jaworski and Lia Bryant

Supervising and writing doctoral dissertations is a sticky business. Sticky because, as the chapters in this book have collectively demonstrated, supervising and writing doctoral dissertations for women is infused with social meanings, costs, and tensions. Language works as an intersubjective form of power in this business, through which “emotions align some bodies with others, as well as stick different figures together, by the way they move us” (Ahmed 2004, 195). If supervising and writing doctoral dissertations works, it is because such working is attached to some emotions yet not others, made manifest through the way the women felt stuck to their students, stuck to their thesis thanks to past histories, memories, and experiences invoked in the present. Eighty-four years later, women do walk on the grass without attracting outrage. But this walking is hardly straightforward precisely because it still remains at odds with the male norm governing western universities. This norm is not necessarily about men per se, but rather about the values, ideals, and assumptions informing how one is to supervise or write doctoral dissertations, and in the process train, become, and feel like an academic worker and scholar. In this sense, knowledge production vis-à-vis thesis supervision and writing is not a disembodied activity, removed from questions of gender, ethnicity, class, age, and sexuality. Knowledge production is still articulated by hegemonic understandings of autonomy, knowledge, and power. Emotions and affective states such as risk, fear, shame, trust, honor, and care are still the antithesis of what it means to be a “good” academic because of the way scholars in this book had to work with and against feelings of failure, potential rejection, and vulnerability. At the same time, these emotions constituted 121

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the invisible emotional labor the women performed. In fact, no thesis or academic identity could be produced without emotional labor, and this often intensified the investments these women made in the production of knowledge. The lesson here is that ignoring the weight of emotional labor will work against the very people seeking to achieve what neo-liberal universities expect them to achieve. Furthermore, engendering in academia is a process that is taken for granted, and this is problematic as it is these gendered conditions that shape academic identities. This, we think, is how neutrality in academia works and reproduces the status quo. Still further, the “abstract bodiless worker” ideal was never present in academic women’s pursuit of a doctorate or in their supervisory practices (Acker 1990). Undoubtedly, supervising and writing a doctoral thesis requires many skills. Yet skills, we are arguing here, are hardly technical or neutral. If the language of skills continues to be used, then, as this collection has illuminated, we need to rethink the effects of this language especially if it renders invisible the way knowledge is produced through gender. It would be foolish to ignore the fact that skills turn out to be embodied, shaped by histories and experiences that compelled the women to supervise and exercise degrees of care for their doctoral scholars whose writing took place alongside caring responsibilities, challenges, and liminal states of being. In this sense, embodiment can be seen as constituted through corporeal generosity (Diprose 2002), or ways in which our embodied selves are part of fostering rather than closing off differences as they take shape in the social world and, here, the research worlds we write about. This kind of generosity is at the heart of becoming, namely, transgressing boundaries and transforming one’s sense of academic identity. In the end, fleshy gendered bodies rather than merit recorded on academic documents are the markers of success or failure. In light of the above comments, in this concluding chapter we will summarize what the book has established as a whole, and what it has accomplished in relation to existing gaps in knowledge about the art of producing dissertations in women’s lives. However, useful as such conclusions are, they seem unfinished and incapable of answering seriously questions such as: why does this matter? Why should anyone else but the women in this book care? With these questions in mind, we will also offer theoretical implications of what we have achieved here, hoping that some of our thinking can instigate renewed practices of supervising and writing doctoral dissertations—practices that take the role of gender and emotions to heart. AFFECTIVE ACCOMPLISHMENTS AGAINST THE GRAIN How has this collection intervened in the way we think of supervision and doctoral scholars? In the introductory pages of this book, we examined what

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the existing literature says about the neo-liberal university which many women in Australia have little choice but to be part of. Of course this is problematic not only in terms of the masculine values placed on how we are to supervise or complete doctoral candidacy. This is problematic because research is driven by market requirements; we are encouraged to choose our topics freely when in fact this freedom to choose is framed by whether an area is well-funded or severely underfunded, as is the case for many working in the humanities and social sciences. This is also problematic because proponents of market-driven research too often forget that ideas as much as products or patents shape the market. Intentional or not, the repercussions of this way of viewing research incite care-less cultures of research (Lynch 2010), nourished by the level of carelessness supervisors are encouraged to exercise through management, and in turn doctoral scholars learn to exercise later on. This kind of care-less culture disrespects boundaries, expecting academic workers to work across public and private spheres. The often-heard emphasis on nurturing research cultures becomes nothing more than lip service, hiding the realities women in academia face on a daily basis regardless of whether they give in to such realities or resist them. The women in this book had something to say about the practical realities of this so-called freedom to choose. First and foremost, this freedom for them was value laden. Making choices about how to supervise or write a doctoral dissertation was indeed deeply gendered. There was no way of escaping this reality, because gendering as a process of materializing gender made certain affective states and practices of doing a PhD more visible. Importantly, making choices required emotional work, which generated a range of affects such as the need to prove oneself or to do a good job, let alone to deal with feelings of pride, fear, trust, and disappointment. When choices were exercised, these depended on levels of reciprocity exercised between the women and others in their lives. For the women in this book, the freedom to choose research topics in the neo-liberal university was as much an emotional enterprise as it was intellectual. The women constantly managed time constraints, pressures to supervise timely completions in a satisfactory manner, the conditions of the university environment as a place of work and study, and the kinds of personal investments associated with what they felt was adequate throughout the processes of supervising and writing. So if there was freedom to choose, this freedom was constrained and conditioned by gender, class, ethnicity, age, and sexuality. Conditioned as freedom is, our book has shown that the women found ways to resist the abstract, bodiless academic worker ideal. While we will examine resistance in more detail later on, for now it is worth saying that emotional labor invested in supervising and writing doctoral theses enabled these women to resist the care-less culture of the neo-liberal university. This was precisely because in various ways they insisted on caring about how they

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supervised or committed themselves to writing their thesis, alongside uncertainty, anger, or fear of humiliation. For lack of a better expression, what “saved” them, what kept them going, was how they supervised or wrote their theses and how they proceeded to work through their challenges. This how, namely, the manner of doing things, was deeply embodied, where the mind and body worked in concert. Thus, if there is a freedom to choose, this freedom is not simply about the kinds of research that gets done in universities. It is also about choosing to care and make decisions in productive ways, enabled rather than disabled by the gendering of emotions. The supervisory relationship is essential to the well-being and progress of doctoral scholars. This relationship is still modeled by the master–apprentice narrative, where the active and masterful master or supervisor/advisor watches or manages the student’s progress, and the compliant and passive apprentice learns a set of research skills while they write their thesis. Based on technical rationality, this model not only is masculine or eerily panoptican in terms of how power is exercised, but also presumes the Cartesian distinction between mind and body (Grant 1999; Lee and Green 2008; Lynch 2010). The experiences and memories of supervisors in this book have shown an entirely different experience. Supervising requires one to exercise a kind of social imaginary—the ethic of social flesh—which attends to student needs without ever losing focus on the wider political landscape of the higher education sector (Beasley and Bacchi 2007). In this sense, supervising can be named as a feminist project because the personal and political are brought into action. This does not mean that only women supervisors engage supervision as a feminist project. Rather, it means being attuned to how gender, class, and ethnicity might affect the way supervisors listen to, advise, and guide their students. For the women in this book, it meant living with the fact that at some point you will be adored and hated by your students. It meant caring enough to challenge your students to meet the required standards of collecting data, analyzing, theorizing, and above all writing. It meant not being nice when you are implicitly and explicitly expected to be nice and motherly because you are a woman supervisor. It meant being bound to one’s sense of honor and pride—affective states that instigated pedagogical practices for better and sometimes for worse. Building trust based on caring steers clear from the dichotomous relationship of supervisor–student. As the chapters across the two parts showed, the boundary between supervisor and student was often blurred. This was not because women supervisors cared, but also because their pedagogical practices created room for debate, reflexivity, and openness toward feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty. In a similar vein, doctoral scholars blurred the boundary between supervisor and student by publishing with senior academics and by questioning what it was the supervisor needed to provide toward the development of the thesis. By working against the supervisor–student

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dichotomy, our chapters brought reflexivity to the fore by focusing on the nitty-gritty of everyday experiences, on which power relations shape how one is to supervise or write a doctoral thesis. In other words, this book has extended the focus on the personal, by locating the personal in the micropolitics of everyday life to highlight how these politics affect scholarly becomings. And here lies an important lesson. To turn the words of neo-liberal styles of management against itself, if we are to be efficient and pragmatic throughout our supervising or writing, then this so-called efficiency must be embodied by affective rather than instrumental pedagogies. Supervision and supervisory relationships are ongoing power-based accomplishments, shaped by reiterative practices attuned to recognizing and recontextualizing intersubjective exchanges between supervisor and doctoral scholar. BRINGING THE RATIONAL ACADEMIC SUBJECT INTO ACCOUNT From the beginning, in this book we aimed to demonstrate the extent to which the sticky business of knowledge production is forever layered by personal histories, memories, and experiences. We believe we have achieved this as indeed these layers are at the center of becoming or training a scholar. It is clear that women’s identities in this book were as much under construction as were their supervising and writing. In so doing, the rational academic subject position, also referred to as the abstract and bodiless worker ideal, was brought into account precisely because this ideal failed to work in the professional and personal realities the women faced. This challenge was sustained in different and nuanced ways, which at this juncture is worth further analysis. Part 1 of the book demonstrated that each supervisor engaged with supervising in an emotionally reflexive and ethical manner. By ethics, we are not simply referring to practices, which are either good or bad. Rather, here we are thinking of Foucault’s (1985, 1986a) emphasis on practices aimed at taking care of the self, which then become the basis of knowing one’s self. In the context of this collection, ethics worked in an interesting manner because the women supervisors considered themselves responsible caretakers of their doctoral scholars. Although morally invested in the desire to do a good job or to belong in academia, women supervisors connected their practices of supervision to their senses of self as professional academic workers and intellectuals. Practices of supervision were hardly neutral or simply a set of skills deployed to manage doctoral scholars efficiently. Instead, their practices generated a series of intersubjective affects that sometimes put the women on the spot, compelling them to question their right to supervise and the way they supervised on a daily basis.

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Bryant’s chapter 2 canvassed a deep sense of ethical investment in supervising through the double lens of gender and class. She described how honor and belonging as embodied experiences can translate into feelings of discomfort because she, as much as her students, did not slot easily into the masculine, white, and middle-class norm of academic life. Bryant showed us that there is always room for supervising that is thought and felt through in a reflexive manner in ways that meet the needs of doctoral students despite larger structural constraints built into the current higher education climate in Australia. Transgression and transformation as intimate emotional states, Bryant also showed us, are central to pedagogical skills required to supervise students to completion. What is valuable about Bryant’s analysis is that she named the emotional landscape of supervision as something that is contoured by the communications and miscommunications between supervisor and student, weaved by enthusiasm, happiness, self-assurance, and confidence as much as anger, shame, failure, annoyance, inadequacy, and frustration. Rather than the focus of the thesis work, these affective states of being shape power relations between supervisor and student. Chapter 3 by Beasley and Jaworski dealt with the power of ethics by never letting the neo-liberal ethos of knowledge production off the hook. Focusing on gender, and elements of class and age, Beasley in particular framed social flesh as a political imaginary that connects people, acknowledges interdependence, and fully recognizes the need to be passionate for the practical purpose of working through a set of problems which not all supervisors can tackle. They discussed interdependence vis-à-vis care and trust, not as a source of weakness but as a source of strength, without denying moments of vulnerability. There was no sanitization of feelings in this chapter because anger, disgust, and disappointment were talked about in an open and honest manner. Experienced in deeply embodied ways, such a range of emotions compelled the two women to question themselves in ways their male colleagues maybe never do, or at least not in the same way. Importantly, Beasley and Jaworski demonstrated a degree of pleasure in resisting the neo-liberal model of supervision. It turns out that developing your sense of who and what you are as an academic, intellectual, and supervisor is part of the survival strategy both women pass on to their students. They see recovering joy and maintaining practices of creative freedom through writing as being at the heart of self-preservation in the face of constant pressure to do things faster and better. Gill’s chapter 4 took the focus on power relations in a different direction. Here, the voices of her students took center stage by examining what it meant for them to question their right to speak alongside research data. Like Bryant, Gill demonstrated that the personal and the political are weaved together, and here this was in relation to gender, ethnicity, and age. This weaving informed Gill’s recognition of her students’ degrees of emotional investments in their

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work. Gill’s chapter demonstrated the extent to which supervision for women is a reiterative process, where the pull between autonomy and dependence guarantees rather than forecloses deep respect for data and research. Thesis supervisors are sometimes riddled with doubts and angst precisely because so much is at stake, especially since a lot of emotional labor must be performed to overcome the fake divide between researcher and research topic. In this sense, supervision for Gill was not about friendship, but instead about having room to debate and question student research practices without ever losing sight of the bigger picture: the thesis indeed must cut the mustard. The focus of the book shifted in part 2 when we presented women doctoral scholars’ memories and experiences of writing their dissertations. From the beginning, it became very clear that writing was caught up with a range of practices and responsibilities associated with language, caring for others, working through one’s sense of vulnerability, and dealing with issues of supervision in that liminal space, written into and between the lines of doctoral theses. All of the chapters in this section challenged and suspended the abstract, bodiless worker ideal and the Cartesian mind–body dichotomy. The chapters demonstrated that writing, thinking, and feeling cannot be separated precisely because of the interdependent nature of one’s progress throughout the period of candidature and because writing, thinking, and feeling are entwined with becoming a scholar while fighting tides of doubt, lack of selfworth, shame, or lack of constructive communication from supervisors. Writing a thesis, the chapters also demonstrated, was a way of identifying or naming emotions and, as a result, exercising agency. Women’s experiences and memories illuminated the blurred boundary between student and supervisor not simply because they were reflexive about the their relationship with their supervisors but also because the personal is indeed political. Writing, in this sense, was not simply a physical matter of sitting down and writing words on a page. Rather, writing became enmeshed in their lives. In some sense, these women embodied something about their thesis writing and this too proved to be an ethical and emotional venture. Chapter 5 by Jaworski reminded us that some women doctoral scholars feel stuck between languages, especially when their gendered identities are articulated through ethnicity and bilingualism. Being stuck between two languages, Jaworski argued, led her to see writing as an ethical practice through which language worked as a form of power. Importantly, she was attached or stuck with a set of emotions caught in time, which turned out to be central to her intellectual endeavors during her candidature. Even though visible and tangible, writing for Jaworski was always an invisible emotional labor, rooted in shame, humiliation, and determination, which instigated a sense of reflexivity and agency in her work. Situating her life, work, and research in a landscape of caring for her husband, children, and frail elderly residents while she worked as a part-time

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nurse, Adams’s chapter 6 showed different shades of determination. Feeling herself to be at the margins of academia because of her age, class, caring responsibilities, and research topic (feminist nursing economics), Adams showed us that caring was intertwined with writing a thesis not simply because she was writing on nurses’ caring labor and work, but also because she cared for a range of people while she cared for her thesis writing and for publishing her research. It is safe to say that as a wife, mother, and worker, Adams almost literally embodied her thesis and in so doing challenged the mind–body dichotomy. Her chapter illuminated that writing is embedded in a caringscape demonstrating, in a similar vein to Beasley and Jaworski, that we need an ethic of care in academia. In this way, we can understand and appreciate the unsaid, the understated in research and in life. In the end, for Adams the interdependent nature of writing her thesis crisscrossed with being a “good” woman, a “good” mother, a “good” nurse, and a “good” doctoral scholar. It also crisscrossed with her children growing up and obtaining their tertiary education, and with a sick husband who sadly passed away toward the end of her candidature. In chapter 7, Rowntree too challenged the power of the mind–body dichotomy by questioning the separation of thinking from feeling, having discovered early on in her tertiary studies that somehow thinking and feeling are not meant to co-exist. Rowntree situated the delicious pleasure of writing, alongside tensions between feeling and thinking the relationship with her supervisors. As Rowntree argued so aptly, writing a doctoral dissertation was bound to the tenor of the supervisory relationship. In her case, this relationship opened up a space in which she could feel safe to express vulnerability. This space was important because, in a similar vein to Gill’s chapter, it embodied reciprocity, which enabled her ideas to crystallize as she experimented with different forms of writing. This space was also important because it illuminated Rowntree’s sense of agency, replete with satisfaction but also bitter disappointment about not receiving the recognition she desired from her examiners. It is commonly assumed that by and large doctoral writing is a lonely enterprise. Indeed writing tends to be solitary, and it is in this space that doctoral scholars are likely to come face to face with their feelings about their work. Ward’s chapter 8 revealed a very different side to the practice of writing. Drawing on online blog content, Ward argued that women doctoral candidates occupy a liminal space. Identifying it as a space in which a person has a shifting status, akin to those living in communitas, Ward argued that practices of writing a doctoral dissertation are bound to the power relationship between supervisor and student, constituted by students’ conflicting emotions tied to the need to have their work read and approved by their supervisors. Interlaced with women’s struggles over financial security and pressures to perform well as candidates, this chapter demonstrated that to be

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in a liminal space you have to write. With some exceptions, to get out of the liminal space you also have to write. And in so doing, you can never function as an atomistic individual. Rational academic subjectivity is an ideal that never works in practice. But let us not forget about the significance of memory work in the task of bringing the rational academic subject into account. Collectively, the chapters in this book drew upon memory work in various ways. Bryant used her own poetry; Beasley and Jaworski examined the relationship between their autobiographies and the neo-liberal model of supervising in an interview; Gill drew on memories of her students challenging the use of “I” in research; Jaworski utilized specific memories, as did Adams and Rowntree; Ward offered snapshots of being in a liminal space based on blog entries. In this sense, writing and analyzing histories, memories, and experiences not only called into question the abstract, bodiless academic worker ideal but also opened up a space in which recalling a range of feelings and affective states was legitimate and relevant. In light of this, we want to suggest that rationalized forms of academic subjectivities can retain and exercise their power precisely because methods of analyzing them do not seriously take into account intersubjective realities of supervising and writing doctoral dissertations. Following the arguments made by Law (2004) about research methods in social sciences, we also want to suggest that research methods may in fact frame out gender in significant ways through which supervision and doctoral scholarship come across as devoid of gendered norms when in fact they are saturated by them, further articulated by class, ethnicity, age, and sexuality. It is not surprising, then, that some subjectivities are recognized and valued, yet others are not. In a somewhat Foucauldian fashion, it is time to take stock of not only what we come to know of women supervising and writing doctoral dissertations, but also how we come to know their complex realities. This book is one such instance and an invitation to further research. THEORIZING WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES OF SUPERVISING AND WRITING DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS Given what we have discussed in this chapter so far, we want to propose sticky ethics as a potential framework for understanding and challenging further the power of the supervisor–student dichotomy in higher education. By saying this, we do not mean that there is no such thing as a supervisor or an emerging scholar who is yet to learn how to operate in the academic world, or that either of the sides must have full control at all times. Rather, we want to rethink the supervisor–student dichotomy in ways that do not involve the supervisor behaving like a traditional boss. The dichotomy is less than likely to go away. Yet we can still do something differently within it,

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placing emotions at the center of our doings. Sticky ethics is the answer at this point. As alluded to earlier, because emotions shape our actions, our experiences, personal histories, and memories, ethics are likely to be saturated with emotions and feelings. In other words, affective states of being are generated by a set of effects in supervising and writing doctoral theses, all of which, in one way or another, are bound to feelings. Whether we like it or not, certain affects stick to us, and these are likely to impact on our supervisory or writing practices in the future. Ethics comes into the picture if, as articulated earlier, we consider ethics as practices that take care of one’s self in order to know one’s academic identity. Clearly, this labor is intersubjective rather than individual. It involves an ethic of care toward oneself and toward another. Keeping this ethic at the forefront of our practices of supervising and writing doctoral thesis may very well alter how we feel as academic workers and scholars trying to rise above endless piles of work. How might we think through sticky ethics in the context here? Our response is ethics become sticky because of the performative nature of supervising and writing doctoral dissertations. To follow Ahmed’s (2004) use of Butler’s (1990, 1993, 1997) work on performativity in theorizing emotions, what is of concern here is the doing of emotions. In this way, supervision or writing is not simply a technical knowledge base and skill set. Instead, supervision or writing are performative in that they cite and reiterate past practices in the present, thus calling the transcendental “I” in academia into question. If this pregiven “I,” in the form of rationalized academic subjectivities, exists in the first place, it is because it relies on other, often invisible givens. Ahmed’s reading of feelings highlights our take on the performativity of sticky ethics when she argues that: Not only do we read such feelings, but also how the feelings feel in the first place may be tied to past history of readings, in the sense that the process of recognition (of this feeling, or that feeling) is bound up with what we already know. (2004, 25, original emphasis)

As was evident in some of the chapters, past autobiographies came into question when some of the women began to supervise. For others, specific emotions and desires shaped the present landscape of their supervision. Likewise, for some of the doctoral scholars, writing their thesis was performatively shaped by the past and present as multiple languages or responsibilities often enmeshed themselves with practices of writing. It is well and good to theorize new ways of framing doctoral supervision and study, but what can this framing really do? How can sticky ethics challenge the power of dichotomies such as supervisor–students, mind–body, rational–emotional? What might our readers take from this analysis and in

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what ways will the content of this book be useful to their daily joys and challenges of supervising and writing? First and foremost, we are arguing that sticky ethics are performatively embodied by an emotional reciprocity. That is, supervision is a site of emotional reciprocity, which shapes how doctoral students might come to write their theses. What this means is that some supervisors may have equations on how to supervise. At the same time, their equations will remain attuned to student needs and, importantly, the role of emotions in the process of facilitating, like coaches, the development of doctoral scholars. Emotional reciprocity in this sense is one form of passionate activism where supervisors can impart their knowledge and wisdom, which can then be passed on to future generations. Emotional reflexivity is not simply a matter of reflecting on or acknowledging the past to challenge the traditions of the present. Mary Holmes challenges this largely cognitive and disembodied approach by firstly acknowledging that in sociology reflexivity refers to “practices of altering one’s life as a response to knowledge about one’s circumstances” (2010, 139). This is most evident in the sociological work of Giddens (1990) and Beck (1992) among others. Holmes (2010) does not deny the importance of cognitive reflexivity in that it offers people a sense of control when they feel disempowered. Yet for Holmes emotions are at the core of the reflexive process because “they are integral to reasoning and reasoning involves invoking and engaging with embodied and abstract versions of a generalized other” (2010, 147). So if we can change something in the present, it is because we are guided by “real and imagined dialogue with what others think, do and feel” (Holmes 2010, 147). In this sense, interpreting each other’s emotions is a necessary task and it helps if one is good at it. However, as Holmes reminds us, Being good at emotion work does not automatically bring social success, because emotional reflexivity is not simply a matter of individuals exercising skills. Emotions are done in interaction with others; they involve bodies, thought, talk and action. Feelings make embodied social selves and selves and lives are made within the social constraints of place and time. (2010, 149)

Holmes’s (2010) point is crucial here because it reminds us that interdependence contours sticky ethics. It is also crucial because, we think, it has the potential to instigate affective pedagogies of supervision—pedagogies essential for enabling doctoral scholars to develop their identities as writers as much as academics. In this way, reflexivity is hardly a fancy thinking exercise that makes us feel better about the present. Instead, reflexivity can do things. Affective pedagogies, namely, the recognition of emotions in how we guide doctoral scholars throughout their research and writing, might very

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well be the saving grace for a lot of doctoral students themselves. Whether we experienced it ourselves, or whether we read it in extant literature, we know that the doctoral experience is fraught with tensions and challenges alongside bursts of joy or satisfaction with one’s writing. Based on sticky ethics, affective pedagogies might very well help our students to accept that at some point in their candidature they will end up feeling as if they have become undone, with something about their sense of identity unraveling before their very eyes, for example when they cannot write what they mean or when analysis is lost in thick descriptions and their supervisors are telling them to analyze more and they have no idea what this might mean. As difficult as it can get, keeping company with, and working through, our undoings may offer opportunities to be redone rather than stay undone. This is particularly important for those who truly feel stuck in that liminal or interstitial space of development as an intellectual and academic worker. What is important about becoming undone is that it can become a source of strength and resilience rather than a constant source of vulnerability. Once again, Ahmed’s work applies to the point we are making here when she says: “In order to move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must act on them, an action that requires, at the same time, that we do not ontologise women’s pain as the automatic ground of politics” (2004, 173). In this sense, affective pedagogies might generate hope for a better future for women who supervise and those who will take up doctoral study. But hope is not a static state of being. Rather, as Ahmed stresses, “hope requires that we must act in the present, rather than simply wait for a future that is always before us” (2004, 184). Resistance, we think, is the home for hope. Of course resistance is crucial not only because it becomes a source of imagining a different tomorrow, but also because it has the potential to challenge practices of power in tertiary institutions. Having said this, a question remains: what hope is there for resistance given that we are governed by neo-liberal models of management, which seem to manage every inch of academic (and even private) lives? If we take a bird’s eye view of the way women have negotiated their experiences and identities in this book, we want to suggest this. Yes, there are structures of doctoral education we have to operate or function in. We cannot avoid them, and most of us will not be able to change them quickly, if ever. However, how we go about operating and functioning, and what the content of our operating is, is still up to us, or within our reach. How might this hopeful how of operating and the content of doctoral education be operationalized? By creating and sustaining practices of creative freedom. In practical terms, it means creating pockets of time and space where we can write. This is important for doctoral scholars, as it is important for their supervisors. In this sense, writing can be seen as part of the care of the self—a space where we can crystallize our ideas, overcome our fears,

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understand our desires to be a scholar in the first place, learn to feel less guilty, and develop our sense of the kernel that will stay with us throughout our academic working lives. Ironically, creative practices of freedom will enable us to perform and do what our institutions demand us to do, but with one difference—we can do it with joy. Furthermore, creative practices of freedom will create pockets of time where our desires to be the kinds of scholars we want to be will have room to breathe, to flourish. Establishing a writing communitas might be the right thing to do. Agency is possible, but it depends where it is coming from. From the way each of the women went about their sticky business of supervising and writing doctoral theses, it is clear that this agency comes from intersubjective and inter-corporeal sources. SOME FINAL THOUGHTS Heidegger (1971) once thought that poetry invoked what is impossible to say, to name, thereby bringing the unspoken into nearness, into being. This book has undoubtedly brought emotions into nearness, helping us to establish that women’s walking on the grass decades later is more like trotting rather than strolling through the institutional pathways of academia. What Heidegger never would have predicted in poetry, let alone in other areas of analysis, is that emotional experiences are inscribed on women’s bodies in and through their efforts to become and remain academics, to be scholars. This means that women’s bodies are not rendered separate from their minds as if their bodies have little to do with rationality, let alone thinking. It means that supervising and writing doctoral theses, as canvassed through the experiences of the women in this book, is about desire, made manifest in feelings of self-worth, shame, pride, anger, joy, and the need to belong against the odds. The stories and experiences of the women have furthered understanding of the emotional politics of gender in the production of knowledge vis-à-vis supervising and writing dissertations. These stories and experiences also have extended our understandings of the mundane, everyday, messy practices of academic work, and how this work is inescapably emotional. And finally, these stories and experiences have demonstrated the extent to which emotions are critical to the production of ideas, of knowledge, and importantly to the gendering of higher education. But wait, there is another final point we want to make. The voices of the women in this book, collectively, are an antithesis to the thesis of the rationalized masculine culture of academia. These voices tell us that supervising and writing doctoral dissertations could never happen without this antithesis. In other words, the antithesis in the virtue of being a critically engaged woman scholar is crucial to desiring, to becoming scholars or remaining as such. This becoming thus opens up spaces for doing things differently,

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through supervision, through writing. Writing about writing decades earlier, Helene Cixous captured the feeling of our final thoughts when she said: “It is this hunger for flesh and for tears, our appetite for living, that, at the tip of forsaken fingers, makes a pencil grow” (1998, 61).

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Index

Academic capitalism, 4, 5. See also entrepreneur Academic cultures, 7 Academic identities, 3, 121 Academic labor, 41 Academic writing, 3, 15 Ahmed, S., 3, 13–14, 24, 25, 28, 72, 73, 77, 78–79, 79, 97, 99, 121, 130, 131 Autobiographical, 16, 35, 36, 60, 61, 62, 63 Becoming academics, 3, 15 Belonging, 15, 21–22, 23, 28, 29, 77, 126 Blog, 15, 16, 17, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 119–120, 128–129 Careers, 49 Care-less, 6, 122, 123 Care work, 2, 6, 92, 93 Caringscapes, 86, 94, 96, 127 Cartesian, 1, 6, 8, 92, 93, 94, 124, 127 Doctoral journey, 3, 17, 32. See also thesis journey Doctoral scholar, 6–7, 8–9, 10, 11, 12, 15–16, 17, 22–23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32–33, 122, 124, 125, 127–128, 129, 130, 131; doctoral candidate, 3, 32, 107, 128

Doctoral study, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 13, 14, 15, 21–23, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33, 131 Doctoral writing, 16, 128. See also writing doctoral dissertation Embodiment, 27, 46, 94, 122; disembodied, 3, 16, 36, 47, 49, 86, 121, 131; embodied, 10, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 26, 28, 32, 41, 46, 48, 51, 73, 77, 79, 81, 94, 99, 101, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 127–128, 130–131; fleshy bodies, 122; gendered bodies, 122 Emotions, 1, 3–4, 6, 11–12, 13–15, 15, 16, 17, 21, 23, 24–25, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 41, 42, 45, 71, 72–73, 75, 77, 82, 87, 97, 98–100, 103, 105, 106, 117, 121, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129–130, 130–131, 131, 133; affect, 3, 15, 40, 45, 72–73, 73, 75, 78, 81, 82, 88, 93, 97, 98, 100, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–126, 129, 130, 131; feelings, 13, 21, 22, 23, 24, 24–25, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 62, 63–64, 66, 72, 73, 80, 86, 96, 98, 99, 112, 113, 121, 123, 124, 126, 128–129, 130, 131, 133 Emotional labor, 16, 25, 72, 86–87, 88, 95, 96, 121, 123, 126–127 Emotional politics, 4, 27, 133 Entrepreneur, 4–5

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Index

Ethics, 72, 75, 77, 79, 81, 125, 126, 129–130, 130, 131 Gender and class, 14, 15, 22, 27, 126 Gender equality, 92 Gender equity, 2 Higher education, 3, 4, 14, 21, 22, 25, 27, 29, 44, 86, 96, 99, 100, 102, 124, 126, 129, 133 Honor, 15, 21–22, 23, 25, 29–30, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 60, 121, 124, 126 Identity, 9, 12, 15, 17, 32, 37, 42, 50, 51, 61, 71, 82, 88, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 107, 109, 112, 121–122, 130, 131 Inter-subjectivity, 12 Language, 7, 12, 13, 16, 27, 28, 35, 39, 40, 41, 42, 46, 47, 57, 59, 61, 71–72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 90, 121, 122, 127, 130 Liminal, 17, 109–110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 120, 122, 127, 128–129, 131 Marginalize, 7, 29, 32, 33, 90; Marginalization, 33 Methodological, 59, 61, 62, 72, 103 Methods, 10, 16, 80, 129; poetry, 15, 23–24, 24–25, 27, 129, 133; life writing, 15, 23; memory work, 97, 100, 102–104, 107, 129; autoethnography, 22, 23, 24, 57, 102 Middle class, 1, 21, 23, 27, 27–28, 28, 30, 32, 91, 126 Neo-liberal Universities, 2, 4, 5–6, 22, 23, 25, 121, 122–123 Performativity, 72, 130; performatively, 16, 72, 81, 82, 130 Professions, 7 Rational, 1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 12–13, 14, 16, 17, 25, 35, 85–86, 93, 96, 99, 109, 111, 115, 120, 124, 125, 128–129, 130, 133 Reay, D, 21, 27, 28, 30–31 Recognition, 9, 41, 59, 103, 105, 107, 116, 126, 128, 130, 131

Reflexivity, 7, 11, 45, 46, 51, 79, 81, 124, 127, 131 Researcher, 5, 8–9, 17, 38, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 96, 99, 103, 126; researched, 65, 66 Skeggs, B, 13–14, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 98, 99 Social flesh, 16, 35, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45–46, 47, 48, 124, 126 Subjectivites, 15, 23, 26, 28, 61, 62, 129, 130; gendered and classed subjectivities, 15 Supervision, 3, 4, 8, 10–11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21–23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32–33, 35, 36, 38–39, 39, 41, 44, 47, 55, 57, 63, 64, 66, 67–68, 94, 100–101, 105, 107, 109, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125–127, 129, 130, 131, 133; supervisee, 98, 101, 105, 106–107; supervising, 3, 16, 17, 25, 35–36, 43, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 64, 116, 121, 122, 123–124, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 133; supervisor, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10–11, 12, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32–33, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 55, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66–68, 89, 97, 98–99, 100–101, 101, 103–104, 104, 105, 105–106, 106–107, 109, 110–111, 111, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118–119, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125–127, 128, 129–130, 130, 131 Thesis, 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 16, 22, 29, 36, 37, 38, 45, 48, 49, 55, 56–57, 57–59, 59, 60, 60–61, 61–62, 63–64, 64–65, 66, 67–68, 71, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121–122, 123–124, 126, 126–127, 127, 130, 133; theses, 16, 49, 55, 57, 68, 75, 123, 127, 130, 132, 133 Thesis journey, 59 Transformations, 31, 33 Woolf, V, 1, 17, 27 Working class, 15, 16, 21–22, 23, 27, 27–28, 30–31, 31, 32, 33 Writing doctoral dissertation, 3, 7

Contributor Biographies

Valerie Adams is an early career researcher and research associate at the Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, and has worked on research projects across the social sciences since 2004. Valerie’s doctoral research analyzed the work experience of residential aged care nurses from a feminist economics perspective. Her continuing research interests are centered on empirical investigations of paid and unpaid care work, the undervaluation of care work in market terms, gender equity issues in care work, the care economy and the emerging feminist economics theorizing on caring labor. Valerie has published in journals such as International Journal of Qualitative Methods and Feminist Economics. Chris Beasley is professor in politics, and from 2009–2013 co-director of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender, at the University of Adelaide. Her books include Heterosexuality in Theory and Practice (co-authored with Heather Brook and Mary Holmes, 2012), Engaging with Carol Bacchi (coedited with Angelique Bletsas, 2012), Gender & Sexuality: Critical Theories, Critical Thinkers (2005), What is Feminism? (1999) and Sexual Economyths (1994). She is currently writing a book on contemporary popular film titled The Cultural Politics of Popular Film: Power, Culture and Society (with Heather Brook) and preparing another book, Internet Dating (with Mary Holmes). Dr Beasley has also developed special issues in several journals, such as Sexualities, Men and Masculinities, Australian Feminist Studies and Health Sociology. Lia Bryant is associate professor in sociology and social work and director for the Centre for Social Change in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy, University of South Australia. She is a sociologist who has 147

148

Contributor Biographies

published widely on gender, emotions, sexuality, and embodiment in the rural. Bryant has co-authored Gender and Rurality (with Barbara Pini, 2011) and edited Sexuality, Rurality and Geography (with A. Gorman-Muray and B. Pini, 2013). She has published widely in academic journals including Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Rural Studies, Feminist Review, Sociologia Ruralis, Gender, Work and Organisation: Ageing and Society, and the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. She has a forthcoming book on Critical and Creative Research in Social Work. Judith Gill is associate professor at the University of South Australia. She has published widely in the area of gender and education, particularly on the ways in which institutionalized forms of schooling are connected with gender distinction, curriculum, and student experience. In recent years, she has investigated young people’s perceptions of social structures and their place within them, an area she contends has been often overlooked in proposals about citizenship education. Her most recent works include Knowing Our Place: Children Talking About Power, Identity and Citizenship, co-authored with Sue Howard (2008) and the edited collection, Globalisation, the NationState and the Citizen: Dilemmas and Directions for Civics and Citizenship Education, with Alan Reid and Alan Sears (2010). Katrina Jaworski completed her thesis, The Gender of Suicide, in 2007 at the University of South Australia. She was awarded the Ian Davey Research Thesis Prize for the most outstanding thesis across the university. Katrina currently works as lecturer in the School of Communication and International Studies, University of South Australia. Katrina is also a visiting research fellow at the School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide. Her research orbits around suicide and gender in particular, and death and dying more broadly. Other research areas include violent extremism; older men and urban sheds; loneliness and older people; and queer aging and genocide. She has published in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Australian Feminist Studies, Social Identities, Health and Social Care in the Community Continuum, Journal of Educational Enquiry and Sister in Law: A Feminist Law Review. She has contributed to edited books such as Abjectly Boundless and Corporeal Inscriptions. Margaret Rowntree was a PhD student in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Social Policy at the University of South Australia. Her doctorate was conferred in 2012. Her dissertation was titled, Tri-millennium Feminine Sexualities: Representations, Lives and Daydreams. She has published on subjects of gender, sexuality, and sexual violence in Qualitative Social Work: Research and Practice and Australian Social Work. She has a particular interest in the place of emotion in research.

Contributor Biographies

149

Mary-Helen Ward completed her PhD at the University of Sydney. In her PhD thesis (Living in Liminal Space: The PhD as Accidental Pedagogy) she considered the experience of doing a PhD in Australia, looking at issues are diverse as history and funding, university and disciplinary cultures, theories of supervision, and skills, and examination practice. She has also contributed chapters to several books, including Educating Health Professionals: Becoming a University Teacher, and has published both on doctoral student experience and on pedagogically based eLearning support for university staff.