Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars

Abstract

Completing a PhD is difficult. Add a major earthquake sequence and general stress levels become much higher. Caring for some of the nonacademic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critical to their scholarly success. Yet academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How then do we increase care for doctoral scholars? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures reduce attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might create these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality of students admitted. We suggest that a range of actors and contingencies are involved in journeying toward a more caring collective culture. We direct attention to the hybridity of an emerging ‘caring collective’, in which the assembled actors are not only ‘students’ and ‘staff’, but also bodies, technologies, objects, institutions, and other nonhuman actors including tectonic plates and earthquakes. The concept of the hybrid caring collective is useful, we argue, as a way of understanding the distributed responsibility for the care of doctoral scholars, and as a way of stepping beyond the student/supervisor blame game.

Keywords:

• Hybrid collectives
• doctoral study
• care
• supervision
• disaster recovery
• communities of practice

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank David Conradson (in particular), as well as Gradon Diprose, Stephen Healy and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and encouraging feedback on different versions of this paper.

Notes

1. We choose not to use the word “students” because some of the authors of this paper feel that the term contradicts the degree of self-direction that is inherent in the doctoral process.

2. We use “he” advisedly here: Johnson et al. (2000) argue that the autonomous scholar hero fantasy comes out of a particularly masculinist notion of the scholarly journey of the “Man of Reason”. Traditionally, women were excluded from this, particularly in rationalist traditions drawing on Kant, where what he calls “the entire fair sex” somehow fell short of the humanity required of the subjects of Reason. We also note that much of the newer work challenging the autonomous scholar trope is written by collectives of women. See for example, the work of Jenny Cameron, Karen Nairn and colleagues, Lilia Mantai and colleagues, and Claire Aitcheson and colleagues, and Alison Mountz and The Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective. Despite this excellent work, the PhD scholars involved in this article could still easily identify the widespread presence of the trope of the autonomous self-made scholar in our department and wider disciplinary community of practice.

3. We make this observation from the point of view of colleagues who have shared considerable amounts of cake and coffee.