Transforming supervisors? A critique of post-liberal approaches to research supervision

Abstract

Preparation for research supervision has assumed greater importance in academic departments of universities with the increase in the number and diversity of both research candidates and supervisors and the financial incentives for on-time completions. Over the past decade a body of literature by both academics and academic developers has emerged and more recently post-liberal theories and frameworks (feminism, postmodernism and post-colonialism) have been used to problematise the field of postgraduate supervision. Central to the feminist and post-colonial critiques is the belief that supervisors are best equipped for their roles by a process of personal self-transformation which allows them to achieve an appropriate balance between emotional and rational elements in their supervisory practice. We wish to set critical and post-modern approaches in historical perspective. We seek to show that feminist and post-colonial approaches are heir to a form of critique, which was founded upon the assumption that certain institutions and practices of modern society are dehumanising because they fragment human beings’ essential unity. We argue that engaging supervisors in a process of self-transformation reinforces the idea that successful supervision is a function of the supervisor's recovery of a fully integrated and higher self.

Keywords:

• postgraduate supervision
• institutional roles
• self transformation

Notes

1. The idea of an Enlightenment project has been questioned in recent scholarship on the enlightenment in national contexts. For the central role accorded to the emotions by writers of the period, see Barbalet (2000), Firth (2007), Hume (1967), and Smith (1976).

2. Foucault (1991) uses the term ‘the governmentalised state’ to refer to the development, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, of administrative techniques and practices (government bureaucracies, social statistics, mass schooling, prisons and hospitals) through which governments in Western Europe sought to secure social peace and economic prosperity.

3. McWilliam's (2002) outright rejection of professional development which Manathunga quotes repeatedly seems based on a few instances of badly organised and delivered programmes.