Positioning a Feminist Supervisor in Graduate Supervision

Abstract

As part of feminist praxis in the academy, students increasingly want to engage in activist research as part of their training. Yet such research, especially that engaging participatory methods, takes time—building collaborative relationships, designing collective research projects, undertaking research and writing up results. As a feminist graduate research supervisor, the author is in a quandary: How to negotiate the relationships among her own penchant for activist research, student research interests in social change and the institutional imperatives for degree requirements? In an attempt to defer some of her angst, she engages in a reflexive exercise to position herself as a feminist supervisor through the literature on graduate supervision. Once graduate supervision has been conceptualized as both a process of subjectification and, at the same time, a site of resistance, then being in a quandary matters less, because the author comes to be more comfortable with her unsettled positioning as both complex and messy.

Keywords:

• Adviser
• feminism
• supervisor
• activist research
• graduate supervision

Acknowledgements

The author appreciates the invitation from Sara Kindon and Sarah Elwood to contribute to this symposium, and especially values their commitment to including her piece in the collection at a time when she was unable to engage fully in the process because of illness. Thanks are offered to the graduate students whose work is discussed in this article—Pam, Kari, Christina, Susan, Rachel, Melody—who along with other graduate students the author works with provide her with the challenges she needs to enhance her own skills as a feminist supervisor of feminist graduate research. Thanks also to Stephanie Abel and Maya Gislason for assisting with the literature review.

Notes

¹ The students identified here have given their permission to be included and identified by name.

² I understand from students that my advocacy of participatory and emancipatory methods encourages some colleagues to take risks and move out of their comfort zone as supervisors.

³ Although I reflect only on my own positioning as a feminist supervisor here, I argue that the students' positionings are just as complex and messy, albeit in different ways. To demonstrate this point, I could have engaged in a more participatory project and included these students as co-authors in co-reflections about the supervisory relationship. But this is not the point I want to make by including descriptions of these students' work.