Dombroski, K., Watkins, A. F., Fitt, H., Frater, J., Banwell, K., Mackenzie, K., … Hart, D. (2017). Journeying from “I” to “we”: assembling hybrid caring collectives of geography doctoral scholars. Journal of Geography in Higher Education. doi:10.1080/03098265.2017.1335295.
When the above article was first published online, the abstract was incorrectly given as:
Completing a PhD is difficult. Within a city and a university recovering from a major earthquake sequence, general stress levels are become much higher and caring for some of the non-academic needs of doctoral scholars in this environment becomes critically important to these scholars to their scholarly success. Yet in the same situation, academic supervisors may be stretched to the limits of their capacity to care even just for doctoral scholars’ research training needs, let alone their broader pastoral care. The question, then, is academic supervisors, who are in the same challenging environment, may already be stretched to capacity. How, then do we increase capacity to provide care for doctoral scholars in this kind of environment? While it has been shown elsewhere that supportive and interactive department cultures are correlated with lower attrition rates, little work has been done on how exactly departments might go about in creating these supportive environments: the focus is generally on the individual actions of supervisors, or the individual quality and independence of students admitted. In this article, 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” emerging in the Department of Geography at the University of Canterbury. Following Callon and Rabeharisoa (2003), our caring collective is hybrid because 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.
This has now been corrected in both the print and online versions to:
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.
Taylor & Francis apologizes for this error.