It Takes a Village to Get a PhD Producing the “Independent Researcher” by Extending the Supervisory Relationship.

Abstract

What should be the outcome of the PhD journey? One frequent answer is to produce an independent researcher who, after years of doctoral education and supervision is ready to take on the academic world. In this context, metaphors such as master and apprentice or even parent and child are frequently invoked. However, research in higher education pedagogy has pointed out that, in the context of the neoliberal university, the rather intense supervisory relation can quickly turn oppressive, especially when intersecting with other power asymmetries around class, race, ethnicity, gender, age, or physical ability. The aim of this article is to ‘trouble’ the linear notion of the independent researcher by reflecting on the multiple, and often un- or under-recognized, relations that accompany the PhD journey. Drawing on feminist approaches that reconceptualize supervision as a care-practice, we reflect on the question of how the benefits and risks of the traditional supervisory model can be balanced through an embedment of PhD supervision into an extended set of relationships. We challenge the notion of independence as alleged self-sufficiency and instead suggest that independence can successfully be produced through 'interdependence’. Such shift, we argue, may help to: first, acknowledge the net of care practices already in place and dignify it as a fundamental part of the social infrastructure of doctoral education; second, mediate some problematic tendencies of neoliberal academia and conceptually reconcile the tensions between care and independence in doctoral education.