Supervision in the contact zone revisited : critical reflections on supervisory practices through the lenses of time, place, and knowledge

Abstract

This article contributes to the discussion on intercultural doctoral supervision through a reflexive analysis of one supervisor’s practices during a joint Laotian/Swedish capacity-building project in 2005–2011. My practices were guided by postcolonial/feminist aspirations to shift power relations and to disrupt knowledge-production practices to allow what Singh (2011, p. 358) calls “pedagogies of intellectual equality”. These ideals, however, were challenged by the formal structure of the PhD programme and my socialisation into a Swedish/Western rationality about what a ‘good’ doctorate is. Using the concepts of time, place, and knowledge (Manathunga, 2014), I reflect here upon my own practices and actions during supervision of four doctoral students from Lao People’s Democratic Republic. This supervision took place in what Pratt (2017/1990) calls the ‘contact zone’, the space where intercultural meetings take place. Manathunga (2014) argues that time, place, and knowledge are crucial to understanding intercultural supervision. I analyse the opportunities and challenges I met as a supervisor, and critically reflect upon how postcolonial theory and concepts of time, place, and knowledge can contribute to discussion on disrupting hegemonic patterns of knowledge production in doctoral training. The analysis shows how supervision in the contact zone may support assimilation at the expense of transculturation, the blending of knowledge from different contexts to create new knowledge (Manathunga, 2014, p. 4). The analysis also points to a third path, accommodation, towards the needs and strategies of doctoral students and supervisors affecting and changing training in unexpected ways.