Doctoral Research Supervision, Pedagogy and the PhD

"This book reminds us that academic voices with important things to say keep on speaking to us long after their authors have left the scene. Alison Lee’s is one such voice, here combined with those of her close colleagues, Bill Green and Catherine Manathunga, to reinvigorate the ongoing conversation about the meaning of doctoral education and, especially, supervision. Folding together published and new work, this book shows the rich gift of Alison and Bill’s early work to subsequent generations of researchers in the field, myself included. The lines of thought pursued in the book refuse the deadly simplicities of a managerialist reworking of doctoral education currently pervade our institutions and public debates. Instead we are reminded of the marvellous subtleties of a research pedagogy directed towards the emergence of original knowledge and of those capable of making it. An (ir)rational pedagogy with yet-surprising depths for its practitioners and those who research it."

-Barbara M. Grant, University of Auckland, New Zealand

"Otherwise clouded and discursively buried amidst Graduate School management and institutional bureaucracy, this brave and rigorous book revitalizes and rises from the ashes doctoral supervision as pedagogy. The book shows why the relational co-thinking, co-creation, and complicated collegiality between supervisors and students are at the very heart of academic becoming – and why supervision remains the most enduring topical thread within doctoral education research for the last four decades."

-Søren Bengtsen, Aarthus University, Denmark