Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision: Reimagining time, place and knowledge [1 ed.] 0415535999, 9780415535991

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Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision

The impact of globalisation and aggressive marketing by universities has increased the flow of international or culturally diverse students enrolling in postgraduate research degree programmes outside their own countries. As access to postgraduate education widens, more local culturally diverse and Indigenous students are also enrolling in higher-degree studies. As a result, significantly more academics now engage in intercultural supervision or supervising students who are culturally different to themselves. This book argues that empowering intercultural supervision can result from more nuanced, critical and theoretically-based understandings of time, place and knowledge. It shows how a range of ‘Southern’ theories (including postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theories) about history, geography and knowledge can offer fresh insights into intercultural supervision. The author suggests that, by using the conceptual tools offered by these Southern theories, the more complex, but potentially rich, aspects of intercultural supervision can be better understood and grappled with. In particular, these theories enable us to challenge assumptions about the universality and timelessness of Northern knowledge, and to create space for the recovery and further development of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges within intercultural supervision. This book will be of value to academic supervisors and postgraduate students, especially those engaged in intercultural supervision, as well as researchers and scholars in the field of higher education. Catherine Manathunga is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

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Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision Reimagining time, place and knowledge

Catherine Manathunga

First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2014 C. Manathunga The right of C. Manathunga to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Manathunga, Catherine. Intercultural postgraduate supervision: reimagining time, place and knowledge/Catherine Manathunga. pages cm 1. Graduate students – Supervision of. 2. Minorities – Education. 3. Indigenous peoples – Education. 4. Multicultural education. 5. Intercultural communication. I. Title. LB2371.M36 2014 378.1′55 – dc23 2014003129 ISBN: 978-0-415-53599-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-11195-6 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

For my amazing Mum, Phyllis Catherine Sullivan, whose courage, determination and sense of fun has always inspired me. Mum passed away on 12 March 2013 – fly free Phyllis!

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Contents

List of tables Acknowledgements 1 Introduction

viii ix 1

2 Postcolonial theory and supervision

13

3 Time and place in intercultural supervision

31

4 Knowledge in intercultural supervision

49

5 Two studies of intercultural supervision in Australia: Context and methodology

70

6 Assimilation

85

7 Transculturation

104

8 Unhomeliness

136

9 Disciplines: Do they make a difference?

151

10 Conclusion

161

Bibliography Index

185 193

Tables

5.1 Interview questions with PhD students and their supervisors 5.2 Conceptual framework

73 79

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been written without the help and support of many people. First, I would like to thank my wonderful friend and colleague Tai Peseta for her unwavering support throughout the process of writing this book. She has devoted many hours to suggesting helpful references, encouraging me, counselling me when I thought I could never write it, reading very bad early drafts and giving me advice about voice and positioning. I would also like to thank another awesome friend and colleague, Barbara Grant, for inspiring me with her work on supervision pedagogy and for helping me to feel at home in Aotearoa New Zealand. Another inspirational mentor, friend and colleague, Alison Lee, who passed away with cancer in September 2012, was generous with her time and incredible powers of thought, even when she was undergoing cancer treatment. She always gave me constructive and insightful feedback on my ideas and helped me to believe in myself. Sue Clegg has also been a wonderful friend and mentor. This book has been long in the making. It took me five years to dream up the idea, conduct preliminary research, gather a more substantial pool of data with the assistance of a collaborative Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant and prepare a convincing book proposal. I am indebted to another good friend and colleague, Ravinder Sidhu, for inspiring me with her work on international education and sharing with me her book proposal. I am also grateful to my Head of School, Rob Strathdee, for his support and encouragement. It was not until I read one of his book proposals that I was able to get the right sales pitch for mine. He also assisted me to bring my research and study leave forward to enable me to focus on my writing in the first half of 2013. This leave took place in Melbourne, when my husband, Chris, received a great promotion at work and was transferred to his company’s head office. I would like to thank Julie McLeod for organising my Visiting Fellowship at the Graduate School of Education in the University of Melbourne at the last moment. I am also indebted to Lyn Yates for making me feel welcome in Melbourne and giving me insightful feedback on my ideas, and to Fazal Rizvi for helping me to crystallise my arguments at a time when I was still shattered with grief after the death of my mother. I am also grateful to my fellow historian and friend, Dolly MacKinnon, for reassuring me when my writing seemed to be going at a snail’s pace. As a veteran of writing many books, she

x Acknowledgements reminded me that you can’t force writing. Another good friend, colleague and experienced writer, Bruce MacFarlane, shared with me his process for writing books. His recent book on intellectual leadership was my constant companion as I wrote my introduction and redrafted my manuscript. My wonderful friend and colleague, Caroline Steel, provided me with a place to begin writing again after my Mum died and supported me through this tough time, as did my friend, Jeannette Brennan. I would not have stayed sane in those weeks of Mum’s final illness and passing without them both. I would also like to thank my generous supervisor and student research participants, who shared their experiences of intercultural supervision with me. I appreciate your time and insights into this intriguing pedagogy. I am also grateful to my wonderful Research Assistants, Maryam (Shirin) Jamarani, herself an international doctoral student and now specialist on intercultural communication, and Suzanne Morris, for their tireless work in gathering and interviewing participants. I am indebted to my international doctoral students and those of colleagues with whom I have worked, for going on intercultural supervision journeys with me and inspiring me with their sparkling intelligence, their vast stores of cultural knowledge and their commitment. I will always remain in awe of your ability to write such high-quality work in a language that is not your own. I would also like to thank my wonderful friends and colleagues at Victoria University of Wellington, Stephanie Doyle, Judith Loveridge, Sue Cornforth, Joanna Kidman, Andrea Milligan and Bronwyn Wood, for their moral support and encouragement during the writing of this book. I would also like to thank the team at Routledge, especially my very patient and kind editor Annamarie Kino, who dealt with my repeated requests for extensions because of my mother’s final illnesses and death with such compassion and sympathy, and Clare Ashworth, my editorial assistant. I was lucky to be able to work with Eliza (Liesje) Stevens, my talented Masters graduate, in the final few months of preparing this manuscript. I appreciate your editorial skills, your sharp eye and the fun conversations we had along the way. Finally, I am, as always, hugely indebted to my family for their unwavering love, encouragement and support. My mother, Phyllis Sullivan, has been the greatest inspiration in my life. She was always my most unconditional supporter and PR person. Without her love, insight and commitment, I would never have become an academic or finished my PhD or kept believing in myself. I miss you Mum but know that you will always be with me. My sister and brother, Deirdre Sanmugam and Tim Sullivan, are my longest and closest friends, always there when I need them. My uncle, Bill Doherty, took on the role of father figure for our family and was always our tower of strength. His son, Bill Doherty, was more like a brother than a cousin to us. My aunts, Sister Carmel Doherty and Sister Patricia Doherty, have also supported me throughout my life. In the writing of this book, Aunty Carm, herself a writer and thinker, has listened patiently to my ideas and has taken on the role of chief confidant since Mum died. My awesome sons, Rory and Daniel, whose experiences and insights have always been intriguing

Acknowledgements xi and inspiring, have made my life rich beyond measure and never fail to cheer me up when I become too serious. Last, I would like to thank the love of my life, Chris Doonan, for his great patience, kindness, encouragement and support. I am profoundly touched by how proud you are of me. You always help me get past my moments of self-doubt, remind me to pace myself, cook me amazing meals and nurture me with your love.

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1

Introduction

Reimagining time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision This book is about the pressing need to reimagine the central roles played by time and history, place and geography, and knowledge and epistemology in intercultural doctoral supervision. This is particularly important at a time when dominant discourses about doctoral supervision characterise supervision as a form of project management. It is also significant because more academics now engage in supervision across cultures within the present context of globalisation, aggressive university marketing, widening access and increased student and supervisor mobility. This book aims to investigate the concepts of time, place and knowledge pedagogically to enrich and unsettle current thinking about supervising students across, between and within cultures. My attempt to rethink intercultural supervision pedagogy will draw upon an eclectic mix of postcolonial, Indigenous, social and feminist and cultural geography theories about time, place and knowledge. I will describe these broad theoretical resources and then seek to read them pedagogically in order to see what they have to offer us to deepen and trouble our understandings of intercultural supervision. My analysis will serve as a conceptual framework through which to interpret some interviews conducted with supervisors and students working across cultures in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and science at an Australian university. I have chosen to use the term ‘intercultural’ because I am particularly interested in the interaction that occurs between cultures when supervisors and students from different ethnicities work together. As Fazal Rizvi has stressed in a number of keynote presentations, where he is asked to speak about the issues surrounding ‘When East meets West’, the critical factor is not the East or the West, which are already over-determined categories, but the ‘meets’ that is most significant. So this book focuses on supervision across, between and within cultural difference. This book seeks to theorise the in-between cultural spaces where supervisors and students meet and negotiate their scholarly identities together – the ‘inter’ in intercultural. This is where the postcolonial concept of the contact zone is particularly helpful. For some time now, I have applied Pratt’s (1992; updated 2008) concept of the

2 Introduction contact zone to intercultural supervision (Manathunga, 2007; 2011). As outlined in detail in Chapter 2, the contact zone was the term Pratt used to describe ‘the social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 2008: 7). A number of other authors have also found it an apt way to theorise intercultural supervision and research (e.g., Kenway and Bullen, 2003; Somerville, 2010). This re-theorising of colonial frontiers enabled the full range of intercultural encounters to be investigated, incorporating not only the exploitation, violence and appropriation evident in contact between different ethnicities, but also the opportunities for creative exchange, ironic mimicry, sharing technologies and practices and developing innovative ideas. Thinking about intercultural supervision as a contact zone allows us to investigate both the challenging tensions and deconstructive possibilities evident in the spaces across and between cultures. By supervision, I mean the practice of educating postgraduate (graduate) students about how to conduct research in a particular academic discipline or several disciplines, in order to become credentialled as doctors of that/those disciplines. As this book has been written in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, I am especially referring to the original English model of doctoral education that our countries inherited, rather than to models developed in North America. This traditionally involved one doctoral student working independently on a substantial research project under the guidance of one experienced academic. The level of guidance provided by the supervisor varied hugely according to disciplines, personalities and practices and ranged from very close surveillance to ‘benign neglect’ (Lee and Williams, 1999). In grappling with the idea of pedagogy, I am inspired by the work of Lusted (1986), Lee and Green (1997) and Grant (2003). They have all sought to emphasise the complex interplays of power and desire circulating between supervisors, students and knowledge. Their work seeks to take pedagogy beyond simplistic, everyday understandings of teaching-and-learning practice to deeper investigations of the ways in which knowledge is produced through the dynamic interaction of supervisors and students. This reading of pedagogy acknowledges that any form of teaching and learning can never be innocent, but is implicated in ideologies, social relations and cultural and geopolitical power.

Significance of my argument Although there is a huge body of literature on intercultural supervision, it remains a pedagogy that is not fully understood. Many of the existing explorations of intercultural supervision take the form of practical guidebooks written for supervisors and/or students. In the majority of cases, these texts offer helpful tips about how to work together. The ‘solution’ posed in these guidebooks to the ‘problem’ of working interculturally comprises clear and explicit communication and negotiation. Although these strategies are helpful, they tend to cast cultural difference as a ‘problem’, a deficit (usually on the part of the culturally diverse Other) that must be ameliorated in some way. They do not address the pressing

Introduction 3 issues of power in supervision pedagogy and the ways in which the social, cultural, historical and geographical context shapes intercultural supervision. Supervisors’ and students’ bodies, emotions, desires and tensions are tidied away, and the role played by knowledge is assumed but rarely engaged with. Underpinning some of these guidebooks, many of the university policy statements about supervision and some of the scholarly articles on supervision is the framing of supervision as project management (Grant 2005). This dominant discourse about supervision unproblematically depicts it as an essentially commercial transaction between two or more equally powerful individuals (one novice and one, or several, more experienced) who carefully construct a tidy Gantt chart outlining the logical, sequential steps required to bring the student’s research project to inevitable and successful completion. Such a construction of supervision excludes the unpredictable, creative or surprising outcomes and obstacles possible in research. Issues as complex and messy as culture, bodies, identities, histories, geographies and epistemologies do not belong in this neat supervision picture. This dominant discourse is particularly aligned with disciplines, such as science and engineering, where knowledge construction may be perceived as rational and objective. In our increasingly networked world, where the knowledges and skills of working across, between and within cultures, histories, geographies and epistemologies are vital to our socially and ecologically sustainable future, such absences in the vast literature on supervision are problematic, even dangerous. This book seeks to address these silences.

Supervision and culture In particular, I locate this book within the substantial, but still marginalised, body of poststructuralist research into doctoral supervision that has emerged since the mid 1990s. This research has sought to uncover the disruptive and productive role of the body, culture and identity in supervision pedagogy (e.g., Green and Lee, 1995; Johnson et al., 2000; Grant, 2003). It has also opened up more complex readings of doctoral pedagogy, which include the operations of power flowing between students, supervisors and knowledge (Lusted, 1986). However, these explorations need to be further enriched and unsettled by applying postcolonial theory to intercultural supervision. This book seeks to extend this work in order to foreground the role played by time, especially colonial history, which continues to shape our world, and place in intercultural supervision. These investigations of supervision have not excavated the Western/Northern construction of disciplinary knowledge either to any great extent (with the exception of the work by Johnson et al. in 2000), which this book will address. This book seeks to extend the emerging literature drawing upon postcolonial and Indigenous theories to interrogate intercultural supervision. This work will be described in detail in Chapter 2, but, in summary, it investigates the possibilities and challenges involved in Ma¯ori and Indigenous doctoral supervision, the ways in which race and gender shaped the experiences of international women postgraduate students, and the supervision experiences of South African women

4 Introduction in Australia (e.g., Venables et al., 2001; Bullen and Kenway, 2003; Kenway and Bullen, 2003; Grant, 2010; McKinley et al., 2011; Ford, 2012). The majority of this work, to which I have contributed (see my discussion below), has been in articles and book chapters, which do not allow the complexity, contestability and deconstructive possibilities inherent in these (re)readings of intercultural supervision to be fully grappled with. This book is designed to extend my earlier research on intercultural supervision. My work has drawn upon postcolonial theory to unpack the operations of culture and identity in intercultural supervision pedagogy. Using the overarching trope of the contact zone, I have sought to investigate how the postcolonial concepts of assimilation, unhomeliness and transculturation have shaped the experiences of students and supervisors working across and between cultures at an Australian university (e.g., Manathunga, 2007; 2011). I have summarised this work in a book chapter called ‘Culture as a place of thought’ (Manathunga, 2013). In this chapter, I concluded that postcolonial theory assists us to think about the ways in which culture can become a generative place of thought in supervision, because it provides us with opportunities to interrogate how assimilation works in Northern knowledge construction and encourages us to create spaces for Other ways of knowing. It also allows us to think about the unhomeliness that we may experience in intercultural supervision and acknowledge both the discomfort and also the deconstructive possibilities unhomeliness offers us. Finally, it opens us to the possibilities of transculturation, where we can help students blend their cultural ways of knowing with Western knowledge to create new knowledge (Manathunga, 2013). This work also forms the basis of Chapter 2 in this book and lays the foundation for my new explorations of time, place and knowledge.

‘North’ and ‘South’: the limitations of language Because I am seeking to explore large-scale and abstract conceptions of culture and identity, especially in Chapters 2–4, I am having to rely on highly problematic and binary terms, such as Western and Northern and non-Indigenous, and Eastern, Southern and Indigenous, to develop my ideas. Even where I deal with the empirical part of my book, in Chapters 5–9, I have to deliberately obscure the specificities of ethnic identities in order to protect the anonymity of my participants. This is especially difficult as I am seeking to move beyond the universalising discourses so characteristic of much of the literature about doctoral supervision (and Northern epistemology generally) and to foreground time and place. Therefore, this requires some justification and explanation here. Following the lead of Connell (2007) and postcolonial scholars such as Chakrabarty (2007), Al-e Ahmad (1984) and Chen (2010), I am trying to foreground the colonial relations of power that continue to shape the geopolitical realities of our contemporary world. I am drawing upon our imagined constructs of categories such as ‘Northern’, ‘Southern’, ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ and ‘Indigenous’ in the way that Chakrabarty (2007) draws upon the ways we imagine and position the idea of ‘Europe’. I am seeking to investigate how these relations

Introduction 5 of power condition the political, historical, social and cultural context within which we supervise. I am also attempting to understand how these relations of power form the historical legacies and resources that we bring into the pedagogical spaces of intercultural supervision. So, I am not unmindfully glossing over the very real problems with these essentialising, generalising and binarising terms. We are always limited by the categories that we work with and the language that we use. I have not been able to find satisfactory alternatives that would allow me to fully capture these relations of power. I am not alone in this failing. For example, Connell (2007) speaks about her use of terms such as North/South, centre/periphery, West/East, developed/ underdeveloped, metropole/periphery. She locates each of these discourses in UN debates, in postcolonial and dependency theories and in the language of Orientalism (Connell, 2007). Indeed, each time we seek to name the Other, to use the dangerous pronouns of us/them, our/their, we are engaging in the work of essentialising and binarising. I draw on Trowler’s (2013) argument for the need for what he calls moderate essentialism in social science research. Trowler (2013: 6) suggests that we need to incorporate some form of essentialism ‘for reasons of clarity’, so that we can describe and investigate particular phenomena, and ‘for reasons of explanatory power’, in order to show how different categories are related to each other in some way. Critiquing some of his own work on disciplinary differences, he shows how strong essentialism is problematic, because it argues that phenomena have particular, specific and unchanging characteristics. He also highlights how strong essentialism is unhelpful, because it suggests that these fixed and bounded characteristics ‘have generative power’ to shape people and knowledge in reductive and deterministic ways (Trowler, 2013). Instead, he recommends a form of moderate essentialism, which he links with Wittgenstein’s (1953) idea of family resemblances, where family members will share some, but not all, of the same features and characteristics, making them recognisable as a group (Trowler, 2013). He argues that moderate essentialism acknowledges that these resemblances are contingent on contexts and change over time and in different places (Trowler, 2013). So, I hope that what I have displayed in this book is a moderate type of essentialism that tries to capture the complexities, blurriness and messiness of categories such as Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern and Indigenous. I also argue that my empirical data problematise these categories to some extent, even though I have had to be vague about the precise ethnicities of supervisors and students, so as not to identify them.

Boundaries of this book This book is not a work of theory. It does not seek to contribute to the ongoing refinement of the theories that I work with here. Rather, it seeks to draw upon these theoretical explorations of history, geography and epistemology to further enrich and complicate our understandings of intercultural supervision. I have brought together a selective and eclectic group of thinking resources in order to

6 Introduction theorise the contact zone of intercultural supervision. I have sought to read these resources pedagogically, to extend our understandings of how time, place and knowledge shape intercultural supervision pedagogies. In Chapter 4, I have sought to draw upon the writings of Southern, Indigenous and Eastern scholars to gaze back at Northern knowledge construction from a different angle, in order to make space for diverse readings of epistemology. In doing this, I am indebted to the work of Connell (2007) on Southern theory, as well as the postcolonial work of Chakrabarty (2007) and Dube (2004) and the Indigenous work of Smith (1999) and Nakata (2006). This book does not grapple with linguistic diversity or the exact ways in which language constructs both our interactions in supervision. Although language issues emerge in supervising students for whom English is a second, third or fourth language, I am not a linguist or a TESOL expert and have never foregrounded language in my investigations of intercultural supervision. This is partly because of my intellectual background as an historian, who has dabbled in cultural studies and sociology. I am also embarrassingly monolingual, in spite of many attempts to learn other languages such as German, Russian and Japanese. I also agree with experts in intercultural communication who highlight the role of culture over language when exploring intercultural pedagogies. This book does not seek to offer unproblematic lists of tips about effective intercultural supervision or easy answers about the complexities and possibilities of intercultural supervision. It is a work of problem-making rather than problemsolving (McCarty, 2001). Although some supervisors and students may find these explorations of time, place and knowledge helpful in further understanding and interrogating their experiences, it is not designed to be a practical guidebook on effective intercultural supervision. This book may not appeal to supervisors and students in all disciplines, especially those in the sciences and engineering, although I would encourage them to read it. I deliberately collected interviews with students and supervisors in science and engineering in this study, but have really only just begun the conversation about how discipline impacts upon experiences of time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision. These issues are particularly addressed in Chapter 9, where I show that there are a surprising number of similarities in the intercultural experiences of supervisors and students included in this study. I have also linked this analysis with some of the intriguing work coming out of feminist, postcolonial and Indigenous investigations of science and engineering and the philosophies of science. There is still a great deal more that needs to be said about this. It is likely to be a particularly fruitful area for further research and exploration.

Reading time, place and knowledge pedagogically Drawing upon a range of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theories, this book argues that time, place and knowledge play significant roles in shaping intercultural supervision. By using these theories as thinking resources, I have tried to critically investigate the ‘inter’ in intercultural

Introduction 7 supervision. As I argue in Chapters 3 and 4, these theories enable us to question under what conditions and with what historical, geographical and epistemological legacies and resources supervisors and students work together in this pedagogical contact zone. If we read these theories pedagogically, as I have sought to do in this book, how might we enrich, unsettle and challenge our understandings of intercultural supervision? I have, then, developed a conceptual framework from these theoretical interpretations of time, place and knowledge through which to explore data collected from supervisors and students working across cultures in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and science in an Australian university, in Chapters 5–9. These data do not include the experiences of Indigenous students, but I have drawn upon the rich literature on Indigenous supervision and Indigenous knowledge and theory in order to apply its lessons to other forms of intercultural supervision. I unearth how these postcolonial tropes of assimilation, transculturation and unhomeliness exclude, include, grapple with, and create space (or no space) for, time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision. I investigate where these theoretical interpretations of history, geography and epistemology resonate with supervisors’ and students’ experiences, and where the silences and gaps emerge. In doing this work, I have been inspired by Clegg’s (2012) article, where she demonstrates how the data she gathered on personal development plans in England caused her to re-engage with sociologists of time and current work on agency, because her existing theoretical resources were inadequate to account for unexpected issues arising in her data. In many ways, this book seeks to begin a conversation about how time, place and knowledge play out in intercultural supervision and in different disciplines. Investigating these features of intercultural supervision throws additional light on how assimilation, transculturation and unhomeliness operate in intercultural supervision. By engaging with my data and applying these theoretical resources to it, I have begun to recognise issues that require further investigation, which will be the subject of Chapter 10.

My position As researchers and writers, we are drawn to particular issues, theories and ideas for a range of personal and intellectual reasons. Growing up in an Irish–Australian, Catholic household in Brisbane, attending Catholic schools, I always had a sense of being different to mainstream Anglo-Australian society. This involved a conscious awareness of colonisation and its ongoing legacies and a deep respect for histories and cultures that went beyond Anglo-Australia. My sister and I both had intercultural first marriages. This is how I come to have a Sri Lankan family name. My two sons, Rory and Daniel, have experienced different patterns of inclusion and exclusion in Australian society, based on their skin colour. Rory is fairer and ‘passes’ as a white man, although he was once asked if he was a ‘halfcaste’. Daniel is browner and has endured racist comments all his life.

8 Introduction This personal history and range of experiences have indelibly shaped the intellectual categories I work with and the issues I research. I was drawn to the study of cultures and histories as a result of my family’s fascination with its Irish past, and with the many cultural groups that now call Australia home. Throughout my undergraduate and postgraduate history studies, I chose to research the experiences of immigrants and cultural minorities and explored Irish United Nations policy in the 1950s and 1960s for my PhD thesis. Watching my sons navigate their intercultural, Sri Lankan–Irish–Australian identities has resulted in an intellectual desire to research the ‘inter’ in intercultural interactions. These personal experiences have also been instrumental in my choice of theories for this book. As Hey (2006) reminds us, we are haunted by particular theories, evocative concepts and some of the key phrases of our favourite authors. Postcolonial theory has come to occupy a central place in my research imagination. This is only a relatively recent development for me, and I continue to feel a bit of a latecomer to this challenging array of concepts and tropes. Postcolonial theory seems to offer carefully nuanced, complex and productive arguments about the legacies of colonialism at individual, community, state and global levels. What I found appealing was the space in postcolonial theory for the deconstructive possibilities inherent in colonial and postcolonial interactions and situations, as well as its full acknowledgement of the terrible physical, psychological and environmental damage wrought by colonisation, which continues into the present. Like most poststructuralist perspectives, postcolonial theory was working with complex notions of power that emphasised the productive nature of power, as well as its oppressive characteristics. It allowed for resistance and agency, as well as control. Postcolonial theory offered ideas about cultural hybridity and transculturation (which I will explain further in Chapter 2) that demonstrated how it becomes possible to develop new, innovative, transcultural identities and discourses. It was not only about the loss of traditional ways of being, thinking and knowing, but also about the creative possibilities inherent in coming into contact with other cultures. Historians are notorious eclectics, and I am no exception. Although I started out intending to focus on postcolonial theory to reimagine time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision, I soon found myself drawn to the work of Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theorists. I am encouraged and reassured by Clegg’s (2007) cheeky call for ‘intellectual promiscuity’ and her argument that sense-making often requires a collection of theoretical resources. Although Indigenous theories are closely related to postcolonial theory, many Indigenous scholars are troubled by the ‘post’ in postcolonial, because colonisation continues to be a powerful, lived experience. In writing this book, I have been inspired by the work of a number of Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Ma¯ori researchers (e.g., Smith, 1999; Nakata, 2006; Ford, 2012). As an historian and woman, I have also been intrigued by social and feminist theorists’ work on time (e.g., Adam, 2004). The cultural geographer Massey (2005) draws upon postcolonial and feminist theory to produce evocative and enriching explorations of space and place.

Introduction 9 I am conscious of the need to carefully locate myself and my position in relation to all of these theories. This is important in working with any theoretical positioning, but probably more so with postcolonial and Indigenous theory, especially as a non-Indigenous person. I am an Irish–Australian woman now working in Aotearoa New Zealand. There is a curious doubling in my position in relation to colonisation, because my ancestors, some of whom sailed to Australia in the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Irish Potato Famine, had lengthy experiences of being invaded and subjugated. However, in fleeing the oppression and devastation of our homeland, we invaded and stole the land belonging to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We ourselves became colonisers. I have written about my positioning as a ‘settler/invader’ scholar and tried, in the Australian context, to think, over the past decade, what that means for my academic work. In Australia, we have no mainstream language that encapsulates these postcolonial positionings. In Aotearoa New Zealand, there is the term Pa¯keha¯ to describe the Europeans who immigrated to this land from the 1800s onwards. There is also the Samoan term Palangi. These terms are widely used in mainstream Aotearoa New Zealand. Only recently, some non-Indigenous Australians have come to use a range of Aboriginal terms for white, based on the languages of different Aboriginal groups. In Queensland, which is where I’ve spent most of my life, the term is migaloo. In Western Australia, it is watjala and, in South Eastern Australia (i.e. Victoria and New South Wales), it is gubba or gub (meaning either ‘ghost’ or ‘government’). In some Northern parts of Australia, it is walypala, and, in Arnhem Land (Northern Territory), it is balanda (Murray, 1999; Eades, n.d.). The term balanda is interesting, because it was the term given by Indonesian sailors from Macassa, which was then the capital of the Indonesian kingdom of Gowa, to the Dutch who traded with them. There is evidence that Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land assisted Macassan sailors in the trepang (sea-slug) trade from around the 1720s (if not earlier) (Macknight, 1976; Murray, 1999). However, these are not terms often heard in mainstream Australian society. I have argued that, if I were to come to terms with my positioning as a settler/invader scholar in contemporary Australia, I would need to: •

• •

•

•

write for a range of audiences about Australian history, although always from a settler/invader perspective, or collaborate with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers; teach students of all ages about this history; actively create spaces in academic departments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics, scholars, students, elders and community members; always remember that settler/invader identities are working from a position of power and dominance (Moran, 2002) and constantly think about what Jones (1999) calls our inability to hear the voices of the marginalised; learn about the growing body of literature on Indigenous ways of knowing and being and researching;

10

Introduction •

•

learn that sometimes we cannot fully know Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture; Jones (1999) reminds us to ‘to embrace positively a “politics of disappointment” that includes a productive acceptance of the ignorance of the other’ and a ‘gracious acceptance of not having to know the other’ (Jones, 1999: 315–6); produce, in respectful partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers, more Southern theory (Connell, 2007) and seek to decolonise methodology and research practices (Smith, 1999). (Manathunga, 2010)

All of this thinking has been thrown into sharp relief now by working in Aotearoa New Zealand, which has a very different history of colonisation and a different set of race relations and is at a very different place in relation to its postcolonial identity. Although I had drawn upon some recent Aotearoa New Zealand work on education and on supervising Ma¯ori students in thinking through what it might mean to be an Australian settler/invader scholar, I am only just starting to grapple more deeply with this work in writing this book and other articles. Therefore, much of the thinking that led me to apply postcolonial theory to intercultural supervision and other aspects of my work has come out of an Australia that is only really beginning to recognise that it is Aboriginal land that has nurtured and provided a home for us. Even though academics and activists have been writing about these histories since at least the 1970s (e.g., Reynolds, 1972; Evans et al., 1975), these understandings are only beginning to leak into mainstream Australia. Settler/invader scholars such as myself are in the early stages of interrogating the shocking stories of our past and acknowledging the ongoing impact of physical and cultural genocide of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our country. We are only beginning to grapple with the racism of our cultural institutions, particularly our universities. The Taiwanese scholar Chen (2010) calls this process ‘deimperialisation’. He argues that ‘the colonising or imperialising population [must] . . . examine the conduct, motives, desires and consequences of imperialist history that has formed its own subjectivity’ (Chen, 2010: 4). This is a process ‘no less painful and reflexive’ than the process of decolonisation, Chen (2010: 4) suggests. hooks (1989) reminds us that, ‘theory is a location for healing’, and it is healing that is particularly required in postcolonial Australia. So, it is within this positioning that I write this chapter in my sunny home office, overlooking the charming wooden houses climbing up the side of Mount Victoria, Wellington.

My voice Like many feminist writers, I wanted to disrupt that Descartesian split and write from the heart as well as the head, and make clear the connections between the personal and the political. As Chen (2010: xvi) suggests, I wanted to ‘bring sentiment to the forefront, making it a source of thought and analysis’. Tai Peseta

Introduction 11 encouraged me to read Behar’s (1996) The Vulnerable Observer and Pelias’s (2004) The Methodology of the Heart. I was comforted by Behar’s (1996: 13) assertion that, ‘it is far from easy to think up interesting ways to locate oneself in one’s own text’. Behar captured my fears exactly when she emphasised that: writing vulnerability takes as much skill, nuance and willingness to follow through on all the ramifications of a complicated idea as does writing invulnerably and distantly. I would say it takes yet greater skill . . . the stakes are higher: a boring self-revelation, one that fails to move the reader is more than embarrassing; it is humiliating. (Behar, 1996: 13) I resonated with Pelias’s (2004: 2, 1) desire for ‘a scholarship that fosters connections, opens spaces for dialogue, heals’, but felt quite unable to emulate his beautiful attempts to ‘put on display a researcher who . . . brings himself forward in the belief that an emotionally vulnerable, linguistically evocative, and sensuously poetic voice can place us closer to the subjects we wish to study’. As I write this introduction, perched high over the trees and old buildings of Queen Street in Auckland on a writing retreat, I do not know how to do this. I am not an ethnographer and, although I briefly flirted with the idea of writing this book as an auto-ethnography, I recognised that I do not have the poetic skills required or the number of interesting, evocative experiences to draw upon. So, what I have tried to do is to weave some of my personal stories, experiences and reflections into the early chapters on postcolonial theory, time, place and knowledge. In the end, there are fewer of these included than I at first imagined, but I hope you, my readers, have gained a sense of my presence as you read this book. Where I have incorporated these personal sections, I have tried hard to make the weaving seamless and the transitions between my personal voice and the voices of theorists I am drawing on smooth and engaging. As always, I am reminded of the T.S. Eliot poem, ‘The hollow men’: Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow. I am uncertain that I have managed to achieve this, but I have done my best. It will be up to you, my readers, to judge. This also brings me to the question of audience and what I hope you will gain from reading this book. I am hoping that this book will give you a deeper, theorised way of understanding the rewards and complexities involved in intercultural supervision. By reimagining the roles played by time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision, I am hoping that you will rethink what is possible to achieve in working across, between and within cultures in supervision.

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Introduction

Outline of book As indicated above, Chapter 2 provides a short introduction to the postcolonial tropes or concepts I will be drawing upon, and the ways in which some of my existing work and the research of others have sought to apply postcolonial theory to intercultural supervision. It provides a justification for using postcolonial and other theory to reimagine time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision and demonstrates the ways in which our contemporary context is indelibly shaped by the legacies of colonisation. Chapters 3 and 4 then seek to read a range of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theories pedagogically, in order to extend our understandings of how history, geography and epistemology impact upon intercultural supervision. I then turn to the empirical part of my book, outlining in Chapter 5 the context and methodology used to gather and analyse interviews with supervisors and their students in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and science at an Australian university, and providing a conceptual framework derived from my pedagogical readings of these theoretical resources. I argue that the postcolonial tropes of assimilation (Chapter 6), transculturation (Chapter 7) and unhomeliness (Chapter 8) operate as key pedagogical assumptions, philosophies or positions that may be adopted consciously and unconsciously by supervisors working with doctoral students in the postcolonial contact zone, and that shape the extent to which time, place and knowledge operate productively or problematically in intercultural supervision. I suggest that each of these pedagogical positions has been established by the colonial and postcolonial conditions, contexts, legacies and resources that we bring into intercultural supervision. In Chapter 9, I begin exploring whether disciplines make a difference to the ways in which history, geography and epistemology play out in intercultural supervision, uncovering a surprising number of similarities across disciplines, as well as some differences. I also briefly outline some of the key arguments put forward by feminist and postcolonial scientists and social scientists, working in the field of the philosophy of science, to challenge portrayals of scientific knowledge as rational and universal. Finally, in Chapter 10, I argue that, when we read time, place and knowledge pedagogically through a range of theoretical lenses, we begin to understand more about how history, geography and epistemology indelibly shape the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision. In summary, my book argues that, if we are to wrestle effectively with the serious global problems facing our world, then we need to draw together the vast array of knowledge systems that all of our cultures have produced. This means creating space for Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges in universities, and a key site where we can make this happen is in the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision. In order to achieve this, supervisors need to situate place, time and Other cultural knowledges at the centre of their supervision pedagogy. This would involve adopting transcultural supervision pedagogies and seeking to understand the unhomeliness that this might involve for students and for supervisors. It would also involve attempting to move beyond assimilationist supervision pedagogies.

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Introduction The legacies of colonialism and imperialism continue to shape our contemporary world (Nakata, 2002; Nayar, 2010). Although the legacies of colonisation are more obvious and explicit in postcolonial societies, such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and the US, and developing countries in Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East, they also impact upon European countries in prominent ways. These include the growing communities of locally born people with African, Asian, West Indian and other developing-world cultural backgrounds living in European countries. Contemporary experiences of culture and identity are deeply implicated in, and inflected by, colonialism, whether a person comes from coloniser or colonised groups, or both, and whether you are located in Europe or anywhere else on the globe. Although different cultural groups have grappled with each other since time immemorial, the age of European imperialism and the associated Orientalism saw the advent of a systematised, formal and institutionalised method for interpreting difference designed to achieve complete ideological and cultural domination, as Edward Said (1994) argued. The political, psychological and emotional after-effects of colonisation continue to impact on the political, cultural, social and economic policies that our politicians implement and the ways in which people relate at a global, national, community and individual level. As one of the most important cultural institutions of our societies, universities have also played a key role in continuing the legacies of colonialism and imperialism by privileging Western and Northern (Connell, 2007) knowledge, research and pedagogical practices. The work of leading Indigenous scholars such as Nakata (2006) and Smith (1999) has demonstrated the myriad of ways in which universities and the whole game of knowledge construction and disciplinary formation are deeply embedded in colonialism. Although I will go into much greater detail about this in Chapter 4, I will briefly sketch in how universities continue to perpetuate colonial discourses. Smith (1999) powerfully traces how colonial powers perceived themselves as centres of knowledge construction and theory building. These theories were then tested upon colonial peoples and in colonial places that functioned as giant laboratories for Western science and other

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disciplines. Many of the academic disciplines, especially my own discipline of history, were built around colonial research, and many academic reputations were created through the exploitation of Indigenous groups around the world, through ‘data’ collected from them. If we fast-forward to the present, we see that the Global North continues to dominate the construction of theory and knowledge (Connell, 2007). The universities that have emerged in countries around the globe are usually modelled on Western traditions, with British and American models predominating in many postcolonial countries, despite the ancient and proud histories of universities in Persia, India, China and Vietnam. The forces of globalisation and the continuing dominance of the English language in many academic disciplines have served only to reinforce these colonial legacies in many countries. What has come to count as knowledge and theory in many disciplines is Western knowledge, which is portrayed as universal. Although Indigenous peoples around the world have begun to develop Indigenous knowledge as an academic discipline, the space created in universities for Indigenous knowledge is incredibly small and marginalised. Indeed, the neo-liberal obsession with quantifiable outputs measured by Westernised, ‘scientific’ norms has only served to reinforce the marginal positioning of Indigenous knowledge, which may not be easily quantifiable in these ways. Lusted (1986) reminds us that knowledge plays a powerful role in any form of pedagogy, along with teachers and students or, in the case of postgraduate supervision, supervisors and students. When we induct our research students into the discourses and practices of research, we are initiating them into a system that continues to accord disproportionate legitimacy and value to Northern knowledge. This is despite all of the creative and generative work of Indigenous, Eastern and Southern scholars around the world, who have extended the boundaries of academic disciplines. These legacies continue to have a major impact on supervision pedagogy, even if we are actively engaged in creating culturally respectful spaces for the Indigenous, Eastern and Southern knowledges. What is recognised as knowledge and the pedagogical practices associated with knowledge construction are intimately bound up in cultural histories and discourses and the ongoing legacies of colonisation. The purpose of this chapter is to show how postcolonial theories sensitise us to these legacies and provide some nuanced ways of understanding culture and identity that create the conditions within which we supervise or study across cultures, and the historical baggage and resources we bring to intercultural supervision. This chapter is not designed to be a comprehensive account of the debates and contestations in postcolonial theory or a contribution to the ongoing refinement of these theories. Instead, I am seeking to apply particular concepts or ‘tropes’ used in postcolonial theory to intercultural supervision. In order to do this, I will outline my approach to postcolonial theory, define the key concepts I have borrowed from postcolonial theory to explore intercultural supervision and demonstrate how other authors have also begun to draw upon postcolonial theories in their work on intercultural supervision.

Postcolonial theory and supervision 15

Postcolonial theory Postcolonial theory is a complex body of work that seeks to focus on how ethnic difference came to be recast during the age of European imperialism and the Enlightenment into a systematic discourse claiming cultural superiority for the West, in order to justify and enable its territorial expansion across the globe. Known for its complicated and often controversial concepts and language, postcolonial theory is a critical, insightful lens through which to interrogate intercultural interactions, relationships, histories and identities. It enables us to investigate how the Western world characterises the non-European world. It also demonstrates how colonial histories were embedded in a racial discourse that depicted non-Europeans as ‘feminised, dehumanised and marginalised’ (Nayar, 2010: 4). This had significant psychological effects, on both the colonised and the colonisers, that continue to shape the present. Postcolonial theory also highlights instances of cultural resistance to these colonial discourses, including those that emerged in nationalist, anti-colonial movements and often shaped the first few decades of independent government. Postcolonial theorists have also been prominent in challenging some of the anticolonial nationalist myths and beliefs that were created in newly independent countries in reaction to colonisation. I agree with Thomas (1994: 2) when he describes colonialism as more than a ‘political and economic relationship that is legitimised through . . . racism’, but a ‘cultural process [through which] . . . discoveries and trespasses are imagined and energised through signs, metaphors, and narratives’. It operates at the discursive level. When such relationships operate at a discursive level, they shape what becomes possible to think, say and do in such powerful ways that they become internalised and require intensive and long-lasting work to undo. This is why postcolonial theory is necessary to truly understand colonialism’s violence (actual, symbolic and psychological) and its longevity. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of governmentality, Thomas (1994: 4) shows how modernity was itself a ‘colonialist project’, because both Western states and those they colonised ‘were understood as objects to be surveyed, regulated and sanitized’. As Thomas (1994: 17) argues, postcolonial theory allows us to ‘unravel secure progressive narratives that too easily separate a colonial past and a liberal present’. By acknowledging the historical ‘roots and routes’ of colonial discourses and their ongoing impact (Hall, 1996a: 10), postcolonial theory is a powerful theoretical tool for understanding contemporary educational intercultural interactions. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, I am not an expert on postcolonial theory, and I am conscious of the need to locate my approach to postcolonial theory as it has become such a blanket, all-encompassing term taken up by various disciplines, in particular and different ways. As I outlined in a recent book chapter (Manathunga, 2011), I am drawing principally on humanities and cultural studies traditions in my use of postcolonial theory and the specific concepts I will be drawing upon. I have chosen to draw upon these traditions of postcolonial theory because they emphasise the deep-seated ambivalence that lies at the heart of relations between the colonised and the coloniser. These ways of reading postcolonial theory stress

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that the colonised subject is ‘never simply and completely opposed to the coloniser . . . complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relationship with the colonial subject’ (Ashcroft et al., 2000: 12). This contrasts with some of the educational and sociological readings of postcolonial theory that, according to Spring (2008), position education as part of a Western/Northern bid for global economic and cultural domination, which, to my mind, seem to be more of an anti-colonial stance. In particular, I have chosen to think through humanities and cultural studies perspectives on postcolonial theory, which map on to my own intellectual and disciplinary background, because they highlight the entangled, mutual (though highly inequitable) identities and interactions between all participants in the colonial stories that continue to shape the present. The legacies of these intricate and often unacknowledged mutual dependencies are especially evident in postcolonial societies where I have spent much of my life, such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and (more briefly) Ireland.

Intercultural supervision as a postcolonial contact zone In my previous research, I have found that a productive way to characterise intercultural supervision is to draw on Pratt’s (2008) postcolonial concept of the contact zone. Pratt described the contact zone as ‘the social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’ (Pratt, 2008: 7). She argues that the contact zone is a preferable term to ‘colonial frontier’, because it challenges Eurocentric geographies of centres and peripheries, boundaries and edges. Instead it ‘invokes the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present’ (Pratt, 2008: 8). In addition, although not denying the conflict that was also a major part of the contact zone, the idea of ‘contact’ is designed to ‘foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters’ (Pratt, 2008: 8) that are often overlooked from the colonising perspective. As Pratt stresses, contact highlights ‘how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other’ (2008: 8). There has been a lot of recent literature in history and cultural studies seeking to reinvestigate the first contact of Indigenous and colonising groups (Denning, 1986; White, 2011; O’Malley, 2012), which has generated other postcolonial metaphors such as ‘middle ground’ in the Great Lakes region of North America (White, 2011) and the ‘beach’ in the Pacific Islands (Denning, 1986). These theorists highlight the ways in which the coloniser and their countries of origin were also changed by the process of colonisation. This is often overlooked in coloniser constructions of themselves. This happened particularly through the adoption of Indigenous linguistic terms and expressions into the language of the coloniser, particularly English. For instance, McEwan (2009) outlines the many terms from different Indian languages (e.g., Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit, Tamil) that were incorporated into the English language, such as bangle, cot, jungle, atoll, candy, cash, dinghy, sugar and mantra. Many Aboriginal words have been incorporated into colloquial Australian English, such as the Aboriginal word for

Postcolonial theory and supervision 17 work – yakka (Macquarie Library, 1981: 2013). There was also a great deal of technological borrowing that has not usually been acknowledged. Contact zones were spaces of ‘compromise and resistance, assertion and imitation, hybridity and adaption’ (Childs and Williams, 1997: 185). Some theorists have continued to use the contact zone metaphor to frame the ongoing nature of that contact in postcolonial societies, which are also often characterised by high levels of immigration and cultural difference. Indeed, ‘globalisation brings everyone into the contact zone’, and the notion of separate histories of the colonisers and the colonised, between the centre and the margins, becomes no longer possible (Childs and Williams, 1997: 213). In relation to higher education pedagogy, several authors have drawn upon the metaphor of the contact zone. Pratt (1996) herself applied it to new pedagogical possibilities in the arts disciplines, including: • • • • • • • • • • •

auto-ethnography; critique; collaboration; mediation; imaginary dialogue; story-telling; parody; comparison; redemption of oral traditions; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history; ways to move into and out of authenticity (Pratt, 1996: 536 and 541).

This sparked other academics in English studies to use the contact zone metaphor to frame their teaching of world literatures (e.g., Bizzell, 1994; Miller, 1994) and to investigate the ways in which African American students coped with university contact zones (Canagarajah, 1997). Drawing on this work, Kenway and Bullen (2003: 10) have applied the concept of the contact zone to higher education, suggesting that, ‘the goal of those teaching in . . . the contact zone is . . . to focus on . . . how students, texts or cultures might come together in productive dialogue – without glossing over difference’. Postcolonial theorists have argued that two key features of the contact zone are experiences of liminality and hybridity. Liminality is a highly productive way of trying to theorise the ‘inter’ in intercultural supervision, or the meeting places between cultures within which supervisors and students engage with each other. Bhabha (1988) wrote of hybridity as ‘a space of translation . . . where the construction of the political object that is new, neither the one nor the Other, properly alienates our political expectations and changes . . . the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics’. Combining the ideas of liminality and hybridity, Bhabha (1990; 2004) develops a concept he calls the Third Space. Indeed, Bhabha (2004: 56) emphasises that it is the ‘inter – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the

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meaning of culture’. For Bhabha, the Third Space is a ‘place of agency and intervention’, a subversive site rather than one of assimilation or acquiescence. He argues that, ‘this Third Space displaces the histories that constitute it and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives’ (Bhabha, 1990: 211). The postcolonial contact, then, is a useful overarching trope to draw upon to describe the context within which intercultural supervision takes place.

Pedagogies of the intercultural supervision contact zone In my previous work, I have identified two key pedagogies students, and sometimes supervisors, experience in the intercultural supervision contact zone that is characterised by liminality and hybridity and that acts as a kind of Third Space. Unlike Pratt’s (1996) list of positive pedagogies that could be used in the contact zone described above, my research has uncovered the adoption of both productive and problematic supervision approaches. Transculturation Transculturation represents a highly productive pedagogy of the intercultural supervision contact zone. The concept of transculturation is particularly associated with Pratt’s (2008) work. She highlights how ethnographers have used this term to ‘describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture’ (Pratt, 2008: 7). Although these groups cannot determine which aspects of the dominant culture they are subjected to, they do have agency in deciding upon which concepts ‘they absorb into their own, how they use . . . [them], and what they make . . . [them] mean’ (Pratt, 2008: 7). It is this type of experience that occurs in the contact zone (alongside conflict, plundering and violence). Indeed, as Sommer (2005: 174) argued, ‘transculturation is creativity derived from antagonism’. If we apply the questions that Pratt (2008: 7) suggests are generated by this notion of transculturation, to the project of intercultural supervision, then we would be asking: • • • • •

What do Eastern, Southern and Indigenous students (and supervisors) do with metropolitan theories and knowledges? How do they appropriate them? How do they talk back to them? How can Western, Northern supervisors encourage these forms of transculturation? Are Western, Northern supervisors’ knowledges reshaped as a result of their engagement with their Eastern, Southern and Indigenous students?

Assimilation It is important to acknowledge that assimilation and all of the symbolic violence that this entails may also be a pedagogy of the intercultural supervision contact

Postcolonial theory and supervision 19 zone, just as forced adoption of Western cultural norms and practices and violence were part of the original contact zone. One of the most useful, accurate definitions of assimilation is located in the Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (Abercrombie et al., 1984: 18), which describes it as ‘a unidimensional, one-way process by which outsiders relinquished their own culture in favour of that of the dominant society’. Wisker (2007: 29) discusses how assimilation ‘cuts off history, family and cultural elements of identity’, ensuring that ‘those who inhabit a physical and imaginary diaspora . . .[are] always in dialogue between the adoptive homeland and the other homeland[s]’. Wisker (2007: 43) also reminds us that Fanon outlined assimilation as the first stage that ‘colonised intellectuals’ move through in their writing. This is the phase, according to Fanon, where these writers produce texts that ‘imitate European models, styles or genres’ (Wisker, 2007: 43). Assimilation requires a total denial of self. Part of the way in which this phenomenon works is by establishing the supposed ‘superiority’ of the norms and practices of the dominant group. Other ways of being may be actively denigrated or criticised, causing self-doubt and shame and a desire to acquire new cultural practices, forms of dress and behaviour, and so on, as quickly as possible. As Fanon (1967) demonstrates, colonial discourses gain their power from the ways in which they become internalised, not only by Western groups, but, more significantly, by marginalised Eastern or Southern or Indigenous peoples. This has been the experience of many immigrants to both settler/invader countries, such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and to the former colonial centres, such as England or France. It has also been the fate of many Indigenous peoples around the world, where the settler/invader groups took over the land and its people and resources and established their cultural and knowledge production practices as the only legitimate way to operate. In many locations around the globe, this went further, and complete cultural genocide was often attempted, in conjunction with actual genocide (O’Malley, 2012). The contact zone is overflowing with scary eugenic beliefs and practices designed to annihilate or ‘whiten out’ Indigenous peoples. These practices, and their aftermath, are evocatively grappled with by Kim Scott (1999), a Nyoongar man from the south coast of Western Australia, in his shocking and powerful novel, Benang. Active policies of banning the speaking of Indigenous languages and the enacting of Indigenous practices were a central feature of colonial rule, as was, in some cases such as Australia, the removal of mixed-race children to white state or church institutions and orphanages. The additional catch, however, especially for peoples that appear visibly different, is that they will never be fully recognised as local or belonging to a place, no matter how much they seek to match the discourses and practices of the dominant or colonising group. As Wisker (2007: 29) and others have emphasised, ‘merging can be impossible in some respects if colour and custom single you out’. Even if you assimilate, you are likely to be subject to marginalisation, discrimination, ghettoisation, exclusion or ridicule (Wisker, 2007). This is a common experience for immigrants and their descendants, no matter how long their people may have lived in a place, as my younger son, Daniel, has experienced. Daniel, who is sixth-generation Australian on my side

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and second-generation on his father’s side, is routinely called a FOB (‘fresh off the boat’) and told to ‘go home’. It was with these nuances in mind that I first applied assimilation to intercultural supervision in 2007 (Manathunga, 2007). In intercultural supervision, assimilation implies the letting go of all of your original cultural and knowledge-making practices upon arrival in a different research space. Instead, you are expected to conform to all of the ways of thinking, knowing and being that are taken for granted as ‘normal’ or natural by the dominant group, which, in many countries, is Western. Very often, people from these dominant cultures may not even be aware that they are operating in a particular, culturally determined way.

Unhomeliness in the intercultural supervision contact zone Another postcolonial trope I have found helpful to unpack the experience of the intercultural supervision contact zone is the concept of unhomeliness. Unhomeliness is not really a pedagogy of intercultural supervision, but an experience that may impact upon both students and supervisors working across, between and within cultures. There are a number of aspects to the postcolonial concept of unhomeliness that are particularly relevant in intercultural supervision. These include: • • •

a reversal of home and the world, with the corresponding blurring of the boundaries between the private and the public; a deep-seated ambivalence in relations between the colonised and the coloniser and in the roles and identities of both parties; unsettling dislocation and uncertainty that result from deciding which existing and new cultural and knowledge-making practices to retain, which to adopt and which to blend together.

Bhabha’s (2004) work is particularly associated with the concept of unhomeliness. He used this phrase to describe ‘the estranging sense of the relocation of home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’ that migrant workers, refugees, Indigenous peoples and cultural minorities experience (Bhabha, 2004: 13). In this state, you are not homeless, but you are never truly at home. As Gandhi (1998: 132) suggests, Bhabha describes how ‘colonialism violates the solace of homely spaces’. Referring to Henry James’ work, Bhabha (2004: 13) also argues that, ‘the recesses of . . . domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions’. In this way, Bhabha (2004: 13) writes about how ‘the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorientating’. For most women, the ways in which the private and the public are interwoven and confused are familiar lived experiences. Bhabha (2004: 15) recognises how this disturbance of ‘patriarchal . . . symmetry of private and public’ results when men and women are no longer neatly represented in only one of these two spheres. He quotes the feminist

Postcolonial theory and supervision 21 mantra, ‘the personal-is-the-political’, describing how unhomeliness occurs when the ‘traumatic ambivalences of a personal . . . history . . . and the wider disjunctions of political existence’ coincide (Bhabha, 2004: 15). Whereas, for Bhabha, the blurring of the personal and the political is painful and disconcerting, some theorists, especially women, find comfort in understanding the structural, political nature of their personal experiences. Although the entanglement of the private and the public can produce divided identities for women, it can also be an inbetween place where both spheres are mutually enriched. Like bell hooks, I have often found theory about the political to be ‘a location for healing’ (hooks, 1994: 59). Unhomeliness also tries to capture the overwhelming sense of ambivalence people may feel about their identities, as they blur, change and re-form. Part of this notion of unhomeliness is the strange, ambivalent relationship between the colonised and the coloniser. As Gandhi (1998: 11) argues, the relationship between these two parties is ‘ambivalent and symbiotic’, characterised by a strange combination of ‘hate and desire – a compulsion to return a voyeuristic gaze’. In supervision pedagogy, this strange, symbiotic pattern of domination and subordination has been echoed in Grant’s (2008) work on Hegel’s exploration of the ‘master–slave’ dynamic and how these positionings may impact on supervision. If these complex, entangled relations of power circulate in any form of supervision, how much more are they potentially in evidence when ethnicity and colonial histories and experiences are added to the mix? It is important to recognise that there are no simple, binary oppositions between the colonised and the coloniser. Instead, there are constant flows of intertwined complicity and resistance, mimicry and mockery (as described earlier in this chapter) that make colonial relations curiously ambivalent and unhomely. In intercultural supervision, this concept outlines ‘the cultural alienation, sense of uncertainty and discomfort that people experience as they adjust to new cultural practices’ (Manathunga, 2007: 98). The unhomely subject will constantly be making choices between which cultural and knowledge-making practices they retain from their previous experiences, which new ways of thinking, knowing and being they adopt, and which structures of being they blend in order to create new possibilities. And not all of these choices will be consciously made either. Part of the dislocation arises from the ways in which contradictory cultural and knowledge-making practices and identities surface and jostle with each other in the body of the unhomely subject. As Kenway and Bullen (2003) argue in their study of international women research students, these women experienced moments of pragmatism, resistance, ambivalence, reinvention, affirmation and solidarity. Indeed, as Ashcroft and others (2000) argue, contained within this terrible dislocation are also the seeds of regeneration and (re)creation.

Using postcolonial theory to explore intercultural supervision Doctoral supervision is already a very complicated form of pedagogy. As Grant’s (2003) work has demonstrated, the supervision space is a complex field of power

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and desire, circulating between the supervisors, the student and knowledge. To supervision, each supervisor and student brings, not only their intellectual knowledge and academic experience, but also their own personal histories, experiences, personalities, cultures and, as Grant (2003) reminds us, unconscious knowings and desires. This is what makes supervision such a rich and also challenging pedagogy. When the people within the supervision space also inhabit very different cultural worlds and bring with them a vast array of different cultural knowledges, insights and practices, then supervision becomes even more complex, but also potentially more fruitful. Intercultural supervision is both notoriously difficult for all parties and also richly rewarding. However, when we turn to the standard ‘how-to’ guides or university policy on supervision, or on being a doctoral student, very little of this material charts these complexities and pleasures, as I outlined in Chapter 1. If you follow these guidelines, so long as you are explicit and carefully discuss and write down how you will operate as a ‘team’, then all will proceed smoothly to a timely and successful completion. Time and time again, supervisors and students have approached me with difficult supervision experiences that they are trying to grapple with – emotions and situations that exceed the carefully laid down prescriptions and boundaries established in guidelines. People speak to me of miscommunication, running out of resonant metaphors to explain the writing of theses, dilemmas about relating to the variety of cultural positionings present in the supervision relationship. I have also experienced instances of miscommunication and grappled with complex and confusing emotions, both as a student and as a supervisor. As I argued in the first chapter, there is no space in hyper-rational descriptions of supervision pedagogy for emotions, cultural differences, irrationalities, desires, pleasures, ambiguities and tensions. More recently, poststructuralist investigations of supervision have begun the work of exploring these irrationalities, dilemmas and pleasures (e.g., Green and Lee, 1995; Johnson et al., 2000; Grant, 2003). However, I think many of these texts do not enable us to fully grapple with the complex interplay of time, place and culture in intercultural supervision. This is where postcolonial theory can help. Postcolonial theory offers us carefully nuanced understandings about the inherent tensions and pleasures of working across and between cultures. It is attentive to the full range of complicated positionings possible in this postcolonial age (e.g., Indigenous, settler/invader, migrant worker, international student, etc.). It demonstrates how history permeates the present, often in strange, subconscious or barely perceptible ways. It reminds us of the importance of place in any pedagogical interaction, carefully locating supervision interactions in space and making evident the many places we bring into the room where supervision takes place. Postcolonial theory provides us with fresh insights into issues of culture, identity, knowledge and intercultural communication, which are vital in intercultural supervision. It is only in the last few years that a small body of work viewing supervision and culture through postcolonial lenses has emerged. Much of this research has been confined to short, article/chapter-length pieces that do not allow for the

Postcolonial theory and supervision 23 careful and extensive exploration of the complexities and deconstructive possibilities postcolonial theory can bring to intercultural supervision. An early use of postcolonial theory is present in Venables et al.’s (2001) discussion of the shifting identities of three South African women who had immigrated to Australia. Writing as two students (one from an Indian South African background and one from a Russian South African background) and one supervisor (from an English South African background), these women explore how their PhD or supervision journeys are ‘brought into relief by the experience of migration’, and how, as a result, they must ‘grow new mind states, new emotional and conceptual landscapes’ (Venables et al., 2001: 243–4). They draw upon the theories of poststructuralist geographer Edward Soja (1998) and postcolonial writer Julia Kristeva (1991) to explore tropes of space, migration and otherness. Writing a few years later, Kenway and Bullen (2003) conducted a project on female international research students in Australia and Canada, in which they argued for a more nuanced approach that takes account of female international students as ‘both gendered and colonial subjects’ (Kenway and Bullen, 2003: 6). They found that the women they studied adopted a range of identity positions, from pragmatic adoption and assimilation, to resistance in response to representations of themselves as Others. Although many of them experienced affirmation, some also felt ambivalent in both their host and home countries. In particular, they drew on Pratt’s postcolonial representation of the contact zone and of transculturation, which I have described above. In a second article from the same study, Bullen and Kenway (2003) explored staff perceptions of female international research students in Australia, drawing on Said’s notion of Orientalism and some of Bhabha’s (1986), Gandhi’s (1998) and Loomba’s (1998) extensions and critiques of this concept to problematise stereotypical assumptions about so-called Eastern or Confucian heritage culture learning styles. In particular, they echoed Loomba’s contention that the West creates its identity by not being all things that are ascribed to the East: If colonised people are irrational, Europeans are rational; if the former are barbaric, sensual, and lazy, Europe is civilisation itself, with its sexual appetites under control and its dominant ethic that of hard work; if the Orient is static Europe can be seen as developing and marching ahead; the Orient has to be feminine so that Europe can be masculine. (Loomba, 1998: 47) They highlight that this plays out in the infantilised notions staff may have of female international research students as passive, uncritical learners and suppressed victims (Bullen and Kenway, 2003). There is also a recent body of work by Singh and some of his students, on supervising Chinese students in Australia, that demonstrates how the boundaries of Western knowledge can be challenged and expanded when students have the opportunity to draw upon their own cultural knowledge. Although the writing of Singh and his students does not explicitly draw upon postcolonial theory, it

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provides many powerful examples of the postcolonial process of transculturation described above. Building upon Rancière’s concept of ‘ignorant schoolmasters’, Singh (2009: 194) argues that, ‘the conscientious but ignorant’ supervisor can treat their students as intellectual equals and facilitate their ability to form new links between their own cultural and knowledge-making practices and those of Western or Northern theory to create new knowledge (transculturation). Extending these ideas further, Singh and Chen (2012) describe in more detail instances of Chinese students troubling Western or Northern knowledge by harnessing their rich Confucian intellectual heritage, their multilingual abilities and their access to transnational digital communities. The additional skills and knowledge possessed by students who are multilingual are also explored in an article by Singh and Huang (2012). These authors examine the colonial underpinnings of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and the many slippages of language and interpretation that have occurred, as Bourdieu’s concepts, which were originally established in France and Algeria, are consumed in anglophone countries (Singh and Huang, 2012). They describe how Western anglophone supervisors can encourage their research students to apply their multilingual knowledge and their cultural theoretical resources in order to create highly original knowledge that pushes the boundaries of anglophone monolingualism. With colleagues Rizvi and Shrestha, Singh (2007: 196) also wrote a book chapter on the ways in which Chinese students studying in Australia and then returning to China develop ‘richly textured cosmopolitan identities’ and mobile, spatial practices. Drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) and others’ constructions of space as relational, Singh et al. (2007) trace these students’ attempts to grapple with early homesickness and with their new Australian environment, where they experienced racism as well as opportunities to build new friendship and educational networks with other international and local students. Negotiating the challenges of survival and independence, they developed ‘generative or creative capacities’, greater reflexivity and cultural flexibility and the ability to be fully bicultural and bilingual (Singh et al., 2007: 206). All of these capacities enabled them to deal with cultural contradictions and pluralities in new ways and to ‘seek new orientations to their world and new forms of cosmopolitan bridging’ (Singh et al., 2007: 208). Although my research has not focused on supervising Indigenous students, there are many insights that can be gained from the recent postcolonial explorations of Indigenous supervision. It is also worth noting that, although these investigations of Indigenous supervision always engage with postcolonial issues, some Indigenous scholars have some concerns with the idea of postcolonial theory. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) outlines the specific issues Indigenous researchers may have with postcolonial theory. In particular, she emphasises how colonisation is an ongoing experience for many Indigenous people, and so it is not ‘post’ or yet over. To underline this point, she quotes Australian Aboriginal activist Bobby Sykes, who said, ‘What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?’ (quoted in Smith, 1999: 24). She also argues that the ways in which postcolonial discourse has been developed and used ‘can still leave out Indigenous peoples, our ways of knowing and our current

Postcolonial theory and supervision 25 concerns’ (Smith, 1999: 24). There are concerns among Indigenous scholars, Smith suggests, that postcolonialism could be ‘a convenient invention of Western intellectuals which reinscribes their power to define the world’ (Smith, 1999: 14). As a particular focus of this book is on the settler/invader societies of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, I will concentrate on some of the research that has investigated Ma¯ori and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander supervision. This is not intended to be an exhaustive account, but instead will provide a snapshot of some of the key understandings that have emerged from this literature that may help us to think differently about all forms of intercultural supervision. Kidman (2007) laid some of the foundations of more recent explorations of supervising Ma¯ori candidates. She has argued that valuing and incorporating Ma¯ori tribal and cultural knowledge and practices in supervision were vital, and that this should sit alongside a recognition that there are many ‘tribal, cultural, social, economic and educational’ differences between Ma¯ori candidates (Kidman, 2007: 167). Just as there is ‘no single “correct” way of being a doctoral student’, there is also no proper way ‘of being Ma¯ori’ either (Kidman, 2007: 168). Kidman emphasises how Ma¯ori doctoral students are engaged in the dual challenge of not only ‘finding their place’ in the academy, which continues to be dominated by Western or Pa¯keha¯ knowledge practices, but also of simultaneously grappling with their own shifting sense of what it means to be Ma¯ori and to engage in ‘their own changing cultural spaces’ (2007: 166). These challenges are later taken up in more detail in the larger study of Ma¯ori supervision described below (McKinley et al., 2011). Kidman (2007: 168) focuses on a ‘clustered supervision’ approach that supervisors of Ma¯ori students, within or across departments, can implement to break down the cultural isolation experienced by Ma¯ori students. This involves organising new clusters of Ma¯ori students and their supervisors early in candidature and negotiating learning needs with the group . A monthly programme of workshops and presentations is then planned, and students are encouraged to complete reporting and writing tasks in each group session. The goal is that, by midcandidature, these cluster groups can become student-driven and autonomous and may link in with other national programmes supporting Ma¯ori doctoral students, such as the Ma¯ori and Indigenous (MAI) Te Kupenga programme, which conducts local, regional and national activities, conferences and events for Ma¯ori and Indigenous students. Kidman (2007) also refers to Kaupapa Ma¯ori and other Indigenous paradigms that Ma¯ori students may choose to adopt in their research. These perspectives question, challenge and extend Pa¯keha¯-dominated disciplinary knowledges. Literally, kaupapa means ground rules (Smith and Reid, 2000). As Nepe (1991: 76) argued, Kaupapa Ma¯ori is the ‘systematic organisation of beliefs, experiences, understandings and interpretations of the interactions of Ma¯ori people upon Ma¯ori people and Ma¯ori people upon their world’. More recently, a Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯ research team, including Liz McKinley, Les Tumoana Williams, Kathie Irwin, Barbara Grant and Sue Middleton, conducted a large study of Ma¯ori supervision. They have produced a large collection of work, and so I will only focus on three of their publications here. In an article written by the whole team, McKinley and others (2011) explore Ma¯ori

26 Postcolonial theory and supervision ways of knowing and how some of these approaches to knowledge are in direct opposition to Western or Northern research practices. For example, they outline how a student grapples with a request from her Pa¯keha¯ supervisor to ‘unpack the stories’, when this would have resulted in the breaking of tikanga (cultural protocols) (McKinley et al., 2011: 121). They capture the liminality or Third Space of ‘working with(in) different knowledges, working with research advisors and researching as Ma¯ori with Ma¯ori’ (McKinley et al., 2011: 116). They also emphasise the spiritual guidance some Ma¯ori students receive from their tu–puna (ancestors) and the ways in which Ma¯ori students may seek to validate their parents’ and grandparents’ knowledge through the research process (McKinley et al., 2011). This article concludes with a helpful summary of recommendations for Pa¯keha¯ supervisors, which may also be applicable to other forms of intercultural supervision. These include the need for Pa¯keha¯ supervisors to be: • • • • •

aware of the multiple agendas some Ma¯ori candidates bring to their academic work; prepared for unpredictable consequences of their involvement; understanding that some Ma¯ori candidates may be using their doctoral study to strengthen their Ma¯ori identity; open to the influence of community-based mentors; open to unfamiliar ways of knowing and thinking (McKinley et al., 2011: 127).

In another book chapter, McKinley and Grant (2012) describe the Ma¯ori concept of pedagogy, which is called ako. Ako is a concept that constructs pedagogy as the ‘unified cooperation of the learner and the teacher in a single enterprise’ (McKinley and Grant, 2012: 207). There are three traditional forms of ako that could be adapted to Ma¯ori supervision. These are formal learning, everyday exposure and apprenticeship. Each of these approaches is usually conducted in a ‘proper setting’ (in other words, place is really important), with the learner listening, looking and imitating with a minimum of words, and may involve a series of tests to check the learner’s desire to learn. These pedagogies require time, care, Ma¯ori cultural knowledge and language development and recovery, and call on institutions to make space in their higher-degree research programmes to facilitate these slower and deeper doctoral pedagogies (McKinley and Grant, 2012). This book chapter provides an important example of transculturation that is helpful for supervisors of candidates from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and for the candidates themselves. In another article, Grant and McKinley (2011: 377) demonstrate how history and locality in Aotearoa New Zealand ‘colour’ supervision pedagogies when Ma¯ori candidates and supervisors and Ma¯ori candidates and Pa¯keha¯ supervisors work together. Their research demonstrates the diversity among Ma¯ori candidates in terms of whether they are engaging in traditional Western academic research while acknowledging their ancestral lineages or deeply embedded in Ma¯oritanga (Ma¯ori culture, practice and beliefs). In other work, Grant has also described how some Ma¯ori candidates use their research projects to reconnect with their Ma¯ori

Postcolonial theory and supervision 27 heritage and become Ma¯ori (Grant, 2010). In terms of Pa¯keha¯ supervisors, they highlight the concerns they might have about their lack of knowledge of ma¯tauranga Ma¯ori (Ma¯ori education, knowledge and wisdom), which is similar to Singh’s point about pedagogies of ignorance discussed above. Grant and McKinley (2011: 383, 380) also discuss the ‘settler grief and guilt’ supervisors may experience as they engage with Aotearoa New Zealand history and recognise the ways they are ‘part of the problem’, becoming conscious of their own biases and assumptions. They also outline the significant roles played by supervisors external to the university. These include the candidates’ kauma¯tua (male or female elder), who takes on a grandparent-type relationship with candidates, which is the primary pedagogical relationship in Ma¯ori culture, and the candidates’ tu–puna (female or male ancestor), who provides spiritual guidance for the project. They describe how some Pa¯keha¯ supervisors try to use Ma¯ori imagery with their candidates, and how candidates and supervisors trade metaphors in a mutual exchange. Grant and McKinley (2011) also show how there are times when Ma¯ori knowledge clashes with Western academic knowledge, and candidates and supervisors struggle to work through these tensions. All of this ‘colours and thereby enriches’ supervision, holding open the possibility of transformation for both candidates and supervisors, although some of these transformations may be painful (Grant and McKinley, 2011: 379). As will be described below, there are a number of important parallels with the experiences of culturally and linguistically diverse candidates in this work on Ma¯ori supervision, especially in regard to the role of beliefs about spiritual guidance and ancestor involvement. In addition, as Said’s (1994) work on Orientalism has demonstrated, stereotypes and misunderstandings of nonEuropean ways of knowing and being by Europeans may continue to surface in intercultural supervision. Bullen and Kenway (2003) demonstrate this in their research on staff perspectives of female international candidates, described above. Reflecting on her experiences as a Ma¯ori student, Hiha (2007: 144) evocatively described how she felt as though she was: walking the edge of a sword with the Western world on one side and the Ma¯ori world on the other. I felt as though I was being pulled both ways and to stay on the sword I was in a tense state all the time . . . It was not until I was centred in my identity as wholly Ma¯ori, rather than staunchly Ma¯ori, that the sword disappeared and I walked my doctoral path without the fear of getting lost in the Western academe. Rather than an experience of transculturation or blending of knowledge, Hiha suggests that her doctoral journey was one that allowed her to become fully and confidently Ma¯ori, and to engage with Western academe respectfully, but on her own Ma¯ori terms. There is also a growing body of literature on supervising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia. Once again, I have only included here some of the recent work that provides particular insights that may be applicable to other

28 Postcolonial theory and supervision forms of intercultural supervision. A number of personal reflections of Aboriginal doctoral graduates demonstrate the diversity of experiences and desires Indigenous candidates bring to supervision. For example, Behrendt (2001: 212) argued that she wanted a ‘formal working relationship’ with her supervisor, so that she would ‘meet deadlines and work hard’ and receive ‘intellectual guidance and rigour’. She was able to secure emotional support outside the supervision relationship, from her family and a number of Indigenous organisations. For other Indigenous Australian candidates, it was important that their supervisor developed a close personal relationship with them and their families (Laycock et al., 2009). For Budby (2001), like others, there was the fear that doctoral studies would distance him from his own family and community. He also wrote about the difficulty of finding a supervisor he could trust (given the Western history of stealing, misinterpreting and abusing Aboriginal knowledge), who would understand that knowledge can be presented and disseminated in many different ways. Ford (2012) also provided a reflection of her experiences as a Rak Mak Mak Marranunggu person from the Northern Territory in Australia completing her doctorate. Ford (2012) uses the term Tyikim, the word in her language for her people and for other Indigenous Australians, to describe Indigenous peoples. Ford (2012: 146) emphasises how she developed the following set of guiding principles for her research that she recommends to other Tyikim (Indigenous) doctoral candidates: •

• • • • • •

valuing and sharing Tyikim knowledge: shared ownership of the project with their Tyikim community; following Tyikim knowledge protocols; doctoral candidate becomes a ‘conduit to help transform Western research’ (Ford, 2012: 148); reciprocity between Western and Tyikim knowledge paradigms; addressing Tyikim community business and especially improving highereducation outcomes for Tyikim students; sharing Tyikim knowledge; recognising that relationships and connectedness are essential and fundamental to Tyikim people and candidates; adopting a Tyikim research methodology; influencing university research ethics and protocols in Tyikim research; prioritising Tyikim examiners (or reviewers) as Tyikim knowledge bearers.

Indeed, Ford (2012: 148) also incorporates an example of transculturation in her discussion of the ways in which ‘reciprocity between an enactment of Tyikim knowledge and Western knowledge paradigms integrat[e] to create a new way of understanding and practicing significant knowledge creation’. The official university inclusion of senior elders from the community of a Tyikim doctoral student in the supervision team is also important (Ford, 2012) (as was the case in Ma¯ori supervision) and confirms the university’s respect for Tyikim knowledge. Ford (2012: 150) argues that the characteristics required of supervisors of Tyikim candidates, especially those from non-Indigenous backgrounds, include ‘goodwill, cultural openness and a measure of acceptance of the unknown’.

Postcolonial theory and supervision 29 Henry, who was Ford’s supervisor, with the Institute of Koorie Education at Deakin University, has also written about supervising Aboriginal doctoral candidates (Henry with the Institute of Koorie Education, 2007). He describes the ways in which the Indigenous student acts as the ‘conduit through which Aboriginal knowledge flows’ into the research project. This ensures that the supervisor becomes a ‘facilitator of this process’ and a learner rather than a teacher, which can be a ‘risky business . . . [as] new ground is being tested through the student–academic partnership’ (Henry with the Institute of Koorie Education, 2007: 156). Henry and his colleagues emphasise the flexibility doctoral programmes allow for Aboriginal candidates to delve deeper into their own knowledge systems, learn more about Western ways of knowing and ‘develop new syntheses of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal knowledges that have resonance and applicability in their own communities’ (2007: 157). Again, transculturation features in Henry’s and his colleagues’ explorations of supervising Indigenous students, although this must be done cautiously and respectfully, especially as Aboriginal candidates ‘do not want their intellectual work to be colonised afresh by non-Aboriginal “experts” on Aboriginal matters’ (Henry with the Institute of Koorie Education, 2007: 158). Therefore, it is particularly important, in supervising Indigenous students, to establish trust, assist students to deal with competing family and community commitments, help students stay motivated, assist students to develop their research topic while understanding that supervisors will not necessarily be privy to some of the deeper cultural and spiritual meanings of this knowledge (Henry and his colleagues call this ‘living with incommensurability’), determine where they should have input and where they should leave decisions to the candidate and their Indigenous community, work in supervisory teams with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal supervisors and undertake the role of ‘advocate, mediator and strategist’ within the university (Henry with the Institute of Koorie Education, 2012: 163). These important explorations of Indigenous supervision provide some parallels with the supervision and examination experiences of a Cambodian doctoral student and her Australian supervisors, outlined in an article by Devos and Somerville (2012). Devos and Somerville (2012) examine the clash of Western and Cambodian knowledge production processes and subjectivities that came to a head when the student received two different examination results. The student’s thesis was a memoir of her grandmother, who was a member of the Cambodian Royal Family, which had been exiled during the Pol Pot regime. The student, Piphal, who had lost everything during this period of terror, including her two children, had memorised her grandmother’s memoir in the Cambodian language before she fled Cambodia to Australia. So her research was ‘a highly emotionally charged commitment to intergenerational and transcontinental identity work’ (Devos and Somerville, 2012: 48). The supervisor writes about how part of the supervisory process involved Piphal dressing her correctly in Cambodian Royal dress and photographing her, a process that the supervisor found ‘uncomfortable’ but that enabled her to understand ‘much more of Piphal’s subjectivity’ (Devos

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and Somerville, 2012: 50). Just as the Ma¯ori candidates in the study above described the role played by their ancestors in their supervision, Piphal, according to her supervisor, ‘believes that the writing . . . is directed by the hands of the ancestors’ (Devos and Somerville, 2012: 50). Whereas one examiner of Piphal’s research regarded her thesis as ‘a remarkable work of personal and academic scholarship’, the other examiner recommended that substantial work needed to be done to ‘develop the historical and political contexts of the narrative’ (Devos and Somerville, 2012: 51). An adjudicator was given the challenging task of making a ruling between these examiners’ reports. She argued that, although ‘both examiners were competent and fair from the perspectives of the disciplinary and research spaces in which they were each located’, this thesis could not be examined ‘in the usual ways’, because ‘the work stands alone, in its own genre’, as a work of ‘difference and innovation’ (Devos and Somerville, 2012: 52–3). Devos and Somerville (2012: 53) conclude that, although it is risky work, especially for culturally and linguistically diverse candidates, we must create space in the academy for ‘non-traditional forms of inquiry and representation’.

Conclusion Postcolonial theory acts as a significant theoretical tool with which to enrich and unsettle present understandings of intercultural supervision. As I have shown in this chapter, postcolonial theory sensitises us to the ways in which previous colonial scripts continue to underpin the realities of our globalised world and our universities, which continue to be dominated by Northern knowledge. It is within this context that we conduct intercultural supervision. These are the conditions in which we supervise across, between and within cultures. These are the historical legacies and resources that we bring to intercultural supervision. Postcolonial theory allows us to develop more nuanced and critical understandings of how cultures and identities play out in intercultural supervision. It supplies us with productive tropes that we can use to theorise the meeting places of cultures in intercultural supervision. In this way, intercultural supervision can be understood as a postcolonial contact zone. As my previous work and that of others has demonstrated, there are at least two pedagogies associated with the intercultural supervision contact zone – transculturation and assimilation. There is also the challenging experience of unhomeliness and ambivalence that occurs when students and supervisors are grappling with conflicting cultural practices. However, interrogating the ways in which culture plays out in intercultural supervision only takes us so far. In the next chapter, I assemble a range of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theoretical resources to enable us to explore the role played by time and place in the intercultural supervision contact zone. I seek to read these theoretical resources pedagogically, in order to reimagine what they can teach us about how history and geography impact upon intercultural supervision.

3

Time and place in intercultural supervision

Introduction In this chapter, I present an exploration of a range of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theories about time and place as a basis to understand more fully how history and geography play out in intercultural supervision. I have included a wide variety of theoretical resources, because I think these theoretical insights further extend our thinking about the role time and place play in intercultural supervision. The common link between these theories is the way in which they seek to go beyond universalised Northern understandings of history and geography. I believe this is particularly necessary if we are ever to go beyond Western or Northern approaches to supervision pedagogy and to knowledge construction. I have sought to read these theoretical resources pedagogically in order to think carefully about what they might mean for how we operate in intercultural supervision as supervisors and students. I try to do this in each section of this chapter. The pattern I have followed is to outline the central premises of these theories and then think about how these ideas allow us to reimagine history and geography in intercultural supervision. In this endeavour, I am greatly assisted by the fact that there is a well-developed body of literature on place-based pedagogy, although this has mostly been applied to the early childhood, primary and secondary school sectors. I have not been able to locate a substantial body of work on time-based pedagogy, apart from Clegg (2010) and Araújo (2005).

Time and supervision Time and histories operate at multiple levels in any supervision process, particularly when supervisors and students come from different cultures. Each supervisor and student will bring into the supervision space their own personal and intellectual histories, which will have helped to shape their personal and scholarly identities. The histories of the countries and cultures that supervisors and students come from are likely to impact on their scholarly identities, which, in turn, will contribute to their supervision interactions. Postcolonial theory encourages supervisors and students to be aware of their own personal, and often contradictory, positionings

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and experiences of colonisation, which may affect their supervision relationship. Then there are the histories of the society within which the supervision takes place, which is often continuously working through its own postcolonial histories. Histories insert themselves particularly strongly into the supervision relationship when Indigenous students work with European, Western or Pa¯keha¯ supervisors in their own country (McKinley and Grant, 2012). However, I would argue that the histories of Western colonisation may also impact upon the supervision of Asian, African, Middle Eastern and South American students by Western or Pa¯keha¯ supervisors. Of course, the reverse scenario, where non-Western supervisors work with Western students, may also evoke the lurking legacies of colonial positionings. Therefore, I believe that, when I work with students from different Asian or African countries (I haven’t yet had the privilege of working with Middle Eastern, South American or Indigenous students), we each bring many layers of history into our supervision space. We also bring diverse and multiple positionings in relation to colonisation. For example, in working with my Ethiopian research student, our supervision relationship sits at the intersection of his personal and intellectual history as a Habesha1 man, who has also studied for his Masters in The Netherlands, and his country’s history as a developing nation that was never formally colonised, my personal history as an Irish–Australian woman and Australia’s history as a Southern, but Western, former colonial outpost and the current social and cultural conditions of our supervision location in Brisbane, Australia, and then our virtual supervision space on Skype when I moved to Aotearoa New Zealand.

Challenging Western notions of linear, singular, homogeneous time It is helpful to draw upon postcolonial theoretical resources to challenge Western notions of time as linear, singular and homogeneous. Postcolonial theory has offered us multiple, heterogeneous ways of representing time that go beyond Enlightenment Eurocentric linear narratives of history, which represent modernism as a natural progression brought to the rest of the world by the West. As Hall (1996b) argued, the ‘post’ in postcolonial represents both a temporal dimension of being ‘after’ colonisation and an epistemological dimension of going beyond the limits of colonial discourses, the after-effects of which remain stubbornly present in contemporary times. Hall (1996b) suggests that postcolonial theory allows for a decentred reading of new relations of power in current times and challenges Eurocentric stagist understandings that link history with the ‘nation’. As a result, postcolonial theory recognises a ‘proliferation of histories and trajectories’ (Hall, 1996b: 248). Subaltern histories or postcolonial histories of non-elite or non-dominant groups within postcolonial societies, such as peasants, low-caste people, women and other groups (Nayar, 2010), have helped to excavate more heterogeneous and circular ways of understanding history. They remind us of the coevalness of multiple histories. Coevalness is an important concept that recurs throughout these theorists’

Time and place in intercultural supervision 33 discussions of both time and place. Coeval means ‘originating or existing during the same period’, or ‘one of the same era or period; a contemporary’, according to an online dictionary (www.thefreedictionary.com/coeval, accessed 31 January 2013). Applying this term to notions of history, Fabian (1983) was one of the first to emphasise that different societies around the globe each have their own unique past, present and future trajectories and grapple with each other at precisely the same time. Theorists such as Massey (2005: 99), whose cultural geography work I will investigate later in this chapter, have called this ‘coevalness’ or ‘radical contemporaneity’. Therefore, these understandings of history show time, not as a series of linear events leading inevitably to the Western project of modernity, rationality and progress, but as a ‘contemporaneity between the nonmodern and the modern, a shared constant now’ (Chakrabarty, 2004: 240). Chakrabarty (2004; 2007) encourages us to rethink notions of time and history that are entangled with European notions of modernity, citizenship and the nation-state. By seeking to ‘provincialize Europe’ and make visible the ‘particular accretion of histories’ that continue to shape our thinking, Chakrabarty (2007: xiv) demonstrates how this European approach to history is only one way of thinking about the past. He seeks to explore the idea of Europe, an imagined construct formed out of colonisation, and how it continues to shape modern India. In particular, he challenges historicist readings of history that construct time as ‘single, homogeneous and secular’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 15), inexorably leading to European modernisation over time. These readings of time suggest that phenomena are thought to happen ‘first in Europe, then elsewhere’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 7). This is what authors such as Fabian (1983) and Massey (2005) have called the denial of coevalness. Enlightenment thinkers such as Mill constructed what Chakrabarty (2007: 8) calls ‘an imaginary waiting room of history’, a kind of ‘not yet’ argument that implies non-Western countries are not yet ready for modernisation. Drawing on the work of Guha on the ways in which peasant rebellions in Indian history incorporated practices that involved gods, spirits and other divine beings as ‘part of the network of power and prestige’, Chakrabarty (2007: 14) ‘pluralises the history of power in global modernity and separates it from any universalist narratives of capital’. He suggests that Guha ‘brings together two incommensurable logics of power, both modern’ – one, the secular logic of European structures of power, and the other, the religious logic where gods and spirits are involved in political action (Chakrabarty, 2007: 14). He calls for a notion of history that emphasises the ‘contradictory, plural and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 42). He also reminds us that these struggles are always based on ‘coercion’ and ‘symbolic violence’ – a tussle over ‘whose and which “universal” wins’. So, if we are to write history, we need to be attentive to ‘the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force and the tragedies and ironies that attend it’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 43). In a series of edited collections, Dube (2004; 2007) and other authors provide an analysis of the ways in which subaltern histories have reshaped the fields of history and anthropology, challenged Eurocentric understandings of the ‘holy

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trinity of liberal/left politics’ (‘race, class and gender’) and ‘initiated new questions in discussions of colony and nation, modernity and community, and historical margins and postcolonial apprehensions’ (Dube, 2004: 11, 1). In the later collection on historical anthropology, Dube (2007) and other authors demonstrate how time can be reinterpreted and pluralised through studies of ancient and recent Indian religious texts. Dube (2007) argues that there have been four key innovations in recent understandings of time that assist us to move beyond Enlightenment constructions of history. These include: •

•

•

•

exploring how different forms of historical consciousness challenge false dichotomies between myth and history, tradition and modernity and instead recognise that history is ‘made up of interleaving, conflict-ridden processes of meaning and authority’; seeking to understand that what comes to be called ‘history’ is the outcome of power struggles over the uses of the past, rather than any fixed, singular objective truth; exploring how postcolonial histories, especially those of subaltern as well as elite classes challenge Western linkages between history and nations and between modernity and progress or destiny; exploring how ‘intractable issues of memory and trauma’ need to be questioned, interrogated and held open to ‘uneasy echoes of limiting doubt’ (Dube, 2007: 38–40).

Banerjee-Dube’s (2007) chapter on ‘reading time’ illustrates some of these developments through its examination of an early-twentieth-century text that was published in 1971 and that interweaves ‘eternal, cyclical and linear’ notions of time and mythical notions such as kaliyuga or the era of evil with experiences of foreign rule by the Gurkhas, Turks and British (Banerjee-Dube, 2007: 161). This text also challenges Western binaries between oral and written traditions, because the performers of these oral stories combined careful grammatical readings with original recitals, so that knowledge is continually ‘transformed’ in each ‘act of transmission’ (Banerjee-Dube, 2007: 151). The text weaves the past, present and future together by using the past to re-interpret the present and to make predictions about the future. In these ways, postcolonial theorists have demonstrated that time is multilayered, heterogeneous, plural and non-linear.

Time through the eyes of social and feminist theorists Social and feminist theorists have also challenged dominant Northern readings of time as linear, singular and homogenous. For example, Adam (2004) has provided some refreshing insights into notions of time. Adam (2004: 1) in particular sought to capture the many ways in which people from different cultures and diverse historical periods have understood time, and to ‘demonstrate how many so-called incompatible perspectives [about time] . . . can be held simultaneously without causing cognitive dissonance or distress’.

Time and place in intercultural supervision 35 Adam (2004: 1–2) defines time as: lived, experienced, known, theorised, created, regulated, sold and controlled. It is contextual and historical, embodied and objectified, abstracted and constructed, represented and commodified . . . it is an inescapable fact of social life and cultural existence . . . as theory and practice, experience and explanation, lived orientation and material expression. She also argues for the significance of context and prefers to use the term ‘timescape’ in order to capture the ways in which ‘time is inseparable from space’ (Adam, 2004: 143). Although Adam (2009: 1) presents a linear, periodised conception of time (fate – ancient ways, fortune – industrial ways, and fiction – contemporary ways), she is attentive to the ways in which ‘time in archaic societies was no less complex, sophisticated or temporally extended’ than in present times (2004: 76). She argues that the ‘cultural reach into the past and the future and . . . the transcendence of individual lifetimes appears to have been far greater in archaic societies’ than in modern ones, and that, whereas few contemporary people would ‘claim to be conscious bearers of thousands of years of tradition . . . archaic cultures could’ (Adam, 2004: 76). The rise of Western clock time was a particular feature of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, as precise time measurement was required for industrial development and scientific experiments, and it suited Protestant beliefs about salvation being achieved through hard work and the denial of bodily pleasures (Adam, 2004). This allowed time to become a commodified, compressed, colonised and controlled resource (Adam, 2004). As Adam (2004: 137) argues, this particular Western concept of time was then imposed upon the rest of the world through the adoption of practices such as ‘standard time, time zones, [and] world time’; an imposition of the ‘time values and social relations of industrial time’. All other ways of understanding time that revolved around the body, nature, the cosmos and events, phenomena and processes came to be constructed as ‘deviant, backward, lazy [and] uncivilised’ (Adam, 2004: 136). Currently, Adam (2009: 1) suggests, the globalised world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has moved beyond clock time to network time, where social time is characterised as simultaneous and timeless or as ‘fiction’. ICTs have made communication and information transfer virtually instantaneous and simultaneous, producing a sense of timelessness. Adam (2004: 135) describes these postmodern developments as producing the ‘layering of time, the mixing of tenses, the editing of sequences, and the splicing together of unrelated events’, or, as Castells (1996: 463) argued, ‘a no-time mental landscape’. The impact of these developments seems to have reconstructed time as an endless, timeless, ahistorical hyper-present or, as Adam and Groves (2007) suggest, a ‘present future’. In this hyper-present, now is all that matters, and yesterday and all of the past are totally irrelevant or, as my sons would put it, ‘so last century’. Adam and Groves (2007: 11) also argue that, in this ‘present future’, the future is:

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Time and place in intercultural supervision emptied of content and meaning, the future is simply there, an empty space waiting to be filled with our desire, to be shaped, traded or formed according to rational plans and blueprints, holding out the promise that it can be what we want it to be.

As Adam and Groves (2007) argue, this is a fundamentally unethical position, which fails to acknowledge the importance of thinking about the needs of future generations.

Pedagogical explorations of time I have only been able to locate a few existing pedagogical explorations of time that could help to reimagine the operations of time in intercultural supervision. The first example comes from the recent work of sociologist feminist and critical realist Clegg (2010), about undergraduate education and the increasing use of personal development programmes for university students. Clegg (2010: 346) argues that the dominant discourse of university teaching and learning is a ‘time future’ discourse that focuses on ‘the [future] life of the individual’, whose only goals are ‘social mobility’ and ‘employability’, which draws upon industrial notions of productive time that do not extend to children, the elderly and those in unpaid employment, let alone to future generations. Clegg (2010) demonstrates how these interpretations of time play out in universities, with their focus on churning out employable graduates, in spite of mounting contrary evidence that suggests that there may not, in reality, be enough professional, knowledge-based jobs to employ all of these graduates. She outlines how the hyper-rational technologies of a mobile, flexible self, such as personal development planning, give students the false impression that they have control over their own futures. Clegg (2010) argues that university discourses about employability and personal development planning also reify only one type of reflexivity – the form Archer (2007) calls ‘autonomous reflexivity’ – and have a time future approach to temporality, which does not match all students’ senses of time. Her research shows that students draw frequently on the past, reconstructing their goals and achievements in a linear, tidy fashion only after their messy enactment (Clegg, 2010). In addition, she shows that, in the fast time of the neo-liberal, ‘enterprise university’ (Marginson and Considine, 2000), neither students nor staff have enough slow, careful thinking time to fully engage in reflection. In seeking to ‘imagine otherwise’, Clegg (2010: 360) argues that we need to draw on feminist and critical work that characterises reflexivity more fully as ‘practices which deal with socially situated relations of power, rather than simply the life plans of individuals as employable . . . subjects’. Clegg (2010) stresses that we also need to make more room and time in current higher-education discourses and practices for a genuine ethic of care for the self, for others and for future generations, if we are to grapple more critically with the multiple temporalities, commitments and connections staff and students have. The second example of pedagogical explorations of time comes from the Portuguese sociologist, Araújo (2005). Discussing time in specific relation to PhD

Time and place in intercultural supervision 37 studies in Portugal, Araújo (2005) argues that the PhD is a ‘phase’ of liminality, combining the past and the future but lived in a vacuous and suspended present. Time during the PhD is ‘circular’, she argues, rather than the linear experience outlined in university policy guidelines (Araújo, 2005: 197). PhD studies in Portugal usually take the form of a special dispensation of time, or dispensa, for academic staff, who are relieved of their teaching and administrative duties so that they can write their doctoral dissertations over a three-year period. She selects the term ‘phase’ to try and capture the ways in which the PhD is an unpredictable period of adaptation, uncertainty, ambivalence and becoming. In particular, PhD students tend to focus on the future – the achievement of the PhD and the ways in which normal life can resume – so that they are ‘living ahead of time’ (Araújo, 2005: 197). In a very real sense then, PhD students experience the PhD as ‘the permanent invasion of the present by the “future” ’ (Araújo, 2005: 202).

Reimagining time and history in intercultural supervision In this section, I seek to read these theoretical ideas about time and history pedagogically in order to extend our thinking about how history operates within intercultural supervision. I believe that one of the first lessons these theoretical resources teach us is that we might need to broaden our disciplinary-based understandings of what could be included as legitimate forms of evidence and analysis, when we engage in supervision across, between and within cultures. As the detailed historical work of Subaltern Studies scholars demonstrates, myths, legends and religious beliefs continue to shape the present realities of people around the globe and challenge modernist binaries between myth and history, the modern and the traditional (Dube, 2004; Chakrabarty, 2007). This could involve gathering many forms of data, including myths and legends, literary and artistic representations, proverbs and wise sayings, oral histories and stories, as well as documentary, scientific and other types of sources. Although this might appear to suit the humanities and some of the social sciences more at first glance, how rich would a history of climate change be, for example, if it drew upon Indigenous oral histories of weather patterns, current Indigenous practices and knowledges about weather, myths and legends about land formation and conditions, ancient representations of floods and other events, as well as geological and other scientific data. Recent examples from the literature on intercultural doctoral studies that I outlined in Chapter 2, such as the work on Indigenous supervision (e.g., Henry with the Institute of Koorie Education, 2007; McKinley et al., 2011; Ford, 2012) and Devos and Somerville’s (2012) article on a Cambodian doctoral thesis, provide existing examples of the ways in which time and history and knowledge have been interpreted in multiple, heterogeneous and coeval ways in doctoral work. In particular, these articles demonstrate the respect accorded to the cultural knowledge and wisdom of these Indigenous and Eastern researchers and the central role they assign to their ancestors and other forms of spirituality in the writing of their theses. In some fields, such as the one I supervise in primarily now, education, it could be important to encourage students to investigate the

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multiple histories of their education systems. This could be achieved by examining the ways in which education systems have been represented through art, literature, other media, dance and ceremony over time; the cultural metaphors, proverbs and sayings that are used to describe education; how experiences of colonisation changed the education system; and so on. I think these postcolonial understandings of time and history would also mean that supervisors and students would need to be attentive to the historical origins and trajectories of the ideas they are working with, the ways in which disciplinary knowledge has been formed over time, and especially the ways in which it has been heavily implicated in European imperialism and ongoing Northern epistemological domination (Smith, 1999; Connell, 2007). This would involve understanding the operations of power inherent in any discipline. It could include exploring the following questions: • • • • • •

How did particular theories or interpretations of evidence become dominant in your discipline or interdiscipline? Are these the same as, or different to, popular understandings of this phenomenon? Why, or why not? Which groups came to determine what would be counted as theory, as evidence, as legitimate methodologies in your discipline? How has this changed over time? Are there coexisting theories or methodologies that can be held in productive tension, rather than simply chosen between? How might your field be different if it operated using a both/and or and/and type of logic, rather than an either/or approach?

Supervisors and students also need to acknowledge how the particular culture, time and place in which key theorists worked have inflected their work. This builds on one of the key points that Chakrabarty (2007) makes about the treatment of European theorists as if they were our contemporaries, and Connell’s (2007) argument about the problems with universalising Northern theory that remains undated, unlocated in any particular time or place. This kind of work is evident, for example, in Singh and Huang’s (2012) article, where they remind us of the colonial foundations of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, and the many slippages of language and interpretation that have occurred as Bourdieu’s concepts, which were originally established in France and Algeria in the 1970s, are consumed in anglophone countries (Singh and Huang, 2012). Many of these questions will be taken up in greater detail in the next chapter, but they are important when we are [re]thinking about the impact of time and history on intercultural supervision. Following Dube’s suggestion that we hold all interpretations open to ‘uneasy echoes of limiting doubt’ (2004: 40), these types of research and knowledge construction would be couched in a tentative, gentle language that avoided strong assertions about the truth of supervisors’ and students’ knowledge claims. To achieve this and, more importantly, have it accepted by examiners of theses and reviewers of publications, healthy and productive doubt, plurality and a sense of

Time and place in intercultural supervision 39 ambivalence about any position could become a recognisable feature of disciplinary knowledge. Thinking otherwise, thinking again and reading against the grain could become key research techniques that all scholars could seek to develop. Although this might seem more applicable to humanities and social science disciplines and intercultural supervision, recent scholarship by postcolonial, feminist and Indigenous scientists and those investigating the philosophy of science suggest this may become possible in some science disciplines as well (Harding, 1991; Sillitoe, 2007). These possibilities will be discussed further in Chapter 9. Chakrabarty’s (2007) metaphor of the ‘waiting room of history’ has double resonance for Indigenous, Eastern, Middle Eastern, African and South American doctoral students. Many research students experience the PhD as a type of waiting period before they can be fully recognised and credentialled as members of academic disciplines (Araújo, 2005). However, given the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives about being the first to develop, while people from all other corners of the globe wait for such progress and Enlightenment, students from non-Western backgrounds have also had to wait a long time for their cultural knowledge, forms of evidence, theories and beliefs to be acknowledged as Knowledge. As Connell (2007) emphasises, this waiting room belief is not only a dated phenomenon, but one that continues to shape the formation of theory in many academic disciplines. Furthermore, the pedagogical readings of time in undergraduate and doctoral programmes by Clegg (2012) and Araújo (2005) have significant ramifications for supervisors and students working across, between and within cultures. In the case of undergraduate students, Clegg (2012: 346) found that, whereas the university presupposed a ‘time future’ discourse about students’ personal development planning, students were often drawing upon their past histories and experiences and their messy serendipitous presents in order to create tidy accounts of their work towards achieving their future career goals. Araújo (2005) argued that doctoral study was a period of liminality or in-between-ness based upon complex combinations of the past and the future, but lived in a suspended present that was sacrificed to achieve the future goal of completing the PhD. The experience of time during doctoral studies was incredibly complex, cyclical and multiple, rather than linear as presupposed in university discourses, particularly in doctoral studies, and caused students a great deal of heartache and difficulty.

Place and supervision Place also plays a highly significant role in supervision, especially when supervisors and students come from different places. As an academic, my teaching and my supervision speak of the geographical location of my work in Aotearoa New Zealand, but also of other places (and other times), especially Brisbane, where I have lived most of my life. Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, I teach the history of education, cultural diversity and research methods. I find ways of incorporating Australian history, research and stories into my teaching. My supervision work includes people who have also come from warmer, more tropical places. We trade groans and stories about coping with the cold in our supervision meetings, although

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the intercultural journeys they have made are far more extensive than mine. I share just an inkling of their feelings of displacement and unhomeliness in this new land. So place (and being in a different place) features strongly in our supervision. Knowledge and ideas are not formed in a vacuum, even though Western academic writing has often been cast in universalist terms, where both time and place are absent. Knowledge travels from place to place, taking on particular hues and meanings that are inflected by local places and cultures. It matters that I am supervising African, Asian and Aotearoa New Zealand students in Wellington, and that I continue to supervise African and Australian students who are based in Brisbane, through a combination of cyberspace communication and visits to Brisbane. Their explorations of history, political science, school and higher education are shaped, not only by their places of origin, life and fieldwork, but also by the experience of leaving those places to learn about research. It is rather ironic that I am writing this part of my book, about place, at a time in my life when I feel quite displaced. I moved to Wellington about eighteen months ago and had to leave my husband and two grown sons back in subtropical Brisbane. So I am physically and emotionally displaced. I commute across the Tasman roughly every two months, and for longer periods when there are pauses in teaching. The other month my husband joins me in Wellington for a brief few days. He’s here at the moment. I live in two places, each so different. Here, it’s a quiet spring morning in Wellington. We have just switched over to daylight saving, so it’s really only 6 a.m. Light is spreading across the harbour. The air is still after the howling winds of last night. There are a few early-morning walkers on the road in front of my apartment windows, a few cars on the road, a soft chirping of birds in the trees of Mount Victoria. People are only just waking up, in their wooden houses that climb up the hillsides, with their gables sketched out in darker colours, at the start of yet another working week. I am learning to feel at home in this cold and windy place. My experience resonates deeply with Somerville’s (2010) recent work on place and pedagogy. Just after I had written the previous paragraphs, I began reading her chapter in the new book she has co-written with a team of colleagues (Somerville et al., 2011). She writes about being displaced, having moved for work from rural Northern New South Wales to industrial Gippsland in Victoria. She powerfully argues that it is possible to learn about place and the body in place, through the act of being displaced and coming to know a new place (Somerville, 2011). Repositioning my sense of displacement as a unique opportunity to learn about place and, in this case, place and intercultural supervision has provided me with a great deal of solace and inspiration.

Place and space (and time) through the eyes of cultural geographers There is a massive interdisciplinary literature offering insights into place and space – terms that I will use interchangeably (following the lead of Somerville, 2010),

Time and place in intercultural supervision 41 although some theorists are capable of having long and intricate arguments about how they are different. To enrich our understandings of place and space, I have chosen to focus on the work of one of the key cultural geographers, Massey. Massey (1997) provides an insightful critique of Eurocentric and masculinist arguments about globalised notions of space and time–space compression. Harvey (1990: 240) first introduced the concept of ‘time–space compression’ to capture the ‘processes that so revolutionise the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter . . . how we represent the world to ourselves’. The effect of postmodern capitalism has been to ‘speed-up . . . the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us’, Harvey (1990: 240) argues. He suggests that our postmodern condition is characterised by spatial concepts such as ‘a “global village” of telecommunications and a “spaceship earth” of economic and ecological interdependencies’ and by an abbreviated sense of time, where ‘time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is’ (1990: 240). Massey (1997: 315) argues that these constructions of time–space compression represent ‘a Western colonizer’s view’, and a male one at that. As she points out: the degree to which we can move between countries or walk about the streets at night . . . is not just influenced by ‘capital’ . . . women’s mobility . . . is restricted – in a thousand different ways from physical violence to being ogled at or made to feel quite simply ‘out of place’ – not by ‘capital’ but by men. (Massey, 1997: 316) She writes of a ‘power geometry of time–space compression’ that is gendered, raced and classed, demonstrating how some groups of people are more able to control the ways in which they move and communicate globally. Massey extends these ideas in her 2005 book For Space. She outlines how European ‘explorers’ saw space as a surface that was ‘continuous and given’ and was just there waiting to be ‘crossed and conquered’. Western-style maps reinforce this idea of ‘space as a surface . . . [a] sphere of completed horizontality’ (Massey, 2005: 107). As a result, Other peoples and cultures were simply ‘phenomena “on” this surface deprived of histories and immobilised . . . awaiting the colonialist’s arrival’ (Massey, 2005: 4). As Massey indicates, the West holds Others ‘still for our own purposes, while we do the moving’ (2005: 122). The only time that mattered was European time, which was carefully quantified and measured and linear, progressing ‘forward’ in a straight, rising line. Massey shows how these Western conceptions of time continue to shape postcolonial narratives about development, where nonWestern countries are regarded as ‘behind’ (2005: 5). Drawing upon Foucault and Derrida, Massey and other feminist theorists such as Grosz also show how, in the West, time was privileged over space and linked with prescribed notions of masculinity and femininity. For example, Grosz argued that: Time is conceived as masculine (proper to a subject, a being with an interior) and space is associated with femininity (. . . externality to men). Woman

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Time and place in intercultural supervision is/provides space for men but occupies none herself. Time is the project of his interior and is conceptual, introspective. (1995: 98–9)

Instead, Massey and other feminists argue that space and time are inextricably intertwined. Putting it another way, Usher (2002) emphasises that it is ‘what happens in the hyphen of space-time’ that matters. All of these theorists also suggest that space and time are relational, rather than based on singular trajectories – ‘space (open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming) is a prerequisite for history to be open’ (Massey, 2005: 59). Therefore, Massey urges us to think about how ideas about time and space could be radically altered if we were to view time and place as ‘a meeting up of histories’, a ‘multitude of trajectories’ (Massey, 2005: 4–5). Such a view of history and place suggests that there are many possible and unfinished narratives, connections that may or may not be made, histories yet to happen. Massey suggests that, although the palimpsest hints at multiple layers of history, some partially erased, others written over, and has given hope to those trying to regenerate non-Western views of the world, it is still an insufficient metaphor to capture the coevalness of history, because it still represents the erasures as coming before the text that has been written over the top. Instead, she proposes Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) idea of the ‘rhizome’ as a way of capturing how different cultural shoots push through the soil at the same moment. Developing this idea further, Massey talks about not seeing her journey to work on the train, from London to Milton Keynes, as travelling through space, but as entering a space that is always already continuously reshaping itself. ‘Arriving at a new place means joining up with, somehow linking into, the collection of interwoven stories of which place is made’ (Massey, 2005: 119). As she argues, ‘to travel between places is to move between collections of trajectories and to reinsert yourself in the ones to which you relate’ (2005: 130). Viewing time and space in this open and relational way would involve engaging in a politics of responsibility, care, connectivity and hospitality. As Massey suggests, ‘the throwntogetherness of place demands negotiation’ (2005: 141). She also indicates that Low and Barnett’s (2000: 59) exhortation to ‘think conjuncturally – shuttling back and forth between different temporal frames or scales to capture the distinctive character of processes which appear to inhabit the “same” moment in time’ will be important. She concludes that ‘the full recognition of contemporaneity implies a spatiality which is a multiplicity of stories-so-far. Space as coeval becomings . . . through an openended temporality’ (Massey, 2005: 189).

Place-based pedagogies There is a huge body of literature on placed-based education pedagogies, particularly focusing on education in the school sectors, some of which is useful in reimagining the role of geography in intercultural supervision. I have not provided a full analysis of this field, but have focused on the work of those who

Time and place in intercultural supervision 43 offer poststructural, postcolonial and Indigenous interpretations of place-based pedagogies that most resonate with the theoretical framing of this book. I have also included a short discussion of the ways in which technologies such as Skype, email and other Internet programs, which take place in the non-place of virtual communication, have begun to impact upon intercultural supervision. Critical pedagogies of place are helpful, because they are centrally concerned with decolonisation, which Gruenewald (2003: 9) defines as strategies to ‘identify and change the ways of thinking that injure and exploit other people and places’, and social and ecological reinhabitation, or ways to ‘identify, recover and create material spaces and places that teach us how to live well in our total environments’ (Gruenewald, 2003: 9). Somerville (2010), writing in an Australian context, has developed a conceptual framework for a place pedagogy that incorporates an exploration of the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and knowledge about place. Her framework contains three interrelated elements: story, body and the contact zone. Somerville (2010) argues that stories are central to our relationship to place. They can incorporate the ‘expressions of visual artists, sculptors and poets as well as scientists, policy makers and agriculturalists’ (Somerville, 2010: 336). She demonstrates how dominant Western storylines disconnect us from an embodied sense of place and construct places as objects for economic exploitation (Somerville, 2010). The central work of poststructural, postcolonial and feminist place pedagogy is to unearth alternative storylines and generate new stories about place (Somerville, 2010). Second, place pedagogy occurs through the body and in local spaces. After working for many years with Aboriginal people and their places, Somerville (2010) came to see the need to locate body/place learning at the centre of her research. She revisited some of her past research projects, seeking to place her body at the centre of the research and to see the landscape as a key research subject. Her article is interspersed with evocative, reflective vignettes, where she records her body walking through local places, learning about local frogs, clouds and power stations. She writes about a different ontology, where the ‘self [is] becoming-other in the space between self and a natural world . . . of humans and non-human others, animate and inanimate’ (Somerville, 2010: 338). She also draws respectfully on Aboriginal notions of body/place connection, thinking about what we can learn from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander understandings of ‘country’. As Deborah Bird Rose (1996: 7), a non-Indigenous researcher who has worked closely with Aboriginal communities for many years, illustrates: People talk about country in the same way they would talk about a person: they speak to country, sing to country, visit country, worry about country, feel for country, and long for country. Country is not a generalised or undifferentiated type of place . . . country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward life. Third, she constructs place as a contact zone, where, as Pratt (2008) theorised, difference is preserved and held in productive tension, rather than suppressed or

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ignored. She explores the ways in which places act as liminal, in-between spaces, where multiple and contested stories interact (Somerville, 2010). She challenges us to enter difference deeply, avoiding easy answers and confronting challenging questions with respect but honesty. For her, this has involved working across and between the spaces between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, with all of the discomfort, risk and emotionally charged pain that this includes, as well as its moments of deep transformation and inspiration. This element of placebased pedagogy resonates strongly with the ways in which I have been applying Pratt’s (2008) ideas about the contact zone to intercultural supervision for some time now. Somerville’s work is then taken up and enlarged in a collection of essays with her colleagues, Davies, Power, Gannon and de Carteret (2011). Using Somerville’s (2010) three elements, these authors argue that place pedagogies allow us to develop new forms of relationality with the Other, including non-human, earth Others. Drawing on Deleuze (2004), they suggest that difference is not about separation from the Other (including the non-human Other), but about how we ‘exist in networks of relationality, dependence and influence’ (Somerville et al., 2011: 8). Martin (2000: 81) took up some of these themes much earlier in an Aotearoa New Zealand context, where she explored place as ‘an ethic of cultural difference and location’, drawing on feminist theories and philosophies of difference and alterity. In particular, she is seeking to understand difference ‘as a paradigm for relation to the “other” ’, rather than as a focus for assimilation or suppression of the other. She explores Levinas’s ideas about ‘hospitality and generosity to the Other’ and Irigaray’s feminist work on difference as ‘spaces in which the other is close yet discrete, separated with permeable boundaries, like a membrane’ (Martin, 2000: 84, 86). She applied these notions of difference to anti-racist and Treaty of Waitangi education work in Aotearoa New Zealand, arguing for a philosophy of education that interrogates Western discourses of universalism and that learns from Ma¯ori protocols for ‘welcome and hospitality’ (Martin, 2000: 89). Canadian scholars, such as Ruitenberg (2005: 214), have also drawn upon poststructuralist theory to emphasise that ‘each experience . . . is itself shaped by the conscious and unconscious discursive categories that have previously left their marks on the body and mind’. Ruitenberg has entitled this ‘a radical pedagogy of place’ (2005: 212), and has sought to investigate the ways in which discursive practices shape and mould what is possible to experience and to demonstrate the many ways in which any place has contested meanings. Drawing on Derrida (1993), she argues that, ‘where we learn becomes part of what we learn but not in any determinable way’ (Ruitenberg, 2005: 214). There are multiple possible ways of interpreting the histories, aesthetics, sounds and images of places, and, in each place, ‘power and other socio-politico-cultural mechanisms are at play’ (Ruitenberg, 2005: 215). I think Ruitenberg’s (2005: 215) statement that ‘one’s subjectivity and identity at any particular moment in time cannot be understood outside one’s local context and history of local contexts’ has profound resonances in supervision pedagogy. As she argues, ‘I am undeniably influenced by my geographic location as well as by the traces of the geographic locations in which

Time and place in intercultural supervision 45 I have found myself in the past’ (Ruitenberg, 2005: 215). She also highlights how the global becomes embedded in the local – ‘there is no “hereness” that is uncontaminated by “thereness” ’ (Ruitenberg, 2005: 216). We all have responsibilities, both to the local and the global. When my Tanzanian doctoral student and I, as an Irish–Australian, meet in Aotearoa New Zealand, we bring with us into the supervisory space traces of all of these (and other) geographic locations. We also bring traces of very different heritages of colonisation by the British Empire from our Tanzanian, Irish and Australian roots and routes. There are also many Indigenous writers who have investigated place-based education as a feature of Indigenous education. Although there are many such examples around the world, I would like to focus on the work of Ma¯ori scholar and educationalist Penetito (2009) in Aotearoa New Zealand. Using stories to illustrate spatial metaphors, Penetito (2009) explores the spatial metaphors ‘who am I’ (the politics of identity) and ‘where am I’ (the politics of location) and relates these to a personalised spatial metaphor or pepeha, which is a Ma¯ori practice of introducing yourself at the welcome ceremony or powhiri, which addresses these two questions and the questions of ‘what is this place and how do we fit into it?’ (Penetito, 2009: 7). He argues that place-based education, with its commitment to ecological and historical consciousness and teaching and learning ‘through culture rather than about culture’, offers the possibilities of overcoming many of the shortcomings associated with mainstream education and its colonial legacies (Penetito, 2009: 18). He outlines three central principles that could form a placebased pedagogy that was based upon Indigenous assumptions – that a sense of place is fundamental to being truly human, that there is a formal relationship between people and their environments, and that this pedagogy would need to embody ways of being that provide for the ‘conscious union of mind and spirit’, or wa¯nanga (Penetito, 2009: 20). Penetito (2009) suggests that this means that teachers and students need to explore what all students know about their identities and locations; that students who practise cultural traditions are valuable resources and could be encouraged to investigate their own knowledge of their landscapes further; and that teachers need to develop an understanding of their local communities and embed these understandings in their teaching and learning practices.

Skype as a (non)place of supervision As the mobility of supervisors and students increases, supervision has also come to take place in the ‘non-space’ or ‘spaceless space’ of the Internet (Usher, 2002: 50). Usher argues that the Internet ‘stimulates new forms of interaction, helps in restructuring and forging creole identities and produces new relations of power’ (2002: 49). Mostly, I use Skype with my students when they are on fieldwork in their own countries, when either I am on research leave or the other supervisor is, when I am returning home to Australia for non-teaching periods or when I am in Aotearoa New Zealand and working with my students who are based in Australia. Skype requires different forms of interaction and communication. Often,

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when we meet on Skype, the other supervisor and I and our student will briefly turn on our videos to see each other and wave to each other, before having to turn them off to ensure a more functional audio connection. I think we all find even a brief glimpse of each other reassuring. Skype communication seems to require longer turn-taking in conversations and is often interspersed with accidental interruptions or moments of talking over each other, which can blur or lose the connection. I have one student who is prone to get very excited about his ideas and would happily deliver a monologue if I did not talk very loudly and persistently, often over the top of him, in order to break into the conversation. I think this has made him wonder if I am permanently cross with him, and I often feel like he is not listening to my advice. We had an opportunity to meet face to face this week, in Brisbane, with our other supervisor, where we tried to discuss this issue and to work out how we might develop better signals about turn-taking in our future Skype meetings. No doubt this non-space will require yet another level of awareness and communicative understanding.

Reimagining place (and time) in intercultural supervision In this section, I seek to read these theoretical ideas about place (and time) pedagogically, in order to extend our thinking about how place operates within intercultural supervision. I believe that one of the first lessons these theoretical resources teach us is that, rather than being ignored or seen as unimportant, place plays a highly significant role in intercultural supervision. So many geographies are at play when we supervise across, between and within cultures. These include the places that have influenced the supervisor’s and the student’s past and present thinking, as well as the place in which they engage in supervision together. As intercultural students, and sometimes their supervisors, will have had to leave their home places to study and to work together, or they may be engaging in the nonplace of the Internet, email and Skype, intercultural supervision brings with it, not only a consciousness about place, but also experiences of displacement and relocation. Therefore, we could encourage our research students to think about the many contested stories that circulate about their research site. This could include the stories the researcher, the participants, the literature and others have about the place where the research is situated. In many cases, especially in African, Pacific Island and some Asian countries, there is very little existing literature to draw on to understand the stories of these places. We could encourage our students to identify the dominant stories, to unearth alternative storylines and to generate new stories about their places of research, as Somerville (2010) encourages us to do. In the case of my students, this would involve (re)thinking and (re)storying how place influences the aspects of education that they are investigating. As a supervisor, I would need to enable my students to interrogate how the places of education in their countries are founded upon contested interpretations, how the histories of these places continue to remain present in these education spaces, and

Time and place in intercultural supervision 47 how they might envision multiple possible futures for these pedagogical places, as Ruitenberg (2005) suggests. We might also need to encourage students to grapple with other forms of representation of stories of place, beyond written texts. Some supervisors and their students are experimenting with oral, visual and digital methodologies and forms of data gathering and ‘story-telling’. Theses by Indigenous students, in particular, are exploring ways of incorporating these additional types of representation. Theses by creative works incorporate these forms of representation as a central feature of the research. All of this creates opportunities for our students to begin building these literatures about their places, histories and cultures and making their own unique contribution to knowledge. It also ensures that supervision becomes a place of mutual and reciprocal learning, as students are able to educate their supervisors about their own places and cultural knowledge. Many of my students are researching places that I have not yet visited. Even if I have journeyed to these locations, there is still a huge amount I need to learn about their places, histories and cultures and the multiple ways in which they can be interpreted. This becomes their opportunity to teach me about their places, histories and cultures, as Penetito (2009), drawing upon an Indigenous perspective, suggests is important in any place-based pedagogy. Penetito’s (2009) work also encourages supervisors to learn what they can about their students’ local communities and places, and to think critically about how these identities and knowledges are impacted upon when students work with them in new communities and places, such as Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand. All of this also allows me to acknowledge my own ‘cross-cultural ignorance’, as Singh (2009: 186) encourages supervisors to do. These theoretical resources about place also remind us that, just as place is a social and relational phenomenon, so too is supervision a social and relational pedagogy. Our supervision interactions and communication and the students’ opportunities to relax into their studies and build their confidence as emerging scholars rely heavily on supervisors’ abilities to engender trust, respect and positive relations within the supervision space. They also rely on students being willing to enter into and engage with that space. However, the onus is more on supervisors, I think, because they hold greater institutional power. An important part of building this kind of supervision space is the inclusion of the body and the personal in supervision discussions, as well as the mind and the academic. Of course, this occurs within appropriate professional boundaries and respect for the privacy of both parties. However, as research by Lovitts (2001) and my own data reinforce (as will be discussed in more detail below), doctoral students require both academic and social integration. Students cannot devote enough intellectual and emotional energy to their research if they are anxious about their living conditions or their families, or if they are profoundly lonely, or overworking and not taking time out to meet people, get exercise and enjoy themselves. Of course, it is not the responsibility of the supervisor to manage all of this, but just showing an awareness of the importance of these issues and occasionally checking in with students to see how they are coping help to build

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trust and emotional support. It also involves ensuring that students are incorporated into a vibrant and inclusive research culture, where they have opportunities to interact both academically and socially with other students and with other academics, visiting scholars and local and global intellectual networks. Therefore, drawing upon all these understandings of place allows intercultural supervision to become a relational, interdependent space of mutual learning and collaboration. This creates room in supervision pedagogy to engage with difference through mutual hospitality and generosity, rather than assimilation and suppression, as Martin (2000) and Somerville et al. (2011) argue. This could ensure that supervision also becomes an open space – a space for multiple constructions of knowledge and debate and contestation. As Somerville (2010) argues, the conditions of the postcolonial contact zone require all parties to engage with each other with respect and trust, and with the recognition that there will be times when they will need to hold divergent ideas in creative tension, rather than always seeking to resolve them or build a false consensus. There will also be times when supervisors and students will have to accept that they cannot ever fully know the Other, as Jones (1999) argues.

Conclusion Therefore, time and place play a significant role in intercultural supervision. I have assembled a range of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theories about time and place as a basis to more fully understand how history and geography play out in intercultural supervision. These theories enable us to challenge abstract Western or Northern understandings of history and geography. I have sought to read these theoretical resources pedagogically, in order to think carefully about what they might mean for how we operate in intercultural supervision as supervisors and students. I have also drawn upon a few explorations of time and pedagogy and the larger body of literature on place-based pedagogy to understand how time and place operate in intercultural supervision. However, in order to fully understand the operations of time and place in intercultural supervision, we also have to explore the ways in which knowledge is constructed in a variety of disciplines. In the next chapter, I examine constructions of Northern Knowledge and Theory through the eyes of Southern theorists in order to challenge Western notions about universality.

Note 1

Habesha means anyone from Ethiopia. This was the term my student chose to apply to himself, as he felt that to be more specific about his particular ethnic background would have been divisive in Ethiopia.

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Introduction In this chapter, I examine constructions of Northern Knowledge and Theory through the eyes of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous theorists, in order to challenge Western notions about the universality of knowledge and theory and to demonstrate the ways in which knowledge construction, universities and research have been heavily implicated in historical and present instances of colonisation. I recognise that, in the space of this chapter, I will be unable to capture the full complexity and diversity of Northern knowledge. However, I have deliberately chosen to gaze at Western knowledge through the writings and theoretical resources of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous scholars, because this might allow us to explore it from a different angle. Northern theorists have already spent a great deal of time narrating, to themselves and the world, the features and complexities of Western knowledge, and so there is little need for me to rehearse these arguments here. I am also aware that I am unable to fully delineate the complexity and diversity of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledge in this chapter. I feel as though I am only just starting to investigate this rich and challenging body of work, and I am limited, and embarrassed, by my monolingualism and my inherently Northern intellectual background as an Irish–Australian settler/invader scholar. As indicated in Chapter 1, my aim is to engage in the work of ‘deimperialism’ recommended by Taiwanese scholar Chen (2010), which involves carefully interrogating the colonial history that has inevitably shaped my subjectivity. I would also like to acknowledge my debts to Connell (2007) for exposing me to the work of ‘Southern’ theorists such as Al-e Ahmad from Iran and Hountondji from Benin in Africa, and to the translators who made these texts available to me and other scholars in English. I realise that I am dipping in and out of these texts for the purposes of this chapter and cannot fully capture all of the aspects of their arguments. What I have sought to do is to read Southern, Eastern and Indigenous theorists’ challenges to Western claims of universality pedagogically, in order to reimagine knowledge construction in intercultural supervision.

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Knowledge and supervision A central feature of research education and supervision is the creation of new knowledge by the research student under the guidance of the supervisor. The production of knowledge, rather than its transmission, plays a pivotal role in all forms of pedagogy, as Lusted (1986) demonstrates. Knowledge is constructed in ‘the process of . . . exchange . . . the transformation of consciousness that takes place in the interaction of the three agencies – the teacher, the learner and the knowledge they together produce’ (Lusted, 1986: 3). Knowledge is, therefore, intimately linked with the teacher and the learner and their interactions – a kind of triangle, as Grant (2003) suggests. This pedagogical triangle is not innocent or neutral. It is a field of power, with each component (teacher, student, knowledge) exerting different kinds of power and desire (Lusted, 1986). Each of these three parts of pedagogy are ‘active, changing and changeable agencies’ (Lusted, 1986: 3). Grant (2003) has applied Lusted’s theorisation of pedagogy to postgraduate supervision to demonstrate how the student’s thesis becomes the particular knowledge artefact created by the pedagogical exchange between the teacher (supervisor) and the learner (research student). The thesis, therefore, ‘has a position and is implicated in power relations: it is a culturally prescribed artefact; it is meant to be big, formal, disciplined, and original’ (Grant, 2003: 181). Knowledge construction, then, is at the heart of all forms of supervision. However, what counts as acceptable Knowledge in the thesis in many academic disciplines is Northern knowledge, which passes itself off as universal (Connell, 2007). Drawing on the work of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous theorists enables us to trace the ways in which Northern knowledge came to dominate during the European colonisation of the globe, and has continued to do so under the present conditions of globalisation and neo-liberalism. These theorists critically examine the ways in which all other knowledge systems and theories were systematically appropriated, discredited or destroyed by colonial forces that sought to bring European ‘Enlightenment’ to the globe. They demonstrate how universities and disciplines were heavily implicated in colonisation, and how the North came to be positioned as the source of Knowledge, while the South functioned as a giant laboratory (Smith, 1999; Connell, 2007). Al-e Ahmad (1984) and both Syed Hussein Alatas (1974) and Syed Farid Alatas (2006) have developed the concept of ‘Westoxication’ and ‘the captive mind’ to theorise the ways in which Northern knowledge at times continues to dominate the minds of scholars around the globe. As we have seen in the previous chapters, particularly Chapter 3, European knowledge systems were characterised as civilised, secular, modern, rational and masculine. Other knowledge systems and theories were carefully positioned as savage, uncivilised, mythical or religious, non-modern, irrational, childlike and feminine – in other words, as Loomba (1998) suggested, as all of the things that were opposite to European knowledge. In the following sections, I will take you through these arguments in some detail, so that we can understand how Northern knowledge came to be so entrenched in the academy and how this might impact upon intercultural supervision.

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 51

Colonisation and knowledge Colonialism not only represented the physical, military and economic invasion of various European powers into many corners of the globe, but was accompanied and justified by an attempt to export Western knowledge, technologies and cultural beliefs to the world. A number of scholars have shown how the Western system of knowledge actually contained multiple constructions of knowledge (including technologies, concepts and words originally appropriated from Middle Eastern, Eastern, African and other sources), even though it represents itself as a unified, universal and superior body of knowledge (Smith, 1999; Nakata, 2006; Sillitoe, 2007; Hobson, 2011). Although this knowledge is actually a culturally specific way of interpreting reality, as Torres Strait Islander Indigenous scholar Nakata (2006) ably demonstrates, it was portrayed as the only valid and civilised way of thinking and writing about the world. The form of knowledge that was exported to the world through colonialism was the rational, scientific, liberal world-view that had developed during the European Enlightenment, with its strong links with the Protestant Reformation and with developments in capitalism and industrialisation. Smith (1999) provides a useful summary of the features of this form of Western knowledge. Western philosophy and the disciplines of psychology and sociology position ‘the individual as the basic building block of society’ (Smith, 1999: 49). This focus on the individual is a key feature of liberalism and contrasts with collective understandings of the community that are elements of Eastern and Indigenous philosophies. Smith demonstrates how there had always been notions of difference in European philosophy. However, these concepts were specifically transformed into a racialised discourse during European modernity. Hierarchies of races and notions about whether particular races had evolved enough to access higher orders of thinking and develop more sophisticated technologies were constructed to provide the ideological justification for the conquering of other people and their land by the West. As Smith (1999) demonstrates, these notions of race were linked, in complex ways, with Western ideas about gender differences, roles and hierarchies. Women were positioned in these Enlightenment discourses as emotional, irrational, childlike and preoccupied with the domestic, private sphere and with relationships. They were constructed as Other to the rational, scientific, adult and individualistic male figure of modernity, who occupied the public sphere of work, government and leadership. Another key feature of Western philosophy was a commitment to hard work, also known as the Protestant work ethic, which was linked with the measurement and management of time, the accumulation of capital, land and wealth and the development of morality and salvation. Western approaches to knowledge privileged written texts over oral and visual representations. These written texts could constitute valid sources of evidence to analyse and investigate as part of research, whereas oral sources were perceived as unreliable and merely stories, myths and legends. Through colonisation, Western knowledge came to position itself as the only rational, scientific and credible way of understanding the entire world.

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Colonisation and the academy European learned societies, universities, academics, travellers and adventurers were deeply implicated in the twin processes of cultural imperialism and cultural genocide. There appears to be little recognition that Western cultures might learn from and respect Other ways of knowing. Whether European observers conducted formal research of the type that is regarded by universities today as valid and rigorous, or were simply informal observers writing about their encounters with Eastern, Middle Eastern and Indigenous peoples and cultures, these accounts proceeded to take on the status of indisputable fact (Smith, 1999). They also framed the ways in which Europeans came to understand the people and cultural practices they encountered in the colonial contact zone. This is what Said (1994) called Orientalism, or the ways in which Europeans represented ‘Orientals’ or Others as ‘exotic, strange, exciting, dangerous, to be exhibited, tamed, silenced’ (Wisker, 2007: 201). As Said (1994) convincingly argues, although encounters with difference have always occurred in human history, what is new about Orientalism or Enlightenment knowledge about the Other is that it was a systematised, formal and institutionalised method for interpreting difference, in order to achieve total ideological and cultural domination and control. As many postcolonial theorists have argued, European reactions to the Other contain a strange mixture of fascination and abhorrence, desire and rejection, fetish and refusal. Although Said was originally writing mainly about British and French colonisation of North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, the term Orientalism has come to be applied to all Others, including Indigenous peoples around the globe, because the same systems of logic and control were applied to knowledge about all non-Western cultures (Wisker, 2007). Enlightenment thinking adopted a strong, binary either/or logic, and this is particularly evident in the ways Orientalism operates discursively to put Other cultures into direct opposition with Western culture. The Orient is positioned as opposite to the West in every way (Loomba, 1998), with the Orient always constructed as unequal and perpetually lacking. In his research, Said (1994) began to notice the ways in which colonial writings about the Other start to sound the same, regardless of the actual context, geography or cultural differences. Over time, generalisations and stereotypes about the Other are foregrounded and become a kind of template applied to all Other cultures and geographical locations. A small example of this kind of homogenisation of the Other is evident in colonial postcards of Indigenous women. I remember being bemused and slightly disturbed as a young history student about how similar colonial postcards of Indigenous women from around the world were – always with one breast exposed, and only a few local details added in terms of costume or accessories.

Western disciplines and colonisation As a result, the formation of Western disciplines is heavily implicated in colonisation. Whole new disciplines began to emerge, as the West gathered massive quantities of data about ‘new world’ flora, fauna, peoples, geographies and

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 53 environments. Classification systems were developed in order to process and systematise this ‘new’ knowledge. Rather than acknowledge the Indigenous sources of knowledge, any concepts, ideas or technologies deemed useful were then ‘discovered’ by Western researchers (Smith, 1999). Such knowledge was perceived as simply there waiting to be taken by Western powers, just as territories and peoples were just waiting to be found, as Massey (2005) argues (see Chapter 3 for details). Indeed, as Smith (1999: 65) argues, Western knowledge was ‘grounded in cultural world views that are either antagonistic to other belief systems or have no methodology for dealing with them’, and, therefore, either appropriate them, ignore them or seek to destroy them. I will deal with the ways in which science, and what we would now consider pseudo-science, is implicated in colonisation in a section below. In this section, I will briefly discuss the ways in which a number of disciplines emerged out of the European colonisation of the globe. The discipline most obviously connected with colonisation is anthropology or, as Smith (1999: 66) describes it, ‘the study of the Other and . . . [of ] defining primitivism’. In many ways, anthropology is the ultimate orientalist project. Engaged with gathering, categorising and representing Other cultures, anthropology is often regarded by Indigenous peoples as an exploitative discipline that created and perpetuated misunderstandings and stereotypes of Indigenous peoples (Smith, 1999). Quoting Livingstone, Smith (1999: 67) highlights how geography was ‘the science of imperialism par excellence’. Of course, these disciplines have sought to address some of these issues more recently. My original discipline, history, is also strongly linked with colonisation and with the stories of dominant groups that are represented as historical fact. Postcolonial theorists have also demonstrated the ways in which history is so clearly a modernist, Enlightenment project. As Dube (2007) argues, even the ways in which anthropology is divided from history as the study of the Other, a study of prehistory and prehistoric societies and myth and legend, whereas history is perceived as the study of development, progress and modernity, underline this situation. Another useful summary of the key premises of the history discipline is provided by Smith, and it is helpful to include it here as a quick reminder. Here, I will cite her helpful list of the key premises of the history discipline: 1 History is a totalising discourse – . . . includ[ing] . . .all knowledge into a coherent whole. 2 There is a universal [European] history. 3 History is one large chronology. 4 History is about development. 5 History is about a self-actualising human subject. 6 The story of history can be told in one coherent narrative. 7 History as a discipline is innocent . . . [and about] facts. 8 History is constructed around binary categories . . . [history and prehistory]. 9 History is patriarchal.

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Knowledge in intercultural supervision 10 History begins with literacy. 11 History was the story of people who were regarded as fully human . . . [not] prehistoric. 12 History . . . begins with the emergence of the rational individual and the modern industrialised society. (Smith, 1999: 30–2)

Clearly, these premises mirror the philosophical underpinnings of Enlightenment modernist thinking and do not recreate a legitimate place for Other histories, belief systems or conceptions of time and culture. Although Marxist, feminist and poststructural historians have set about challenging these very limited views of the discipline since the 1960s and 1970s, its citing practices and theoretical underpinnings continue to use Europe ‘as a silent referent in historical knowledge’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 28). This involves the ways in which non-European historians seem required to draw upon European historiography in their writing, but there is no need for similar reciprocity for European historians. He argues that this is not simply an example of ‘“cultural cringe” . . . on our part or of cultural arrogance of . . . European historians’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 28). Instead, it is because only Europe is ‘theoretically . . . knowable’, because ‘all other histories are matters of empirical research that fleshes out a theoretical skeleton that is substantially “Europe”’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 29). Non-European histories are constructed ‘in terms of a lack, an absence or an incompleteness’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 32).

North as source of Knowledge and Theory; South as laboratory Therefore, the North came to be positioned as the source of all Knowledge and Theory, whereas the South was perceived as a giant laboratory to test European theories and as a site for gathering data about people, flora and fauna (Al-e Ahmad, 1984; Smith, 1999; Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007). Establishing how this played out in the discipline of sociology, Connell (2007) argues that Northern theory achieved and maintained its dominance through four major discursive strategies. I have explored the first strategy, the argument about the universality of European experience and knowledge, in detail, in this chapter and in the two previous chapters. The second approach outlined by Connell (2007: 45) is ‘reading from the centre’, where these theories generally seek to resolve some issue or problem identified by other Northern scholars as important, whether or not it is applicable to scholars and societies in the South. An important aspect of this move is to depict time as ‘abstract . . . date-free and . . . continuous’ (Connell, 2007: 45), which I discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Indeed, as Chakrabarty (2007) argues, European critique does not come from ‘nowhere’ or ‘everywhere’, as it pretends, but from particular places and at particular times (p. xvii). Chakrabarty (2007: 5–6) challenges us to think about why we ‘treat fundamental [European] thinkers who are long dead and gone . . . as though they were our own contemporaries’,

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 55 whereas, at the same time, non-Western intellectuals are only seen as historical figures, and the knowledge systems that they developed are ‘now only matters of historical research’. The third and fourth strategies outlined by Connell (2007: 46) are related to the ways in which Northern theory engages in ‘gestures of exclusion’, by rarely citing theorists from the colonised world, and operates through the ‘grand erasure’ of Southern thought. She uses the example of the ways in which Islamic thought, which has explored the topic of modernity to a great extent, is rarely referenced in Northern theoretical discussions. The effect of all of this, Connell (2007) argued, is to create a kind of theoretical terra nullius (land belonging to no one, or uncultivated land). This is a deliberate reference to the strange colonial justification used in Australia, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land was invaded and seized by the Crown and redistributed by the colonial government, without any treaty or legal settlement of any kind (Connell, 2007). As a brief illustration of how these Northern discursive strategies continue to operate in the academy, I would like to recount a brief experience of grand erasure I had at a conference in Melbourne, some years ago. I was talking with a famous male English sociologist (who shall remain nameless) about my interest in postcolonial theory. Talking over me in highly dismissive tones, he argued that he got extremely tired of postcolonial theorists going on and on about colonialism. Really, the key categories of analysis would always be race, gender and class (what Dube (2004: 11) calls the ‘holy trinity of liberal/left politics’). He also found it bizarre when he visited Aotearoa New Zealand that he was welcomed to a conference through a Ma¯ori powhiri, because he didn’t think that the Ma¯ori had any special claims on New Zealand. I was left open-mouthed and speechless. In the shock of the moment, I was unable to even begin to find the language to challenge his argument. Later, when I was reading Connell’s (2007) book, I recognised the classic claims of universality, reading from the centre, gestures of exclusion and grand erasure I had experienced. In many ways, European knowledge and science were funded and developed through the colonial enterprise providing stolen wealth and raw data and populations to test Northern theoretical constructs. Writing evocatively from an Indigenous Ma¯ori perspective, Smith very clearly demonstrates how the South functioned as ‘the laboratories of western science’, sites where research methods could be tested and data could be invasively collected, opened up, dissected and pinned to a board. Human remains and sacred artefacts were routinely plundered, and sacred sites were destroyed for supposedly scientific ‘testing’. Using techniques now discredited as pseudo- or quasi-science, Indigenous people’s skulls were filled with millet seed or grapeshot to ascertain their mental capacities (Smith, 1999). Writing about Western colonialism around the globe from an Iranian perspective, Al-e Ahmad (1984: 33) also describes how colonised peoples ‘served as raw material for every sort of Western laboratory’. The gruesome history of Western science and social science is well known and does not need to be repeated here. The key point to remember, as a Western researcher and supervisor, is that these were the origins of our academy. Even if these specific theories were

56 Knowledge in intercultural supervision subsequently overturned, the philosophical underpinnings of the Enlightenment positioned, and continue to position, what is deemed as legitimate knowledge in the academy and continue to shape the research practices and norms of many disciplines.

‘Westoxication’ and the colonisation of the mind A more challenging aspect of this Northern domination of the academy is the desire some students from other cultures have for Western solutions to their own countries’ problems and issues. Although it is true that many Eastern, Southern and some Indigenous students enrol in research programmes in Western countries to add Western knowledge to their thinking resources and strategies, and there is a great desire for Western credentials in the South and East (Sidhu, 2005), there are a number of students who arrive in Western countries convinced that the answer to all of their country’s problems lies in the West. For example, when one of my African students first came to Australia, he seemed convinced that the West held all of the answers in the quality of higher-education stakes. I recognise the difficulties of speaking about this from my position as an Irish–Australian academic and member of this Western academy. I worry about sounding patronising or as if I want to deny students access to Western knowledge. However, it is important to think carefully about how colonisation of the mind might take place, even as an outsider to Eastern, Southern and Indigenous cultures. Along with many postcolonial authors, I would argue that there are negative and potentially alienating effects embedded in some of this desire for all things Western. This is a postcolonial legacy that can be difficult to interrogate and can have a significant impact on intercultural supervision. This is where the work of Al-e Ahmad, an Iranian literary figure and activist, can be useful, to reflect, from a Middle Eastern perspective, on the colonisation of the mind. Al-e Ahmad developed the concept of gharbzadegi to discuss the psychological effects of colonisation. Gharbzadegi was the title of his book, first privately printed in censored format in Tehran in 1962, later seized and banned by the Iranian government in uncensored format, and finally published in 1978 (Connell, 2007). Notoriously difficult to translate into English, the term gharbzadegi has been variously translated as ‘Westoxication’, ‘occidentiosis’, ‘plagued by the West’ and ‘Weststruckness’ and has suggestions of ‘contagion and a blow being delivered’ and ‘infatuation’, infestation or intoxication (Connell, 2007: 118). I think this concept is a very powerful way to (re)think how colonisation of the mind operates (Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, 1986): as a disease, an infestation and a feeling of infatuation and intoxication. I was unable to access the translation of Al-e Ahmad’s book by Green and Alizadeh, and so I will rely on the translation by Campbell and Algar, which they entitled Occidentosis: A Plague From the West. Al-e Ahmad makes an early reference to disease in his text to explain what he means by gharbzadegi. He likens ‘occidentosis’ or Westoxication to ‘tuberculosis’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 27). He also suggests it has the elements of infestation – ‘perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils’, where wheat is eaten

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 57 from the inside but the ‘bran remains intact’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 27). Al-e Ahmad argues that, although rivalry has always occurred between the East and the West, the age of Western imperialism marked a change in the Islamic and Eastern worlds from competition to ‘the spirit of helplessness, the spirit of worshipfulness. We no longer feel ourselves to be in the right and deserving’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 43). He was particularly concerned about the way Western interpretations of Iranian culture had reached the point of dominance, and the way in which Iranians also view themselves. As he argued: The occidentotic regards only Western writings as proper sources and criteria. This is how he comes to know even himself in terms of the language of the orientalist. With his own hands he has reduced himself to the status of an object to be scrutinised under the microscope of the orientalist. Then he relies on the orientalist’s observations not on what he himself feels, sees and experiences. (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 98) All of this makes the westoxicated elite susceptible to Western control or like ‘the ass going about in a lion’s skin’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 31). Although he sees ‘irreligion’ as ‘just one of the symptoms of occidentosis’, he is also sceptical about Iranian clerics, whom he portrays as fixated on religious ‘customs and institutions . . . on superstitions and [whom] retreat to the shopworn customs of the past . . . content[ing] themselves . . . with serving as gatekeeper to graveyards’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 116, 73). He explored the pedagogical implications of Westoxication, suggesting that the 1960s’ pre-revolutionary Iranian education system at all levels sought to ‘foster occidentosis’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 112). He characterises Iranian school programmes at the time as having: no . . . reliance on tradition, no imprint of the culture of the past, nothing of ethics or philosophy, no notion of literature – no relation between yesterday and tomorrow, between home and school, between East and West, between collective and individual. (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 113) Meanwhile, he argues that Iranian universities function either as ‘storefronts for those occidentotic intellectuals who have returned from Europe and America’ or as refuges for traditionalists who ‘have retreated into the cocoons of old texts’ and, as a result, ‘have had no effect on society’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 116–17). I think that the idea of Westoxication is a more productive metaphor for this phenomenon than the idea of the ‘captive mind’ that was developed by Malaysian sociologists Syed Hussein Alatas (1974) and his son Syed Farid Alatas (2006). The notion of the captive mind was defined by Syed Hussein Alatas (1974: 692) as the ‘uncritical and imitative mind dominated by an external source, whose thinking is deflected from an independent perspective’. He argued that this occurred when

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people from non-Western cultures were educated in Western thought, consumed Western writing and were principally taught by Western scholars (Alatas, 1974). Although Western scholars largely ignored this work, Said (1994) acknowledges its usefulness in developing his thinking about the ways in which Orientalism operated. This theory unfortunately fits neatly with Western assumptions about the lack of critical approaches to knowledge in Confucian thought, which have been heavily critiqued by scholars such as Singh and Huang (2012), although both of the Alatas men would not have intended that it be read in this way. By contrast, the metaphor of Westoxication carries with it the idea of a disease, an infestation or a type of force being imposed by the West.

(Neo)colonisation and globalisation Many scholars have demonstrated how moves towards a more globalised world since the 1980s have not diminished the power of the global North to control knowledge (e.g., Nakata, 2002; Massey, 2005; Adam and Grove, 2007; Connell, 2007). Indeed, if anything, this positioning has only grown stronger as technological developments and global capitalism have increasingly exported Western culture to the world, and the English language has become the international language of business, science and communication. Lingard (2007) uses the term ‘metaculture’ to describe the intensive process of Westernisation that has occurred as an integral part of globalisation. As he demonstrates, this is not simply affecting the global spread of Western (or American) popular culture, but continues to produce the ‘silent valorisation of Western epistemologies’ (Lingard, 2007: 233). Smith paints an evocative, heavily ironic picture of the similarities between colonisation of old and the neo-liberal, global capitalism of today: Territories are called markets, interesting little backwaters are untapped potentials and tribal variations of culture and language are examples of diversity. Evangelicals and traders still roam its landscape, as fundamentalists and entrepreneurs. Adventurers now hunt the sources of viral disease, prospectors mine for genetic diversity and pirates raid ecological systems for new wealth, capturing virgin plants and pillaging old jungle here and there. (Smith, 1999: 98) Nakata, too, points out the role of a whole range of diverse Western interests at play in contemporary investigations of Indigenous knowledges. He outlines the ways in which this current fascination with Indigenous knowledges are ‘overwhelmingly driven by research into sustainable development practices in developing countries (mainly supported by the UN and NGOs) and the scientific community’s concern about loss of biodiversity’ (Nakata, 2002: 282). He demonstrates the complex links between the global environmental movement and ‘scientific interests such as bioprospecting and gene-harvesting’ (Nakata, 2002: 282). Indeed, all of this activity, he suggests, ‘looks remarkably similar to former

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 59 colonial enterprises which co-opted land, resources and labour in the interest of their own prosperity’, where Indigenous knowledge becomes commodified, just like all other knowledge systems (Nakata, 2002: 282–83). Malaysian sociologist Syed Farid Alatas (2003), building upon the work of his father, Syed Hussein Alatas (1974; 2002), also describes this dominance of Western knowledge production in the social sciences as a form of academic imperialism that produces academic dependency in non-Western countries. He argues that the US, Britain and France, in particular, are able to assert control over the production of social science knowledge by writing a massive volume of publications, which in turn ensures the worldwide expansion of Western ideas, which are then consumed by countries around the globe and gain far more status and respect than ideas produced in other countries (Alatas, 2003). He introduces helpful categorisations of countries that go beyond slippery and problematic terms such as North and South. Instead, he outlines a division between core countries (such as the US, Britain and France), semi-peripheral countries (such as Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and Germany) and peripheral countries (non-Western countries) (Alatas, 2003). This capture by core countries of knowledge production in turn produces a ‘global division of labour’ in the social sciences, where theoretical studies are principally produced in the core, while empirical studies are developed in the periphery (Alatas, 2003: 606). Drawing upon Appadurai’s (2001) exhortation to ‘deparochialize research’, Lingard (2007) explores how these issues of knowledge control play out in the field of education, narrating his experiences of teaching international, mostly Chinese, Masters students at the University of Sheffield in England and conducting a professional doctoral programme and PhD supervision in the Caribbean for the same university. He outlines how the Caribbean students demonstrate a sophisticated and thorough knowledge of the colonial and neo-colonial histories of the Caribbean and its contemporary global political positioning and a strong desire to speak and write back to the Western centre or metropole (particularly the US). Many of his students’ chosen research topics seek to reignite local awareness of colonial histories and their ongoing impact upon their postcolonial present. However, when it comes to the literature they cite and the research theories and methodologies they use, these are mostly drawn, uncritically, from the West. Despite the fact that there is a substantial critical, postcolonial Caribbean literature on education, their initial literature reviews focus primarily on US sources, which are treated as unproblematically universal. A strong commitment to Western theories and methodologies and a narrow understanding of the shape and scope of ‘proper’ social science research are characteristic of their early doctoral work (Lingard, 2007). As Lingard argues, this dependence on Western sources and research approaches ‘restricts possibilities and is itself reflective of past and present geo-politics’ (2007: 246). In summary, these Southern, Eastern and Indigenous ways of reading the colonial history and present conditions of knowledge production help us to recognise the ways in which Northern knowledge has come to dominate university systems around the globe.

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Reimagining knowledge in intercultural supervision: producing Southern knowledge In this section, I seek to read these theoretical ideas about knowledge production pedagogically in order to extend our thinking about how knowledge could operate within intercultural supervision and how we might encourage the production of Southern Knowledge and Theory in working across, between and within cultures with our research students. I think one of the first steps is that we, as academics and supervisors, have to acknowledge the colonial legacies embedded in Northern knowledge. I think it is important that we acknowledge how our disciplinary ancestors played a role in colonisation, how they wrote the marginalised out of our disciplinary history or tested theories on the Other, often in the most gruesome and invasive of ways. Although this does not need to be a paralysing experience of guilt by association, I think that it is something we could recognise and be conscious of. We also could acknowledge that, as these theorists remind us, these underlying Enlightenment assumptions remain embedded in the contemporary geopolitical power realities of research practices, the operation of our disciplines and our academy. An important part in building upon our awareness of this history could be to discuss with our research students the formation of our disciplinary knowledge and the complex ways it was entangled with colonisation. It could also be important to discuss how we are going to engage them with the ideas of Western theorists, but that we should always remain conscious of the period and location that they were writing from, their positionality, as much as our own. If we were drawing upon the theories of Foucault, as I have sometimes done in my research, this would mean thinking through how being a male, gay French theorist writing mainly in Paris, and for a period in Tunisia in the 1960s and 1970s, situates and locates Foucault’s work in terms of gender, sexuality, culture, place and time. As Connell (2007) has explored through her analysis of Bourdieu, our gendered, cultural, geographical and historical location inevitably shape the possibilities and the limitations of our work. This is also the point Chakrabarty (2007) alludes to when he talks about how we, as researchers, often refer to Western theorists’ work as if they live in our context and in our present, which is clearly not the case. It would mean thinking critically, especially about the silences and omissions in Western theorists’ texts. The effect of these omissions is evocatively captured, for example, in a YouTube clip by an African American scholar talking about the incompleteness of Foucault’s theories on crime and punishment, which talk about the disappearance of European practices of putting tortured, dismembered bodies of the punished on display, when, at the same time, black bodies were being routinely enslaved and later subjected to systems of imprisonment (Dr Kuku, 2010). He makes the point very strongly that Foucault is talking only about a white male body. Creating space for Southern knowledge would also mean learning from our students or finding out together about the theorists and scholars from their own contexts, cultures, countries and regions. This would mean examining the ways

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 61 in which genuinely Southern perspectives and theoretical positions can be brought to bear on different research topics, and demonstrating how Northern theory is inadequate to deal with the realities of Southern social, political, economic and cultural contexts (e.g., Guha, 1988; Chakrabarty, 2007; Chen, 2010). As Southern scholars such as Chakrabarty (2007) and Alatas (2006) emphasise, this would not involve the wholesale discounting or abandonment of Western theories, but, rather, the selective application of these thinking resources, with an acknowledgement that these theories can never provide a fully sufficient theoretical framework. It is up to us as academics and supervisors to ensure that our research students access these works and draw our attention to new work from their contexts that will help all of us push the boundaries of knowledge and theory and the ways in which the academy operates. In the next section, I will outline just a few of the possible ways we can think about incorporating Southern knowledge and theory into intercultural supervision. This is not an exhaustive list, but it provides a starting place to think about how Connell’s (2007) ideas about Southern theories, Smith’s (1999) ideas about decolonising methodologies, Chakrabarty’s (2007) ideas about multiple genealogies, and some of my own earlier work on transculturation (Manathunga, 2007; 2011) might enable us to reimagine the ways in which we could grapple with knowledge in intercultural supervision.

Both-ways transculturation part one: bringing Northern and Southern theory into dialogue There are times when it can be productive to bring Northern and Southern theory into dialogue with each other, to think through the issues present in Southern contexts. This is what Chakrabarty (2007: 20) calls ‘plural or conjoined genealogies’, or understandings of history and time and theory. Beninese philosopher Hountondji also mounts a powerful argument for the use of both Western and African thought, suggesting, ‘why should we exclude the works of Western philosophers or forbid Africans to appropriate them while Westerns still have the right to extend their curiosity to all continents and cultures without renouncing or losing their identity?’ (1996: xi). Rather than rejecting European thought, Chakrabarty (2007: 19) demonstrates how it is ‘both indispensable and inadequate’ in characterising non-European modernity. For example, Chakrabarty (2007) seeks to bring the debates between European analytic and hermeneutic traditions, as epitomised by Marx and Heidegger, ‘into some kind of conversation with each other in the context of making sense of South Asian political modernity’. He highlights the universalising trends evident in analytic modes of thought in trying to ‘demystify ideology’ and the particularising trends evident in hermeneutic modes of thought, which are ‘intimately tied to places and to particular forms of life’ (Chakrabarty, 2007: 18). Chakrabarty critically engages with what each of these theorists have to offer his analysis of Indian history, carefully critiquing the aspects of their work that do not resonate in his context, but also demonstrating where they are, in fact, useful.

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In writing about Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous knowledge, Nakata has developed the theoretical concept of the ‘the cultural interface’ (2007: 9). He defines this as the ‘contested space between two knowledge systems . . . [where] things are not clearly black or white, Indigenous or Western’ (Nakata, 2007: 9). As a result of colonisation and dispossession, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples face the constant necessity of living simultaneously in two different but overlapping worlds. They have had ‘a long experience of being located in this space of contested positions at the cultural interface’ (Nakata, 2007: 10). It is in this blurry, tricky space that Indigenous peoples ‘live and learn, the place that conditions our lives, the place that shapes our future and more to the point the place where we are active agents in our own lives – where we make decisions – our lifeworld’ (Nakata, 2002: 285). Nakata argues that this creates both complex and confusing challenges and tensions (what Bhabha would call unhomeliness, as highlighted in Chapter 2) and, at the same time, opportunities for innovation, cultural renewal and enhancement, transformation and the continual expansion of Indigenous knowledge. This is, as Nakata (2002: 285) asserts, a place of ‘constant negotiation’ to which Indigenous peoples constantly employ the full range of ‘human responses’, just as they have done since Europeans first landed on their shores – ‘rejection, resistance, subversiveness, pragmatism, ambivalence, accommodation, participation, cooperation’. The cultural interface for Nakata represents the full range of ‘intersections’ that Indigenous academics engage in. This is not simply the intersection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, but also intersections between Indigenous academics, between them and their communities, and between them and non-Indigenous academics. Therefore, the cultural interface is ‘complex and layered by many, many historical and discursive intersections’ (Nakata, 2006: 272). Therefore, Nakata calls for both a recognition of the differences between Western and Indigenous knowledge systems and an acknowledgement that uncritically dichotomising them does not offer productive ways of engaging in the cultural interface. These two forms of knowledge: work off different theories of knowledge that frame who can be a knower, what can be known, what constitutes knowledge, sources of evidence for constructing knowledge, what constitutes truth, how truth is to be verified, how evidence becomes truth, how valid inferences are to be drawn, the role of belief in evidence and related issues. (Nakata, 2007: 8) As a result, they cannot be used to evaluate each other. Nakata’s (2007) work emphasises the importance of complexity, careful critique and ‘complicated discussions’ of all theories and knowledges, and how they work historically and discursively to claim legitimacy for particular viewpoints or what he calls ‘standpoints’. Building upon feminist standpoint theory, Nakata (2007: 11) has developed ‘an Indigenous standpoint theory’, which is ‘both a discursive

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 63 construction and an intellectual device to persuade others and elevate what might not have been a focus of attention by others’. He characterises Indigenous standpoint theory as ‘theorising knowledge from a particular and interested position’, which does not aim to ‘produce the “truth” of the Indigenous position’, but rather seeks to ‘better reveal the workings of knowledge and how understanding of Indigenous people is caught up and is implicated in its work’ (Nakata, 2007: 12). He persuasively argues that Indigenous Studies is as much ‘the study of how we have been studied, circumscribed, [and] represented’ (his italics) as it is about Indigenous cultures (Nakata, 2006: 272). He develops three key principles for Indigenous standpoint theory. First, this involves acknowledging that Indigenous people are located in the ‘contested knowledge space at the cultural interface’. Second, this means that ‘Indigenous agency’ is ‘framed within the limits and the possibilities of . . . this constituted position’, where Indigenous people experience a constant ‘push–pull between Indigenous and non-Indigenous positions’. For himself, Nakata (2007: 12) argues, this helps him ‘to see my position in a particular relation with others, to maintain myself with knowledge of how I am being positioned, and to defend a position if I have to’. Third, all of this ‘both informs and limits what can be said and what is to be left unsaid in the everyday’ (Nakata, 2007: 12). If we think pedagogically, then, in the context of intercultural supervision, we could work towards encouraging our research students to bring Northern and Southern theory into dialogue in their research, following the example of scholars such as Chakarbarty (2007) and Nakata (2007). Nakata describes this process as: the negotiation of meanings . . . surrounding different systems of knowledge and the weaving back of them into something quite different from both Western and Indigenous traditional contexts of education . . . which allow both elements to work together rather than at cross-purposes. (2006: 273) This creative blending of Northern and Southern theories to create new knowledge is similar to the concept of transculturation that I have applied to postgraduate supervision for some years now. As described in detail in Chapter 2, I was particularly focusing on the new knowledge that culturally and linguistically diverse research students create when they blend Northern theories that they find helpful with their own cultural knowledge. Ensuring that these students come into contact with, and engage with, the work of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous theorists would be an important part of that process. This is the first part of encouraging both-ways transculturation of knowledge production.

Both-ways transculturation part two: transculturation for the North? The second part of encouraging both-ways transculturation would be to encourage Northern theorists to engage respectfully and critically with Southern theorists. In many cases, they do not. If they do at all, they often argue that really these

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works are only examples of Southern scholars applying Western theories to Southern contexts. For example, Connell refers to the ways in which those in the metropole regard Argentine Mexican anthropologist García Canclini’s work as that of ‘a regional cultural studies specialist or idiosyncratic postmodernist’ (Connell, 2007: 163). Many of the Northern critiques of postcolonial work that I have read do not demonstrate this respectful critical engagement. Generally, an argument is mounted that Southern postcolonial work is really no different to the more significant theoretical moves already launched by those in the Northern academy. For example, Dirlik (1994: 340) argues that the works of Subaltern Studies ‘are not discoveries from broader perspectives’ and ‘do not represent earth-shattering conceptual innovations’. They are, instead, he argues, ‘the application in Indian historiography of trends in historical writing that were quite widespread in the 1970s under the impact of social historians such as E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and a whole host of others’ (Dirlik, 1994: 340). Dirlik claims that the only difference is that Indian historians added ‘third world sensibilities’ (Dirlik, 1994: 340). Chakrabarty (2002) strongly refutes this Northern arrogance by writing a history of Subaltern Studies. In his introduction, Chakrabarty (2002) argues strongly that this work had four significant implications for historiography that did indeed represent a new theoretical positioning. These include that Subaltern Studies: 1 2 3 4

reject stagist versions of history; represented a post-nationalist form of historiography; focused on the relation between texts and power . . . [given that] subaltern social groups do not usually leave behind their own documents; developed a conscious strategy for reading the archives [against the grain or] . . . analyz[ing]the very textual properties of these documents . . . [to understand] the history of power that produced them. (Chakrabarty, 2007: 14–16).

These arguments are also confirmed in the work of Dube (2007) that we explored in Chapter 3. Encouraging Northern theorists to engage in transculturation respectfully and critically with Southern theorists is important, but probably beyond the confines of intercultural supervision. However, a starting point could be ensuring that our own research draws upon the work of Southern theorists and encouraging our Western research students to follow this example.

South–South theoretical work There is also a great deal more space in the academy to encourage South–South intellectual dialogue and theoretical work. Although it is important to retain an emphasis on the ways in which each Southern context has its own particular histories and issues – something conveniently glossed over in Orientalism (Said, 1994) – there is potential for new understandings and synergies of intellectual effort

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 65 in South–South dialogue and collaboration. For example, I have a number of African and Asian students investigating the use of English, either as the medium of instruction in secondary schooling in their countries, or as a core subject in university professional degrees. In the first case, this policy is both an enduring legacy of British colonisation and a recognition that the key to higher-paid employment, status and prestige in their country is knowledge of the language dominant in global business, development and industry. In the latter case, it is more a question of seeking future employment in English-speaking multinational corporations or NGOs. In each of these cases, there is not much literature about the privileging of English. Much of the material that has been written on the positioning of English in these countries either adopts such a policy with great enthusiasm or stridently opposes this policy. I have often suggested the usefulness of searching for literature on the policies and practices of English-language teaching of other countries that share similar colonial histories and postcolonial circumstances. Although these literatures will not fully capture the nuances and experiences of English-language teaching in these countries and must be carefully engaged with, my students and I have often found Southern knowledge and theoretical explanations that resonate with aspects of their countries’ situation. These Southern theoretical frameworks then provide a more relevant and applicable platform from which to build their own theoretical contributions and knowledge than some of the Northern theories that are simply inadequate for their countries’ circumstances. In another example, Lingard (2007) demonstrates how useful Smith’s (1999) work on decolonising methodologies has been for Caribbean doctoral students who are seeking to move beyond and challenge the dominance of Western secondary sources and theories in their research. Taiwanese scholar Chen (2010) also proposes this kind of South–South theoretical work through his work on Asia as method. He suggests that the intertwined processes of imperialism, colonisation and the cold war have formed knowledge production in Asia, and the way to develop new ways of interpreting world history could be through engaging with ‘the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point’ (Chen, 2010: 212). In this way, theorists and activists could redress the problems created by drawing upon Europe as the imaginary frame through which to engage in knowledge production. Instead, Asian countries would look to each other, and to other ‘Southern’ places, as ‘each other’s points of reference’ (Chen, 2010: 212). Using Asia as method has highly radical and productive implications for the work of our intercultural research students from a range of Southern locations and for the ways in which we grapple with knowledge production in intercultural supervision. Similarly, Iranian scholar Al-e Ahmad (1984), writing in the 1960s, suggests that Iran send its students to Asian countries such as India or Japan, rather than Europe or America, as was then the case. He recommends these two countries in particular because ‘we might learn how they came to terms with the [Western] machine, how they adopted technology (especially Japan) and how they came to terms with the problems that now confront us’ (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 121).

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I think, as Southern but Western scholars located in peripheral, but wealthy, nations such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (or what Alatas (2003) calls the semi-periphery), we have a particular responsibility to facilitate South–South intellectual engagement. As the main beneficiaries of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in our countries, I feel it is the basic minimum we can do to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and work towards ending the one-sided domination of Northern Knowledge and Theory. As Connell (2007: vii) suggests, such an approach will ‘serve democratic purposes on a world scale’. In particular, such an approach would work towards decolonising knowledge, theory and education. As McLaughlin and Whatman (2011: 365) argue, in the context of incorporating Indigenous perspectives in higher-education curricula, ‘the success of decolonisation of education depends upon the efforts of non-Indigenous peoples to re-examine their positions and the control they exert over curriculum decision-making and reform’. As supervisors working with Southern, Eastern and Indigenous students, Southern or semi-peripheral academics could not only think about linking these students to the rich intellectual and theoretical resources of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous researchers, but also seek to link them in with existing South–South networks and create new links across and between countries and transnational organisations in the periphery.

Respecting, not integrating, knowledge systems – living with the unknowable There are times in this risky, intercultural work where knowledge systems cannot and should not work together or be integrated in certain ways. As an intercultural supervisor, this means accepting the limits of our own knowledge and grappling with the tensions, complexities and unpredictability of different knowledge systems along with our students. It means accepting that there are times when translation is impossible, and when it is necessary ‘to dwell in the space of the unknowing’; to ‘suspend meaning’, as Somerville and others (2010: 339; 2011: 6) argue. As Pa¯keha¯ academic Jones (1999: 315–16) from Aotearoa New Zealand reminds us, we must, at times, ‘embrace positively a “politics of disappointment” that includes a productive acceptance of the ignorance of the other’ and a ‘gracious acceptance of not having to know the other’. This is a particularly risky space for both supervisors and students to inhabit, when the student’s work must be evaluated and credentialled by scholars in the discipline. There are no easy recipes or solutions to offer in these situations. These issues are wrestled with in the growing literature on Indigenous and Ma¯ori supervision (for example, McKinley et al., 2011; Ford, 2012) and in Devos and Somerville’s (2012) insightful article on the doctoral examination of a Cambodian student. From these articles, it is clear that each case of the incompatibility of knowledge systems emerging in research students’ studies needs to be carefully dealt with. This is not an argument for not subjecting Southern, Eastern or Indigenous knowledge to rigorous critique, as will become clear in the following section. Rather, it is an argument for making sure that the supervision team, where

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 67 possible, has Southern, Eastern or Indigenous co-supervisors or advisors. It is also an argument for grappling with the ways in which we might help students to trace the reasons for this incompatibility of knowledge.

Critiquing Southern knowledge Southern knowledge needs to be subjected to critical assessment and engagement, although the criteria for rigour and validity are likely to be different (Nakata, 2007). In mounting an argument for why such a critique is important, I have found the research of Beninese African philosopher Hountondji and Torres Strait Island Indigenous theorist Nakata especially helpful. Hountondji, writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, produced a strong critique of African ethno-philosophy, which was a popular form of African philosophy from the 1940s to the 1980s. Hountondji (1996: 67, 63) argued that there was a significant difference between ‘folklorism’, or ‘a spontaneous implicit and collective worldview’ (which was how he depicted African ethno-philosophy) and philosophy, which he argued is ‘the deliberate, explicit and individual analytic activity which takes that world-view as its object’. Because his analysis was so contentious, Hountondji (1996) sought to defend his position in the preface to the second edition of his book. He argues for ‘the necessity of conceptual rigor and the importance of the theory of science as a core discipline or subdiscipline of philosophy’ and ‘the value of discourse and the history of discourse as being the only possible place where philosophy appears’ (Hountondji, 1996: xiii–ix). Importantly, he asserts, ‘we must be particularly careful and demanding when the knowledge at stake is about ourselves’ (Hountondji, 1996: xix). He also emphasises how he was seeking to ‘demythologise the concept of Africa’ and to defend ‘Africans’ freedom of thought’ from ‘all sorts of essentialist and particularist doctrines born of a hundred years of Africanism’. Although he did not deny the existence of African philosophy, he rejected conservative ideas that such a philosophy was only buried in the past, rather than dynamic and continuing to grow in the present, and that there was some kind of overall consensus across the whole continent. He critiques African philosophers who appear to support Western ‘refusal to accept that a non-Western society could contain a plurality of opinions that might conceivably diverge’ (Hountondji, 1996: 78). Using the work of Fanon as a basis, he was also against essentialist readings of culture, where ‘any definition of an African would, by implication, restrict or confine him or her in a conceptual, ideological, religious or political stranglehold and reinforce the illusory belief that some inexorable fate weighs him or her down forever’ (Hountondji, 1996: x). His argument, then, seeks to emphasise African freedom, diversity of cultures, beliefs and opinions, coevalness, dynamism and agency. He also stresses the importance of rigorous conceptual and methodological logic. Time and time again, in his original text, he emphasises the ways in which he believes ethno-philosophy is, in fact, engaging mainly with a Western rather than African audience and fits with ‘Africanism’ rather than a genuinely Indigenous perspective on African philosophy. Ethno-philosophy, he argues, ‘has been built

68 Knowledge in intercultural supervision up essentially for a European public’ (Hountondji, 1996: 45; his italics). As a result, it is ‘an extroverted discourse and . . . an alienated literature’ (Hountondji, 1996: xviii). Indeed, as he asserts, ‘African studies were invented by Europeans’, and, therefore, there is a significant need for African scholars to develop ‘a sharply critical awareness of the ideological limits and the theoretical and methodological shortcomings’ of these European disciplinary practices and to ‘reinvent them’ (Hountondji, 1996: xix; his italics). Such an African debate about philosophy would be ‘an autonomous debate, not a far-flung appendix to European debates’ (Hountondji, 1996: 53). Hountondji (1996: 76) suggests instead that the real question philosophers and scholars should be asking is ‘why certain Western authors, followed . . . by African authors should from a certain time onwards have felt the need to look for such a collective world-view in the secret recesses of the mysterious African soul’ (Hountondji, 1996: 45, 76; his italics). These are the kinds of critical question that Foucauldian and other postmodernist scholars constantly ask of knowledge and discourse. Writing in an Australian Indigenous context about Indigenous standpoint theory, Nakata (2007) produces similar compelling arguments for the need for rigorous debate and critical engagement within Indigenous knowledge. He argues that Indigenous standpoint theory, lays open a basis from which to launch a range of possible arguments for a range of possible purposes. These arguments still need to be rational and reasoned; they need to answer to the logic and assumptions on which they are built . . . what is said must be able to be accounted for. (Nakata, 2007: 11) Rather than ‘assert[ing] a claim to truth’, Nakata (2007: 11) argues that Indigenous standpoint theory must be open to ‘the scrutiny of others’. As I have outlined in the section above, Nakata’s work is certainly characterised by a rigorous and critical engagement with the complexities of Indigenous knowledge. It is important to point out, however, that this does not mean that Northern and Southern, Eastern or Indigenous knowledge should be evaluated on exactly the same criteria, any more than, say, quantitative and qualitative research can. Such different world-views have fundamentally different epistemologies and ontologies and very different purposes. Building on the work of Verran (2001, quoted in Nakata, 2007: 8), Nakata argues that ‘one knowledge system cannot legitimately verify the “claims of truth” of the other via its own standards and justifications’. Instead, different knowledge systems should be evaluated on the basis of their own criteria and need to develop effective ways of being able to account for the rigour of their arguments. Somerville (2010) and Somerville et al. (2011) provide non-Indigenous scholars such as me with a very helpful, sensitive and relational model for this kind of rigorous but respectful engagement in the intellectual ‘contact zone’ between knowledge systems. In this contact zone, ‘all researchers . . . refuse easy answers . . . confront the difficult questions and . . . move beyond their comfort zone’

Knowledge in intercultural supervision 69 (Somerville, 2010: 338). This can occur ‘through reflexivity and careful listening, and through a willingness to suspend meaning . . . [and through] mutual responsibility’ (Somerville et al., 2011: 6). These are the pedagogies we need to bring into intercultural supervision, in order to reimagine how knowledge could be produced in this postcolonial contact zone or cultural interface. These are the pedagogies that would create space for the construction of Southern Knowledge and Theory.

Conclusion Therefore, the present geopolitical realities of Northern and Southern roles in knowledge production have a huge impact upon the ways in which knowledge is grappled with in intercultural supervision. This chapter concludes my attempts to read the work of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theorists pedagogically, in order to reimagine the roles played by time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision. The next section of the book seeks to apply these ideas to some empirical data I gathered about instances of intercultural supervision at an Australian university. I wanted to test the pedagogical assertions I had made about the role of time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision with some empirical data. I was keen to expand our understandings of the ways in which time, place and knowledge play out in two key pedagogies that I have argued are characteristic of the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision, assimilation and transculturation, and in the experience of unhomeliness that also may feature in intercultural supervision. The next chapter provides details about the context in which these data were gathered and the methodology I used for these studies.

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Two studies of intercultural supervision in Australia Context and methodology

Introduction In order to trace how time, place and knowledge might play out in intercultural supervision and extend our understandings of their role in the pedagogies of assimilation and transculturation and experiences of unhomeliness, I conducted two small studies of intercultural supervision in an Australian university, in 2007 and in 2009–10. In this chapter, I will provide details of the context, participants and methodology of these studies. I will report these in as much detail as I can, without providing any potentially identifying information about my student and supervisor participants. I am very grateful to these participants, thirty-three in all, who generously gave my research assistants and I their reflections on their experiences of intercultural supervision. These studies were deliberately small scale. I was not seeking to make large generalisations about the nature of intercultural supervision in Australia or in the humanities, social sciences, engineering and the sciences. Instead, I was hoping to capture the richness and complexity of supervisors’ and students’ experiences of intercultural supervision across a number of disciplines. My research assistants and I interviewed eighteen research students and fifteen supervisors. Where possible, we sought to match students with their supervisors, so that we could understand how each of these parties to the supervision relationship experienced their interactions across, between and within cultural difference.

Context These two studies were conducted at a research-intensive Australian university. Like many research-intensive universities around the globe, this university was seeking to increase its postgraduate student numbers, particularly fee-paying international students. So, in some disciplines included in this study, this involved rapid growth in the number of students being admitted into doctoral programmes, and consequent pressure on supervisors to take on increasing numbers of students. Although some of the science disciplines included in this study were able to successfully manage very large numbers of postgraduate students working in labs and were assisted by postdoctoral fellows and other researchers, these kinds of

Intercultural supervision in Australia 71 pressure were more difficult for supervisors in the humanities and social sciences, where research topics are often far more diverse, and where supervision requires higher degrees of individual feedback on extensive and iterative draft writing. Towards the end of this period, university policy leaders in postgraduate research revised this policy, placing a greater emphasis on recruiting quality research students. However, this did not necessarily appear to impact upon underlying concerns supervisors had about the number of students they were asked to supervise. In common with most universities in many Western countries (and increasing numbers of universities in Asia), this university had been seeking to improve supervision pedagogy through the provision of academic development programmes for supervisors and research students, and through a raft of policy initiatives and supervision award programmes. Responding to increasing government desires to regulate and control postgraduate research programmes, this university was developing a range of risk management strategies around postgraduate supervision and was seeking to update and improve policies and guidelines about supervision. All of this meant that supervisors and students were working together in an increasingly high-pressure environment, where the rewards for successful and timely completion by postgraduate students were high, and consequences for not doing so were serious for both supervisors and students. It also resulted in an ongoing increase in the numbers of supervisors and students engaged in intercultural supervision. Many of the existing language-support programmes for these students were stretched to the limit. Although the Bradley Review (2008) shifted the focus of much Australian university policy back to issues of equity, particularly for Indigenous and working-class students, much of this effort was focused on undergraduate programmes. At this university, the numbers of Indigenous research students remained shockingly low, and numbers of domestic, culturally and linguistically diverse students remained relatively small in most of the disciplines included in these studies.

Methodology These studies used a semi-structured approach to interviews in order for us to understand more about students’ and supervisors’ intercultural experiences of time, place and knowledge in supervision. Following on from earlier research on doctoral education, I decided that it would be more beneficial to interview individual students and their own supervisors, rather than a randomly selected group of supervisors and students, who might not necessarily work together. I was very much inspired by the work of Grant in Aotearoa New Zealand, who was conducting similar studies. Of course, these interviews were conducted separately, and the supervisors were unaware of which of their students were participating. It was not always possible to recruit matched student and supervisor pairs, but every effort was made to achieve this. In both studies, I used a purposive sampling technique to recruit my participants. There were some minor differences in the approaches used in the two studies,

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owing to time, budgetary and other factors. The first small study was funded as part of a small internal research grant, and the second study was completed as part of a larger Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) project on cross-cultural supervision, led by colleagues at Macquarie University. The only mandatory criterion for both studies was that students and supervisors would be working across cultures in their supervision. Although this mostly involved AngloAustralian supervisors working with culturally and linguistically diverse students, care was taken to also recruit supervisors from Asia and continental Europe. All of the students included in these studies were not Anglo-Australian, but, where relevant, culturally diverse supervisors’ descriptions of working with AngloAustralian students were also recorded and analysed. A number of continental European students whose first language was not English were also included in the study. As I am not a language expert, I chose to focus especially on cultural diversity, rather than on the details of linguistic diversity (as indicated in Chapter 1). Students and supervisors were asked not to name each other during recorded interviews, nor to name their friends whose experiences they talked about during the interview. The interview questions that were used as prompts for conversation with students and supervisors were designed to broadly explore the impact of time, place and knowledge on intercultural supervision. In the second study, the questions appeared in the following format, in three parts, as a condition of me joining an ALTC project and collecting data for that study as well as my own (see Table 5.1). The middle set of questions were those developed for the ALTC study, and the questions in sections one and three were those used in my pilot study. This was the key reason why there are an unusually large number of questions for semi-structured interviews. My research assistants and I gave participants copies of these questions prior to their interviews and used them as reminders during the interviews. The data I am reporting on in this book include students’ and supervisors’ responses to a version of all of these questions. As can be seen in Table 5.1, questions for PhD students or candidates (as they are often called) served as the basis for asking supervisors about their perceptions of how their PhD students were experiencing supervision. Supervisors often have, at best, only small glimpses into their students’ experiences, especially across cultures. Indeed, the more I study and experience intercultural supervision, the more I become aware of how little I can imagine of my culturally and linguistically diverse students’ experiences. These prompting questions appear to have allowed the students in the study to outline what they wished to reveal of their intercultural supervision experiences. It is quite possible that students may have revealed more of their experiences to Shirin, the Iranian research assistant and international PhD student and later graduate, than to Suzanne or myself, as Australian supervisors. However, this may also not be the case, as the students knew that their responses would be analysed by an Australian supervisor later. I also think that these questions appear to have allowed supervisors to describe how they viewed their students’ experiences, in turn revealing some glimpses into their supervisory practices. Of course both students and supervisors would have wished to narrate themselves as ‘good’ PhD students or supervisors.

Table 5.1 Interview questions with PhD students and their supervisors Interviews with PhD students/candidates

Interviews with postgraduate supervisors

1 Why did you choose to study in Australia? 2 When you first came to Australia, did you have any friends/family/relatives here? 3 Did you find it difficult to settle into your research studies in a new country? 4 Did your supervisor help you to settle into your research studies? If so, how did they help you? If not, what would have helped you settle in more effectively?

1 Do you think your research student found it difficult to settle into their research studies in a new country? 2 What strategies did you use to help them settle into their research studies?

1 What aspects of your involvement with your supervisor do you regard as most beneficial and useful to them? 2 What are the main sources of misunderstandings and problems that arise for students and their supervisors? 3 What do you think international students need most from their supervisors? 4 Based on your own experience of being an international student or knowledge of international students, what changes and developments in supervision would you like to see? 5 What other developments do you believe would be beneficial for effective research education? 6 In what ways can international students take action to improve their supervisory experience? 7 What are the most serious types of misunderstanding that may arise between students and supervisors?

1 What aspects of your involvement with international students would you regard as most beneficial and useful to them? 2 What are the main sources of misunderstandings and problems that arise for international students and their supervisors? 3 What do you think international students need most from their supervisors? 4 Based on your own experience, what changes and developments have you undertaken to meet the needs of international students? 5 What other developments do you believe would be beneficial for effective supervision of your own students or international students in general? 6 In what ways can international students take action to improve their supervisory experience? 7 What are the most serious types of misunderstanding that may arise between students and supervisors?

1 Do you feel different as a person since you started your research studies? If so, describe those differences. If not, describe why you don’t feel different 2 Do you feel part of your school’s research culture? 3 Do you take part in school research activities such as seminars, journal clubs, student groups, etc.? 4 Do you join in activities with other research students? 5 What do you think you have learned from your supervisor? 6 What do you think your supervisor has learned from you? 7 Have you returned to your home country during your research studies? If so, what was it like to go back?

1 Do you feel different as a supervisor since you started working with your international student? If so, describe those differences. If not, describe why you don’t feel different 2 Do you think your student feels part of your school’s research culture? 3 Does your student take part in school research activities such as seminars, journal clubs, student groups, etc.? 4 Does your student join in activities with other research students? 5 What do you think you have learned from your student? 6 What do you think your student has learned from you? 7 Has your student returned to their home country during their research studies? If so, did they describe feeling different when they returned home?

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These two studies were small studies that were never designed to establish anything in the way of trends or ‘truths’ about intercultural supervision. I was trying to understand how students and supervisors chose, on that particular day they were interviewed, to describe how they experienced intercultural supervision. Language is never any kind of transparent representation of ‘truth’ or experience in any determined way. Consciously and unconsciously, when we describe our experiences to someone else, we are constructing them into particular narratives. As a result, these narratives will be replete with cover stories and contradictions. I received ethical clearance from my university for the first study and then additional ethical clearance from all of the universities involved in the larger second study and I carefully conducted the research following these ethical protocols. All of the standard ethical considerations that apply to interviewing people in their place of work or study apply. In addition, because of small numbers of specific ethnic groups in specific disciplines, there is also the ethical issue of maintaining anonymity. Even more importantly, because I chose to interview student and supervisor pairs (or teams) in the majority of cases, a great deal of care had to be exerted to achieve internal anonymity, where students or supervisors working together or maintaining postgraduation professional relationships should not be able to recognise the words of their own student/supervisor. As a result, I have had to report here the general, overall details of the demographics of the total group of students and supervisors who participated in this study. I have not matched them up in any way, in order to protect their professional relationships. I have also had to be vague about their disciplinary areas, preferring to use the overall categories of humanities and social sciences in the pilot study and humanities, social sciences, engineering and sciences in the second study. In the following four chapters, the interviews will be referenced by referring to each participant’s continent, discipline and whether they are a supervisor or student (e.g., Asian social science supervisor, etc.). I will now outline in more detail the exact nature of each of the two studies and how they varied slightly.

The studies In 2007, with a very small amount of internal research funding, I conducted a small pilot study of intercultural supervision in the humanities and social sciences. Because of the very short timeframes involved, I used a purposive sampling technique where I approached several supervisors I already knew in the humanities and social sciences. To ensure students did not feel pressured into being part of the study by their supervisors, I asked each supervisor who had agreed to be part of the study to provide me with a full list of all of their students’ names. Each of them had between five and ten students. I then randomly selected a number of students and successfully recruited one humanities student and one social science student to participate in the study. Therefore, in total, the first study involved five supervisors and two doctoral students, from different social science and humanities disciplines. I conducted the interviews with the two students and three of the supervisors from the humanities, as my research assistant, Dr Maryam (Shirin)

Intercultural supervision in Australia 75 Jamarani, was personally known to these supervisors, and Shirin conducted interviews with two of the supervisors from the social sciences, whom she had not previously met. One of my Masters students, Naomi Anastasi, transcribed the interviews from this study. My goal, in particular, was to write a chapter for a forthcoming book where I had had a chapter abstract accepted by the editors (Manathunga, 2007). This very small study enhanced my interest in broadening this study, and, in 2008, I was fortunate to be invited to join a national ALTC project on the development and evaluation of resources to enhance skills in postgraduate research supervision in an intercultural context. This project included Sue Spence, Gail Huon, Judi Homewood, Anna Reid, Allyson Holbrook, Stephen Marshall, John Hooper, Sid Bourke, Theresa Winchester-Seeto and myself. In particular, I worked closely with Anna Reid, Theresa Winchester-Seeto, Judi Homewood and a number of research assistants. We reached an agreement that I would organise the recruitment of supervisors and students from my university for the study and would coordinate this part of the project. In return, I would be able to modify some of their interview questions and ask participants at my university some additional questions in line with my pilot study. Without access to this much more significant pool of funding, this second study would not have been possible. Working closely with my research assistants, Dr Maryam (Shirin) Jamarani and Dr Suzanne Morris, we were able to recruit an additional eleven supervisors and sixteen students. Again, we used purposive sampling, but this time, in most cases, we approached students first and then sought to recruit their supervisors into the study. The supervisors who participated in this study were not told which of their students were also participating in the study, nor were the students informed which, if any, of their supervisors had agreed to take part. In two cases, our study included pairs of supervisors who worked together with a great number of culturally and linguistically diverse students, several of whom were involved in our study. In other cases, we managed to interview several students of the one supervisor. There were a few instances where we were unable to recruit matched pairs/trios of students and supervisors, but these data were included, because they were from either students or supervisors from similar disciplines as other participants. Shirin, who was then an international humanities doctoral student (and later graduate) from Iran, and Suzanne, who is an Australian science doctoral graduate, conducted the majority of the interviews in this study. The only interviews I conducted were those with supervisors already personally known to Shirin. In the following section, I will provide an overall description of the demographics of the students and supervisors whom we interviewed in our two studies. Students A total of eighteen students participated in semi-structured interviews. These students were all enrolled in traditional PhD, rather than Professional Doctorate, programmes. These students were enrolled in doctoral programmes where they were conducting a substantial research project under the supervision of two or

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more postgraduate supervisors. They were mostly not doing any additional coursework. These students were mostly past their first significant candidature milestone, called Confirmation of Candidature at many Australian universities, and the Full Research Proposal in other systems around the world. In some cases, students had recently submitted their theses or had successfully graduated. Therefore, all of these students had had at least one full-time year’s experience of intercultural supervision. In the two studies, thirteen female and five male students participated. These students were from Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, China, Bangladesh, Mexico, Iran, Italy and Germany. They ranged in age from their early twenties to their mid forties and had various levels of professional and family responsibilities and commitments. In some cases, they had enrolled in doctoral studies in Australia directly after their undergraduate and Masters studies, and, in other cases, they had had significant amounts of professional experience prior to undertaking doctoral research. Some of the students had brought children, or partners and children, with them to Australia. In other cases, some students had had to leave partners, children and elderly parents behind in their own countries. Some had undertaken prior studies in Australia or other English-speaking countries, and others had not. In some cases, the language of instruction used in their countries’ secondary or tertiary education was English. They each had a varying level of competence in written and spoken English, although most of them were reasonably fluent English speakers. They were all principally located in Australia for their studies and were involved mostly in face-to-face supervision, rather than online or distance supervision, although the majority of them (especially in the humanities and social sciences) returned to their own countries to gather data or conduct fieldwork. In most cases, supervision involved a mixture of scheduled face-to-face meetings with one supervisor or a team of supervisors, informal interactions, email and other forms of online communication. Their studies were in the overall disciplines of humanities, social sciences, engineering and the sciences, and they were located on several different campuses of the university. It proved harder to recruit students in the engineering and science areas. As a result, eleven of the students were from the humanities and social sciences, and seven were from engineering and the sciences. Supervisors Fifteen supervisors participated in semi-structured interviews in these studies. These supervisors were from Australian, American, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Greek and English backgrounds. All of the non-Australian supervisors had worked in Australia for at least four years, with the majority working in Australia for ten to twenty or more years. Interestingly, the English and American supervisors described themselves as English– or American–Australian. Those supervisors born in Australia described themselves variously as ‘white Australian’ or ‘(Anglo)Australian’. One supervisor born in Australia described her/himself as ‘English’. In some cases, supervisors also specified the ethnicity of their partners when asked

Intercultural supervision in Australia 77 to ‘describe with which cultural background or backgrounds . . . you most identify’. In the following chapters, they will only be identified as ‘Australian’ and numbered within their discipline. The Asian supervisors included in these studies responded to this question with their original ethnicity, regardless of how many years they had been working in Australia or the nature of their official citizenship. The continental European supervisors involved in the study either provided highly detailed accounts of their ethnicity within their country and/or described themselves more broadly as European. I am deliberately using broad continental terms here in order to protect the anonymity of participants. Supervisors were also asked to identify the ethnicity of their own supervisors. Regardless of their own ethnicity, ten supervisors had Western supervisors when they were students, four had Asian supervisors, and one had had a supervisor from an ethnic minority within America. In the two studies, eight men and seven women were interviewed. They ranged in age from mid forties onwards, with a number being close to retirement. They were all experienced supervisors, with some of them having supervised for more than twenty years. Some of these supervisors had received university or national recognition for their supervision, and some of them had personal and/or research-based knowledge and experience about cultural diversity. Most of them had spent much of their academic careers in Australia, although one had moved to Australia four years previously for a senior appointment. In the next section, I will review and summarise the chief theoretical contributions my book is trying to make to current understandings of intercultural supervision. I will then describe how these theoretical understandings shaped my data analysis, which will be presented in detail in the next four chapters.

Working with theory I have drawn on Trowler’s (2012) series of questions about the relationship between theory and data to frame how I have tried to work with theory. These include: 1 2 3 4 5

What work am I asking theory to do in my research? Whose perspectives and interests are privileged, whose are occluded? What levels of analysis are foregrounded by my theoretical approach? What other flaws exist in the lens I am using? What are the most beneficial relationships between theory and data in my work? (Trowler, 2012: 281)

I have argued that the range of postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, cultural geography and social theories I have brought together in Chapters 2–4 represent richer and more complicated ways of understanding, interrogating and deconstructing intercultural supervision. This is the work I am asking these theories to do, which answers Trowler’s (2012) first question. In this way, I am deliberately seeking to privilege Southern and other non-dominant perspectives and interests

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in these studies (part one of Trowler’s second question). This is because I think these theories have more novel insights and provocations to offer us, as we seek to understand intercultural supervision pedagogy more deeply. The perspectives and interests that these theoretical standpoints occlude or exclude would be those already overrepresented in dominant discourses about supervision, such as cognitive and psychological understandings of supervision and liberal readings of the roles and responsibilities of supervisors and students and the kinds of practical advice contained in guidebooks and policy documents about supervision (part two of Trowler’s second question). These theories enable us to create more effective and insightful links between the broad context within which supervisors and students operate and the political, cultural, social, geographic and historical legacies and resources they bring to supervision (the macro level) and the finegrained and detailed close-up pedagogical experiences supervisors and students have as they seek to work across, between and within cultures (the micro level). This is my response to Trowler’s third question. Like any theoretical perspective, however, there will inevitably be limitations attached to drawing upon these theories. Trowler (2012) challenges us in his fourth question to reflect on the flaws in the theoretical lens you are using. One limitation of these theories is that they may concentrate too much focus on colonial history and legacies. These perspectives generally relegate dominant Northern or Western perspectives to the background, although, as I have argued above, that has been a deliberate strategy to privilege hitherto non-dominant positions. They also remove the focus from rational, masculinist, modernist constructions of knowledge. I am seeking to refine, develop and extend my theoretical resources in engaging with the data from these two studies. I am also using these theoretical positions to interrogate and further explain my data. I will address Trowler’s final question about the most beneficial relationships between theory and data in my work in my concluding chapter. I always intended that this book would grapple with time, place and knowledge using key theoretical resources, and then to seek to apply those lenses to the empirical interview data that I collected in Australia several years ago. As a poststructuralist, I am always uneasy about making claims to rigorously address (and especially ‘improve’) intercultural supervision pedagogy. I can offer deconstructions of just about every key term used in my book and have sought to hold these words and issues under erasure. I have tried to emulate this here, although I fear there are times when I get up on my soapbox (my sons are quick to remind me when I talk like that!). I have tried to show how each of the theoretical contributions of the scholars that I draw upon might be relevant to reinterpreting time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision. Table 5.2 tries to encapsulate the arguments that I have made in the previous two chapters. If we think about time, place and knowledge through these theoretical lenses, we can see that each dimension will create moments of transculturation, periods of unhomeliness and potential for assimilation in intercultural supervision. I have sought to explore how each of these three dimensions – time, place and knowledge – operates in the data I collected on intercultural supervision in Australia.

Table 5.2 Conceptual framework Issue

Learnings from theories

Time/history Histories are multilayered

Implications for intercultural supervision/ Questions for supervisors and students How do your: (1) personal and intellectual histories, (2) societies/cultures histories, (3) experiences of the postcolonial histories/present of the country in which you work together shape your scholarly identities and supervision interactions? How can your research go beyond notions of history as a series of linear events leading inevitably to Western notions of modernity, rationality and progress?

Challenging Western notions of linear, singular and homogenous time (Chakrabarty, 2004; 2007)

What are the past, present and future trajectories of your culture and how do they impact upon your research/ supervision of students? Notion of coevalness (different What forms of evidence are you/ societies have their own unique your student going to include past, present and future trajectories; your/their research? they grapple with each other at precisely the same time) (Chakrabarty, 2004; Massey, 2005) Secular and religious senses of time What could be learned from (Chakrabarty, 2004; 2007) including myths, legends, literary and artistic representations, rituals and ceremonies, oral histories, proverbs alongside documentary, ‘scientific’ and other forms of evidence? Mythical and rational time Does time/history feature in your/ (Banerjee-Dube, 2007; Dube, 2007) your students’ research? If so, how, and if not, why not? Eternal and cyclical notions of time How does your/your student’s (Adam, 2004; Banerjee-Dube, 2007) research show respect for the past and the future? ‘Present future’ time in the How is your/your student’s research contemporary world (Adam and influenced by your pasts, presents Groves, 2007) and futures? ‘Time future’ in higher education How does your/your student’s and absence of an ethic of care research show an ethic of care for the for the self, others and future self, others and future generations? generations (Clegg, 2010) continued . . .

Table 5.2 Continued Issue

Learnings from theories

Implications for intercultural supervision/ Questions for supervisors and students

Place/space

Place involves: (1) location (which may not be stationary); (2) material locale; (3) sense of place/ attachment to place

How do: (1) location, (2) material locale, (3) sense of attachment to place emerge in your/your student’s research and in your supervision spaces? How do personal and social memories of place surface in your/your student’s research and in your supervision spaces? In what ways are the supervision spaces between you and your student relational? How do you both build upon these relations? In what ways are your supervision spaces open?

Place and memory are intertwined and personal and social

Challenging Western notions of place/space as a surface waiting to be ‘crossed and conquered’ (Massey, 2005: 107) Place/space as ‘open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming’ (Massey, 2005: 59; see also Martin, 2000) and contested (Ruitenberg, 2005) Place pedagogies as made up of stories of place, bodies in places and work in the space of the postcolonial contact zone (Somerville, 2010)

What are the multiple ways in which you/your student might think about your supervision space? In what ways are your supervision spaces contestable or open to different interpretations? Learning is profoundly influenced How might your differences be by our present and past regarded as a space for hospitality geographies (Ruitenberg, 2005) and generosity rather than assimilation? Place is a complex interplay of What are the dominant stories of the local, the trans-local and the place about your/your student’s global, and we have responsibilities research site? to each of these elements (Ruitenberg, 2005) Indigenous place-based pedagogies How will you/your student unearth emphasise: (1) sense of place as alternative storylines about part of being human; (2) formal your/your student’s research site? relationship between people and their environments; (3) linkages between mind and spirit (Penetito, 2009); (4) recognising ‘country’ as a living, conscious being with a past, present and future (Rose, 1996) Supervision places include non- or How will you/your student locate inter-spaces such as Skype, email, your/their own body within your/ discussion fora, etc. their research site? What is your/ their relationship to this place (site)?

Table 5.2 Continued Issue

Learnings from theories

Implications for intercultural supervision/ Questions for supervisors and students

Place/space and time are How might you and your supervisor intertwined rather than separate work together in the postcolonial entities/experiences (Massey, 2005) contact zone? How might you both grapple with your diverse ways of knowing, being and thinking? How might you discuss contested storylines about place (and other issues)? How do your present and past geographies influence your/your student’s research? How does the local, trans-local and global feature in your/your student’s research? What kinds of responsibility do you/your student have to each of these levels in research? What formal relations exist between your/your student’s research and the environment? What linkages exist between the mind and spirit in your/your student’s research? In what ways does ‘country’ act as a living, conscious being in your/your student’s research? How do non-/inter-spaces such as Skype and other virtual places impact upon your supervision? How are the multiple histories of the many places involved in your supervision represented in your/your student’s research? Knowledge

European learned societies/ How was (is) your discipline universities/travellers were (are) implicated in cultural imperialism implicated in twin processes of and cultural genocide? cultural imperialism and cultural genocide (Said, 1994; Smith, 1999; Wisker, 2007) Formation of Western disciplines How do you discuss the histories of heavily implicated in colonisation your discipline with your student? (Smith, 1999; Chakrabarty, 2007) West/North as source of Knowledge In what ways do knowledge and and Theory (Chakrabarty, 2007; theory from the global North Connell, 2007); East/South as labs/ operate in your discipline? sources of data collection and imitation (Al-e Ahmad, 1984; Said 1994; Smith, 1999) continued . . .

Table 5.2 Continued Issue

Learnings from theories

Implications for intercultural supervision/ Questions for supervisors and students

Power of global North (including power to create theory) continues through neocolonialism and globalisation since 1980s (Nakata, 2002; Connell, 2007; Lingard, 2007) Notion of ‘Westoxication’ – shift from historical sense of competition between East and West to a ‘spirit of helplessness’; infatuation, intoxication (Al-e Ahmad, 1984: 43; Connell, 2007) Respectfully engaging with Southern Theory (Al-e Ahmad, 1984; Hountondji, 1996; Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007) Explicitly locating the ways in which gender, culture, place and time impact upon theorists’ ideas (esp. those of the West/North) (Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007) Bringing Southern and Northern theory into dialogue (Chakrabarty, 2007) Notions of the ‘cultural interface’ (Nakata, 2007)

In what ways does the global South continue to operate as a lab, source of data or place of application in your discipline?

Transculturation for Northern theorists (Chakrabarty, 2002; Connell, 2007)?

Fostering South–South theoretical work (Nakata, 2006; Connell, 2007; Lingard, 2007; McLaughlin and Whatman, 2011) Respecting rather than integrating knowledge systems – allowing space for the unknowable and for different systems of evaluation (Jones, 1999; Nakata, 2006; 2007; McKinley et al., 2011; Somerville et al., 2011; Devos and Somerville, 2012; Ford, 2012)

What continuities and changes have occurred in your discipline in contemporary, globalised times?

Does your discipline regard the global North/West as the site of progress and knowledge construction? What opportunities exist within supervision to explore the limitations and inadequacies of global Northern theory and knowledge? How does the work of Southern theorists influence your/your student’s research? How do you/your student account for differences and continuities in Northern and Southern theories in your research? How does the gender, culture, place and time of your/your student’s favourite theorists shape the knowledge that they created? Do you/your students make this explicit in your/their research? How can you/your student bring Southern and Northern theory into productive dialogue in your/their research? What kinds of cultural interface do you/your student operate across, between and within in your/their research?

Table 5.2 Continued Issue

Learnings from theories

Implications for intercultural supervision/ Questions for supervisors and students

Critiquing all knowledge systems, including Southern knowledge (even from an outsider position) (Hountondji, 1996; Connell, 2007; Nakata, 2007) Moving beyond essentialist and binary thinking about cultural difference and différance (Hountondji, 1996; Nakata, 2007)?

How do Northern theorists engage with the work of Southern theorists in your discipline?

Relational models for rigorous and respectful engagement across, between and within cultural difference including reflexivity, careful listening, mutual responsibility and an awareness of the untranslatability of some knowledge (Somerville, 2010; Somerville et al., 2011)

How might you/your student foster South–South research collaboration through your supervision? How are the knowledge systems that operate in your discipline different? When are they not able to be integrated? How do you allow space in your supervision for culturally unknowable/untranslatable issues/ ideas to be grappled with? How are different knowledge systems evaluated in your discipline? How do you/your student position different knowledge systems in your research? How do you/your student critique all of the knowledge systems in your research? In what ways does an outsider positioning shape this critique, and in what ways does an insider positioning impact on this critique? How do you/your students cater for the complexities, nuances and shades of difference across, between and within cultures in your research and supervision? How do you/your students go beyond essentialist and binary thinking about cultural difference/ différance? What kinds of relational interaction have you/your student developed in your supervision? How do you and your student engage in reflexivity, careful listening, mutual responsibility and an awareness of the untranslatability of some knowledge?

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In particular, I have used these categories to extend our understandings of the two key pedagogies I have observed in the postcolonial contact zone or cultural interface of intercultural supervision – assimilation (Chapter 6) and transculturation (Chapter 7) – and in experiences of unhomeliness in intercultural supervision (Chapter 8). I have also sought to investigate any disciplinary differences that emerge between the fields of research that my participants came from (Chapter 9). I have attempted to quote directly from my participants’ interview transcripts as much as possible in the next four chapters, in order to privilege their voices and make them come alive in the text. Occasionally, this makes for complex reading, as I show how different supervisors and students respond to particular themes or issues. I have adopted a referencing system that indicates participants’ overall ethnicity, discipline and whether they are a supervisor or a student. Where I have more than one participant with the same general ethnicity and discipline, I have adopted a numbering system. I have not used pseudonyms, because they would possibly divulge the participant’s ethnicity. I used a thematic form of data analysis that subjected each of the supervisor and student interviews to close and iterative readings to identify the operations (or absence) of place, time and knowledge within their accounts of supervision, based upon the questions I developed from my summaries of theoretical understandings of time, place and knowledge in Table 5.2. The reason I chose to start these chapters with an analysis of place in intercultural supervision, rather than time, was that the data contained much more evidence for the importance (or absence) of place than time in intercultural supervision. I then organised these in the following chapters according to the two key pedagogies of assimilation and transculturation and experiences of unhomeliness that I have been writing about for some time now (Manathunga, 2007; 2011). Postcolonial theory operates with a both/and logic, and so I have argued that there are likely to be moments of assimilation, transculturation and unhomeliness within most experiences of intercultural supervision. This moves us beyond notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ intercultural supervision and allows both supervisors and students to engage in mutual reflexivity, responsibility and deep listening, as Somerville et al. (2011) encourage those researching across, between and within cultural difference to do.

Conclusion Therefore, this chapter has sought to outline the context, methodology and details of participants taking part in these studies. Using Trowler’s (2012) five framing questions about the relationship between theory and data, I have outlined how I have sought to use the postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, cultural geography and social theories I have brought together in Chapters 3 and 4 to reimagine time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision. I have tried to show how these theoretical understandings can be transformed into the questions I used to interrogate the data (listed in Table 5.2) I collected from supervisors and students. The next three chapters present my analysis of how place, time and knowledge played out in these data, categorised under the headings of assimilation, transculturation and unhomeliness.

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Assimilation

Introduction I have characterised one of the pedagogies I have observed operating in the postcolonial contact zone, or cultural interface of intercultural supervision, as assimilation. As indicated in Chapter 2, assimilation can be defined as ‘a unidimensional, one-way process by which outsiders relinquished their own culture in favour of that of the dominant society’ (Abercrombie et al., 1984: 18). In supervision, assimilation plays out as a limited, one-way process of socialisation into Northern/Western knowledge. In my analysis of the data that I collected, I have found that assimilation operates as a denial of place, time and non-Western knowledge systems. When considerations of geography, history and non-Western epistemologies are largely absent in intercultural supervision, supervision becomes limiting and constraining for both students and supervisors. My data demonstrate that there are instances of these debilitating forms of supervision across all disciplines, even in a humanities school where intercultural communication is studied. Not all of the supervisors operating within an assimilationist pedagogy are Western either, although in this study the majority are. The issue of assimilation is complex, however. There is a certain extent to which we must, as supervisors, help students to grapple with dominant Northern forms of knowledge construction and publication. As supervisors working in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and in other locations, we are located in the Western academy, regardless of which cultural background we come from or how nuanced our postcolonial understandings of place, time and knowledge are. As Connell (2007), Chakrabarty (2007) and others emphasise, Northern research practices and norms continue to dominate most disciplinary areas. To deny our students access to these research practices, which they actively seek by enrolling in a Western university, would be to limit their ability to think across and live within several knowledge systems. It could also expose them to the risk of not gaining their doctorate at all, or to limiting their opportunities to publish and to build successful academic careers. It is also important to recognise that the supervisors featured in these data may well be completely unaware of the disempowering impact their supervisory style is having on their students. It is very possible, particularly in disciplines where

86 Assimilation knowledge production is regarded as impartial, that some of these supervisors are unaware of the dominance of Northern knowledge systems in their disciplinary practices. They may also be unaware that other knowledge systems and ways of constructing arguments, thinking, speaking and writing exist. I am also conscious of all of the constraints that supervisors operate under – the increasing numbers of students we are required to supervise, the pressure to gain research grants and publish, while not neglecting undergraduate teaching, and the need to be good academic citizens with very little reward. I wonder about the extent to which the increasingly neo-liberal academy requires us to ignore place, time and diverse knowledge systems if we are to retain our jobs and have any hope of career progression. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to try and understand exactly how assimilation appears to be operating in these instances of supervision. Exactly how are place, time, the body and diverse forms of knowledge ignored in supervision? What are the effects of this on culturally and linguistically diverse students and on their supervisors? How might we avoid assimilation, without denying our students access to Western knowledge systems? It is also important to point out, in this chapter, that I do not have matched interviews with all of the supervisors and students in this study, and so there are instances where we only have one side of the supervision story.

Absence of place and culture: focusing on lack Assimilationist types of supervision are marked by an absence of a sense of place in the supervision interaction, where supervisors do not appear to have time to discuss the places that students have come from or the ways in which these geographies have shaped them. These supervisors may also be unaware of their own geographies. They appear to operate within a universalist frame, where knowledge is abstract (Connell, 2007) and not located in an embodied sense of place – simultaneously ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’, as Chakrabarty (2007: xvii) argues. Space is merely a surface to be crossed and conquered for conferences and research meetings around the world. There is no sense of responsibility to the place the students come from or the place in which the supervision relationship is situated, let alone the interplay of the global in these spaces. In one social science supervisor’s interview, there is a strong denial of the importance of place and cultural difference. This emerges as a liberal discourse about treating all students the same: I don’t believe that they [international students] should get any less or being treated lower compared to local students. It just means that you have to work harder . . . I will expect the same intelligence and ability to go through things as I would from other PhD students. But I give the time and effort to talk it through with them . . . And that may make it a bit stressful. But in the end they realize that you are treating them like others. (Australian social science supervisor 3)

Assimilation 87 There was a sense, in her interview, that treating all students the same and requiring them to respond in the same ways was the only way of maintaining academic standards and thesis quality. Difference appeared to be something to supervise out of students, rather than something to be learned from and incorporated in research.

Deficit views about place and culture Assimilationist approaches to supervision were also characterised by negative or deficit views about place and culture. The interviews with supervisors adopting these kinds of approach resound with references to the terrible lack of English language ability international students bring and the enormous time and effort required by supervisors to deal with students’ writing. An Australian social science supervisor described her Asian student’s language as ‘difficult and it is strange’ (Australian social science supervisor 3). Throughout her interview, she made continual references to ‘not treating them like idiots’, ‘don’t assume that they don’t have intelligence to do that’, ‘you shouldn’t assume she’s stupid’, because of students’ language difficulties. Indeed, she compared English as additional language speakers to ‘deaf’ people. The effect of this reinforced her deficit view of international students. An Australian humanities supervisor adopted a strident negative discourse about English language issues and academic standards in her interview. She spoke repeatedly about the work she did at the micro level of students’ writing – ‘what students, particularly international students, need is that quite high level of support at the very detailed, nitty-gritty level for language and expression and structuring’ (Australian humanities supervisor 1). She argued that, ‘if we take on international students, we take on that English language problem as well’. It was also clear that she had lower expectations of what her international students would be able to achieve in their PhD studies. She suggested that, ‘I actually am not requiring an enormous intellectual breakthrough’ from her Asian students. Instead, she saw the students ‘working in the language and teaching areas doing something that’s a little bit different . . . more of a professional PhD or an applied PhD’. In discussing preparing students for the examination process, she argued that, ‘all I can do is help you shape it [the thesis] into something that we can send out, with all our fingers and toes crossed, to the examiner and do some remedial stuff when it comes back’.

Destructive feedback These deficit discourses about students’ English language skills are sometimes accompanied by destructive feedback or critical questioning techniques, which tend to sap students’ confidence and any trust they may have developed in their supervisor. One European social science supervisor, while acknowledging that her cultural background may be ‘perceived by some Australians as impolite because

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I’m just so direct’ (European social science supervisor), argued that her approach to supervision was a ‘Socratic approach’. For her, this meant that: I just criticise it really heavily, I just say, how do you know that? They say, oh my project shows that such-and-such works. I say, how, where did it show it, bring it on, please express that, what is it that you think worked and who else said that would have worked? So I keep questioning until – they get frustrated during the questioning because they think that their message is not getting across, but what I’m trying to get them to see is that the way they are expressing the message is not the right way. They should be doing it differently. She also believed that: If a student is not really responding to the question you’re asking, that’s a sure sign that they don’t really understand that question. So then I would – what I find myself doing a lot is reducing my array of speaking, so I would speak a little bit more slowly, a little bit more clearly and repeat again and again in different ways what I’m trying to say to the student. (European social science supervisor) She believed that students who cried in supervision meetings were suffering ‘from that stress and the frustration’ that comes from ‘feel[ing] confused’, rather than the effect of her supervision approach. The effect of this style of cross-questioning was devastating for her Middle Eastern student. This student suggested that her supervisors left her feeling like ‘a criminal. I was just preparing myself to answer to the crimes that I had done. I said okay, you know the judges will ask me the questions. “Oh God! Help me”’ (Middle Eastern social science student). The other analogies she used for her supervisors were ‘boss and a client’ and ‘examiners’. She also spoke about her supervisor’s feedback as ‘sometimes very offensive and disappointing’. ‘Peer attack’ rather than ‘peer review’ was also how a Middle Eastern humanities student described the process of getting feedback on her writing (Middle Eastern humanities student). She explained that, ‘it’s very hard for me not to take the comments personally’ and described, earlier in the interview, how one of her Australian supervisors had ‘said if I received such a questionnaire at my house, I’d just throw it into the rubbish’. She reflected that, ‘there’s so many other ways of saying it’. Her supervisor, however, locates the reaction to feedback within the body of the student. She argues that, ‘domestic students . . . internalise that and work with it whereas an international student . . . would actually find that overwhelming’ (Australian humanities supervisor 1). The problem, she believes, is caused by international students’ ‘isolation, the loneliness, possible burdens of family responsibilities’, rather than linking it with her own feedback style. There are also instances in the data of Asian students finding Asian supervisors’ feedback too critical. In this case, the supervisor and student are from different Asian countries. An Asian humanities student described how her Asian supervisor

Assimilation 89 was ‘too critical’, often saying, ‘I don’t think your work is good’ (Asian humanities student 3). She talks about the ways in which supervisors could ‘say the same thing but in a nice way, in a polite way, in a more accepted way’. She suggested that, in the end, you ‘realise it is impossible to satisfy your critical supervisor’. She also described trying to interpret her supervisor’s body language and fearing her supervisor’s displeasure: Once she asked me something I forgot and I explained my opinion and she kept silent without saying anything and the look on her face was very serious. I thought oh . . . Am I saying the right thing? She might think I’m a bad person or whatever. (Asian humanities student 3) A Middle Eastern science student, who was an experienced researcher, also faced accusations of plagiarism the first time he tried to submit a piece of writing to his Australian supervisor. Rather than discussing this with the student initially, the Australian supervisor immediately went to the head of school and made a formal complaint. The student was shocked, because he had just arrived at the university and was in his first week of studies. He had prepared: [a] draft for her to actually express my interest and then introduce my skills in research . . . I grabbed some part of other documents, with reference, and I put them together . . . to show . . . I’m interested in this way and if you’re happy with this I can work on my own. (Middle Eastern science student) He argued that, because he had been a journalist in his own country and had a great deal of research experience, he had the confidence to explain the purpose of the draft document to the head of school and demonstrated how the references were included. A change in supervisors did not result in great improvements in supervision for this student. Instead, further accusations were levelled at him. To introduce himself to the next supervisor and to demonstrate his research background, the Middle Eastern student gave his supervisor ‘the list of my publications and . . . my background and my employment’. However, this Australian supervisor responded by saying, ‘Why are you in my lab? . . . I don’t trust you. You’re coming here to grab information from my lab and . . . publish’. This was followed by a far worse accusation when the student went to a conference. The student was ‘invited because of my other academic skills and then my background’ to an all-expenses paid conference. The Australian supervisor had already given the student permission to attend the overseas conference, but had clearly forgotten that he had done this. During the time he was away, ‘something happened in India, in the hotel in Mumbai . . . the bombing’. The student returned to Australia to discover a series of frantic missed calls on his mobile from his supervisor. He was ordered to meet the supervisor immediately

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and was asked, ‘I was wondering [why] you haven’t been in the lab during the last [few weeks]’. He was then asked whether he was ‘involved in something’. The student, who is ‘an Australian citizen . . . with a clear background’, was accused of being a terrorist by his Australian supervisor. Although the supervisor is now ‘quite shy to be faced with me’, according to the student, the supervisory relationship has been destroyed, and the student continues to struggle with his PhD in the face of great prejudice and mistrust. Unfortunately, my research team was unable to interview his supervisor to hear his perspective on these experiences. What is particularly intriguing about some of the supervisor interviews included in the study is that statements about all of the deficiencies culturally and linguistically diverse students bring with them appear alongside comments about the need to be aware of students’ places and cultures. Clearly, some supervisors believe that they are factoring place and culture into their supervision. A European social science supervisor, herself a former international student in Australia, describes how she knows ‘about culture shock because I went through it myself. At the beginning stages I tell my students, chances are by this stage you’re going to start feeling a little bit home-sick, a little bit confused’ (European social science supervisor). She also claims, ‘it’s always interesting to learn about their culture’ and about her discipline and profession in ‘their own country’. However, she believes that none of this requires her to modify her behaviour. She also suggests that she knows ‘exactly where they are at any given point in time mentally or psychologically’. Similarly, an Australian humanities supervisor describes how she is ‘very conscious of those problems’ students are likely to have in adjusting to study in Australia and is able to list these issues (Australian humanities supervisor 1). She claims that she talks about these issues with students but, like the European social science supervisor described above, she also does this in a patronising way – ‘these are the things that I know you’re going to find difficult’.

Absence of time/history There is an absence of a sense of time and history in the supervision interaction. These supervisors do not seek to recognise, respect and build upon students’ personal, intellectual and professional histories or the histories of their societies and cultures. Supervisors adopting assimilationist approaches seem to disregard the prior professional and cultural knowledge students brought with them to their PhD studies. This was evident in one of the instances above, where an experienced researcher from the Middle East tried to demonstrate his professional knowledge and publications to two Australian supervisors in a row, but was greeted with accusations of plagiarism and stealing secrets from the lab. A Middle Eastern social science student described how she had previously lectured in English and linguistic university courses in her home country ‘for nearly four years . . . and I was recognised as the best teacher’ (Middle Eastern social science student). She had been ‘very successful and I had a lot of good motivation and I felt very strong and very useful and very interested in studying, continuing

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studying, but I hadn’t done any research’. She also had a reputation for assisting other academics and students: before I get into Australia, I had a very good self confidence, very strong person who was very helpful to other people as well. Many people . . . just consulted me to help them and I was very helpful. That was what they told me and I was a good reason for the progress of many people. (Middle Eastern social science student) None of this prior experience was discussed or acknowledged by her supervisor. There was also an absence of a focus on the career futures of these students. As indicated above, supervisors adopting assimilationist supervision styles were focused on the present time and directed their efforts to getting their students through their PhD studies. They did not usually refer to career preparation for their students or discuss creating these opportunities. This present-time focus was often signalled in the interview data, when supervisors struggled to answer the question about what they had learned from their students. For example, an Australian humanities supervisor responded, ‘interesting question . . . I don’t know how to answer that one actually’ (Australian humanities supervisor 1). She then talked through her experiences and came up with a case where she could have been more proactive in helping a student enrolled in another school, but was unable to explain more about what she had learned from her students. She found it much easier to list what she thought her students had learned from her.

Absence of the body, the personal and the relational Assimilationist forms of supervision also deny the importance of the body and the personal in supervision spaces. As Chapter 3 demonstrates, many theorists have argued about the importance of the body in regard to place, and the ways in which place is relational (e.g., Massey, 2005; Somerville, 2010). These supervisors tend to regard students’ personal experiences and difficulties as irrelevant to their engagement in research. Supervision is regarded as a form of project management, and only explicit discussions of the research at hand is allowable in the supervision space. This leaves students feeling like their supervisors do not care about them as multidimensional human beings, with emotions and responsibilities outside the boundaries of the mind. All of this results in a feeling that supervision is a closed, inflexible and cold place – dehumanised and dehumanising. One Middle Eastern science student described how his supervisor was ‘quite avoiding having any responsibility of these personal aspects of the researchers’ (Middle Eastern science student). In other cases, supervisors will state that they are aware of personal challenges international students might have, and yet it is clear that they regard them as beyond the scope of proper supervision. As one Middle Eastern humanities student explained, ‘from the very beginning she made it very clear . . . through her actions, that she was just there for my research and even with my research she was an associate’ (Middle Eastern humanities student).

92 Assimilation The student interviews demonstrate that students are particularly aware of how supervisors might occasionally refer to personal issues, but do not have a genuine ethic of care for them, or seem to easily forget personal information that they may have told them. One student described this as ‘artificial caring’. She described how there were brief times when her supervisor would ask about her personal life ‘for a few minutes’, but then promptly forget anything that she had said (Asian humanities student 3). Another student described how she had had a miscarriage and was brusquely asked by her supervisor, in a fast corridor conversation, ‘how are you feeling?’, and was told, ‘been there done that’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). The student paused to gather her emotions and try to respond, but the supervisor had already moved off down the corridor. The student interpreted this as, ‘I’m not here to socialise with you or really understand you’. This is often accompanied by a sense in which the social aspects of supervision were simply a waste of the busy supervisor’s time. As one Asian student with an Asian supervisor said, ‘I don’t bring up my personal information . . . because I think the supervisors are busy. They don’t want to listen’ (Asian humanities student 3). She felt that she and her supervisor had ‘very different interpersonal approach[es]’, and that she may be judged for discussing personal information: ‘I just have the feeling I’m scared to bring up my personal information if she doesn’t ask . . . even if she asks, I have to be very careful wording myself. . . . I’m really scared to annoy her sometimes’. Unfortunately, our research team was unable to interview the supervisor to find out her perspective on these issues. An Asian student in engineering also had an Asian supervisor who was ‘workfocused’ and far too busy to discuss personal or health issues, even when she had a spinal injury. Fortunately, her Australian supervisor is ‘more polite . . . he tends to be more concerning about my back. He tends to ask me oh how are you going, how’s it doing, like whether you can keep on up with your work with this problem’ (Asian engineering student 3). The time and care it takes to understand students and to build rapport and trust did not appear to be available to these supervisors and were not regarded as important in achieving creative and innovative research. Supervision was, therefore, not relational, but a mere business transaction: research to be managed, accounted for and ticked off, publications to be written. Again, the Middle Eastern science student contrasted this style of supervision with the type of supervision common in his culture, where, he argued, ‘your supervisor will be representing your family’ and providing the kind of ‘support that you get from your family’ (Middle Eastern science student). This would involve introducing you to people, providing research funding and taking care of you as a person. Without this kind of supervision, ‘you feel I’m on the edge of a valley . . . without any support’. An Asian humanities student working with an Asian supervisor from a different cultural background argued that, ‘supervision [is a] kind of teaching’ and felt that supervisors should ‘have a genuine interest in the student’ and ‘take care of [this] teaching . . . from the bottom of their heart’ (Asian humanities student 3). This would also involve being a ‘very effective communicator’, including being able to

Assimilation 93 give constructive feedback, being a good listener and committing time to the student. She also believed that students had a responsibility to be good communicators as well. For an Asian student in engineering, taking time for students also meant actually turning up for scheduled meetings with students and being there if you ask students to come back later: They say can you come back later. You come back later, they’re not there and sometimes you set up a meeting with them and they’re just not there, so you kind of understand what he’s like. So he’s a busy man. (Asian engineering student 3) She has learned that, when her second supervisor arranges meetings, her main supervisor is more likely to attend. Her Asian supervisor once told her about another student who was ‘really stressed’. The supervisor believed it was because ‘everyone has outside commitments and work but you must learn how to segregate’. She commented that this was ‘easily said, not easily done’, and she achieved this by keeping her stress to herself and keeping any questions she had about her research ‘short and simple’, because the supervisor was ‘bogged down with problems’. She also believed that being independent and trying to resolve her own problems were part of her culture, because she came from a family that was ‘really strict, high expectations, do the best you can’. She talked about the importance of not ‘disappoint[ing] her parents’. Her interview demonstrates, however, the huge personal cost that this had on her. She spends exceedingly long days and some nights in the lab and feels unable to take holidays – ‘I really just want to celebrate . . . the New Year with my . . . friends’. A Middle Eastern humanities student described how she had imagined she would have a better relationship with her female supervisor. She thought, ‘I do not have anybody in this country so if anything comes up I can talk to [her]’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). She was sadly disappointed, indicating that, ‘I don’t think she ever was aware that as an international student I felt uncomfortable’ with her. Her supervisor’s interview bears this assessment out, because the supervisor describes how she once received anonymous feedback from one of her students that she ‘could be more friendly’ (Australian humanities supervisor 1). She found this hard to understand and then launched into a discussion about the importance of professional barriers between supervisors and students. She equated being friendly with ‘going to the bar’ with students. Clearly, for her, appropriate supervision focuses only on the research at hand, and not on the relational. Although there is obviously a need to retain professional boundaries in supervision, several supervisors in this study managed to do this highly effectively, while still adopting a relational style of supervision. Students with supervisors adopting assimilationist approaches were acutely aware that supervisors cared more about their own research and career progression. As an Asian humanities student indicated, she believed supervisors ‘don’t take the students’ research as serious as their own. They want to spend

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more time for their own research, for the publication, for climbing up the ladder of career’ (Asian humanities student 3). In many cases, they felt this extended to the research culture of the school and, sometimes, of the whole university. The same student quoted someone who said, ‘PhD students should be treated like staff’ and indicated that, in her school, ‘I don’t think PhD students have been treated as staff; they are the least powerful group of people in the school’. She also suggested that the school seemed to ‘mention money more’ and was not taking supervision seriously or being ‘student-centred in their culture’.

Northern Knowledge and Theory as universal and timeless Supervisors adopting an assimilationist approach also tended to regard Northern knowledge as universal, rather than situated in a particular place and time. There appeared to be an unshakeable commitment to the inevitability and superiority of Western modernity, rationality and progress. This seems to take place even when students conduct fieldwork in their own countries. These beliefs about universal knowledge are probably unsurprising, given the global dominance of Northern knowledge in many disciplines and the increasing reliance on English as a global medium of research communication. This is usually evident in supervisor interviews, in general statements about research that assume there is only one correct way of undertaking research. For example, one Australian social science supervisor rapidly rejected her Asian student’s ideas for his research: And I was saying to him ‘you can’t do that.’ and he said that is the one I want to use. I am going ‘NO, what you’ve got to do is you have to’, and he began to understand why he needed to do that. (Australian social science supervisor 1) The students of these supervisors were particularly aware of their supervisors’ belief that there was only one correct way to approach research. The Asian social science student of the supervisor quoted above explained that he had ‘some sort of restriction to voice everything to her’ (Asian social science student 4). One Middle Eastern science student used the metaphor of singing to explain this narrow approach to research processes – ‘if you’re not real agreement to sing this song in one tonality you have a problem’ (Middle Eastern science student). Later in his interview, he talked about what he perceived as his supervisor’s lack of openness and flexibility to new ideas – ‘You’re not able to teach him . . . He never gets any ideas changed’. A Middle Eastern social science student indicated that her supervisor’s ‘typical feedback is, “no this is not what you do” . . . “why are you doing this?”’ (Middle Eastern social science student). When she tries to explain her reasons for taking this approach, she feels that, ‘they are not in my side. They look like they are examiners’. There are also times when this feedback is accompanied by a great deal of anger – ‘she told me that no I shouldn’t have been doing that and she got so angry, so angry’.

Assimilation 95 Students also grappled with the differences between researching in their own countries, where research often sought to address real-world problems, and researching in a Western country, where there is a commitment to exploring abstract knowledge. As one Middle Eastern science student indicated, ‘if you’re coming from, for example, third world countries with real problems. So it’s not dreaming. You touch this problem’ (Middle Eastern science student). He characterises Western knowledge as dreaming and states: you have to be detached from the real world, to a dream world . . . Because every time that you’re working in third world countries you bring the new ideas, real ideas from the society and put it on the table and try to look at these from other angles. But here it’s quite different because if you have . . . a problem . . . you have to dream it. (Middle Eastern science student) This issue was compounded by the student’s perception of the supervisor’s power to act as a gatekeeper. Even if the student was working on an abstract knowledge problem, he might also want to link it with a real issue experienced in his home country – ‘[you may] bring fresh idea to be connected to this research to make it more valuable and more applicable to the society’. Nevertheless, the supervisor is able to veto this, with ‘no connection’ to the student’s society. This student felt it would be useful if Australian supervisors could be given the opportunity to ‘go and live at least for a short time in third world countries’. This was not something that could be learned by ‘writing and reading’, but needs to be learned by actually experiencing life in these countries – ‘it should be touched’. However, this is a complex issue, because students come to countries such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to learn about Western knowledge and ways of conducting research. An Australian humanities supervisor reinforced this point – ‘they can’t write an [Asian country] thesis. They actually have to end up writing a Western thesis’ (Australian humanities supervisor 1). The students in this study appeared keen to learn from Western knowledge as an additional knowledge system to add to their existing thinking repertoire. There is no evidence, however, that they were planning to discard their own cultural knowledge systems, as an assimilationist supervisory position would appear to suggest they must. Therefore, assimilationist supervision approaches appear to allow very little place for the histories and knowledges of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous cultures, denying the coevalness of all human societies. As one Middle Eastern science student explained, ‘if you publish a thousand papers in your local language, it doesn’t give you any credit . . . You have to change it, convert it to English and then get its credit’ (Middle Eastern science student). He also explained how there was little respect for the knowledge that he brought with him to Australia – ‘there was the problem of bringing that local knowledge to Australia and then you bring something, not only your personality, your knowledge and your culture and the tradition from the other country’. However, none of this knowledge is recognised as significant, much less able to be drawn upon in his research. He illustrated this

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using the example of a phenomenon such as water, which has multiple cultural and religious meanings around the globe and an ideology behind them, rather than only a scientific code – ‘it’s not H2O, it is water with traditional religious applications . . . it’s a glass of ideology . . . a package of ideology plus science’. Clearly, he recognises the political and cultural nature of knowledge, but his supervisors appear, to him at least, to regard knowledge as neutral and universal. He believes this lack of recognition and respect for his cultural knowledge acts as ‘a kind of barrier between you and the person without that kind of information and background to meld these difficulties’.

Northern research practices constructed as universal Assimilationist approaches to supervision also appear to be characterised by a belief that Northern research and publication practices are universal. These interviews provided a series of detailed examples of how supervisors believe that there is only one way of engaging in research practices such as asking questions, critical thinking, debating with supervisors and writing for publication. Although many of these supervisors are aware that culturally and linguistically diverse students are lacking Western approaches to these skills, some supervisors are uncertain about how to help them develop them, or believe that students need to develop them without their active assistance. Asking questions Asking questions of supervisors can be daunting for all research students, particularly early in candidature. Being able to ask the right kinds of question requires a certain amount of knowledge of the research process. However, for culturally and linguistically diverse students, active questioning may not have been part of their previous educational and cultural experience. As one Asian humanities supervisor indicated, this issue led to an early impasse with her Australian supervisor when she was a PhD student. Her supervisor had encouraged her to ‘explore and wander around’ and come back to the supervisor if she had a question. However, as this Asian supervisor explained, ‘Then [I] didn’t really know how to ask questions . . . I really didn’t know what a question was . . . I didn’t really know how to actually find the questions’ (Asian humanities supervisor). The effect on her was devastating. She felt ‘lost [laughs] very lost . . . I was so desperate I actually nearly gave up’. Critical thinking One Asian humanities student working with an Asian supervisor believed that she was not actively taught critical thinking skills but was required to learn them by observing her supervisor closely and by enduring her supervisor’s critical approach to her own writing:

Assimilation 97 [My supervisor] is very critical. I have to say my critical ability has been increased. I have learnt a lot from her. She is very critical of the literature in general . . .[and] she’s very critical even toward my research . . . for the new literature I have been very critical. I could pick up the holes. (Asian humanities student 3) This also appeared to be the approach of the European social science supervisor working with a Middle Eastern student. She described her feedback as ‘a critique’ and talked about how she would ask students, how can you say that when his study had only three subjects? So then by asking questions like that, you get them to think, oh okay, so not everything that gets published is actually valued research, there are mistakes in research, there are flaws and limitations. Then . . . they develop an eye for this and start pulling them out. (European social science supervisor) Her student eventually was able to learn these critical thinking skills, which she indicated was ‘actually what my father has always been recommending to all of us but now I see in practice how research mean and in regard to physically doing the research’ (Middle Eastern social science student). However, she emphasised that learning critical thinking by being subject to heavy and damaging critique from her supervisors came at ‘a very high cost’. Debating with supervisors: the various meanings of yes A number of students in this study described the difficulties they experienced in breaking their own cultural norms in order to debate or disagree with their supervisors. They indicated frequently that it was important to be polite to authority figures, and this involved nodding often and saying yes to everything the supervisor suggested. As one Middle Eastern social science student stated, ‘because I regard my supervisor as a very wise person . . . I just accept what she says’ (Middle Eastern social science student). Another Middle Eastern humanities student indicated, ‘for me . . . the supervisor was the authority, the oracle and I was not there to argue with them’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). For supervisors adopting assimilationist approaches, this was perceived as a frustrating deficit, although one European social scientist rather enjoyed the ‘respect for their teachers’ that her diverse students displayed (European social science supervisor). This same supervisor complained that, A lot of times I find myself talking and the student nodding, but in the next meeting what I asked the student to do was not exactly what the student did because the student thought they understood, but they didn’t.

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Writing practices The writing practices and structure of argument that have come to dominate research in many disciplines in Western universities are actually culturally specific, rather than universal. They are essentially Anglo-Saxon or North Atlantic in origin and involve clearly stating an argument at the beginning of a written piece, proving that argument with evidence throughout and then restating the argument at the end. Some scholars have characterised this structure of argument as a diamond shape – focused at the beginning and end, with more information and evidence in the middle (Kaplan, 1966). In this style of writing, there is very little tolerance for digression from the central argument. There is also the expectation that the writer is responsible for conveying a clear message, rather than readers being expected to make the connections themselves. This argumentative structure is used in most English academic writing, but is not used in many continental European languages or in Asian, South American, African, Middle Eastern or Indigenous languages. In some cultures, a more circular logic is used in thinking and writing. In other languages, an argument is made, and then a counter-argument is included, before a position is reached. There is also greater tolerance for digression (Kaplan, 1966), and more reliance may be placed on the reader’s ability to interpret the text (Clyne, 1987). Some people have suggested that Confucian heritage cultures use an inverted triangle type approach to writing (Kaplan, 1966). In my study, one Australian humanities supervisor indicated that this was a useful characterisation for those not aware of Confucian culture, but a little bit simplistic. Instead, he suggested that Confucian heritage cultures use a writing style that is: less direct and very much more tangential . . . There’s a lot of dancing around before you get to the point . . . there’s often a starting point and an end point . . . But it’s what goes on in the middle . . . a lot of drifting off . . . and coming back to a point. I think we [in Western writing] expect something a lot more linear than that in progression of ideas. Once something’s been established, you know, there’s no need to go back to it again and revisit something you’ve already gone on about. Well that’s sort of okay on the Chinese side of things. (Australian humanities supervisor 2) He also suggested that there is more respect for readers’ ability to interpret texts and a desire not to insult their intelligence by being too explicit – ‘The other big issue is degree of explicitness. So there’s . . . a much more stronger expectation on the reader to understand what’s going on’. Many English-speaking supervisors may be unaware that this way of writing is culturally determined and may be surprised when they receive drafts from their PhD students not conforming to the Anglo-American argumentative structure. This situation was described in this study by an Australian engineering supervisor working with a European student, who was an experienced researcher prior to commencing her PhD studies. The supervisor discussed the difficulties she had

Assimilation 99 when giving her student feedback on her writing. What she had realised was that the student: convoluted everything. She wrote things three or four times. And it took me a little while to realise what she was doing and then for us to have that conversation and for her to get very cross with me and say not that . . . this] is the way we do it in [her home country] and that is the way that papers are published. (Australian engineering supervisor 1) Interestingly, the student recalled this incident very differently. She believed that her supervisors lacked the specific technical background that she had, and, therefore, that she had to: repeat myself many times before they [the supervisors] really understand what I mean, and I have to try to come from certain different corners, and I have to develop the area much more. I can’t assume that they have the same background. (European engineering student 1) I think this demonstrates the extent to which cultural writing practices become subconscious and assumed. At least in the way the student recounts this experience, her interpretation of this difference of opinion was about ensuring that her supervisors understood the points she was making. The supervisor, on the other hand, remembers the student’s angry defence of her cultural approach to writing. It also reveals just how Anglo-American the styles of writing and argument used in English-language publishing in many disciplines, especially in engineering and the sciences, actually are. As Clyne (1987) argued, there is a far greater tolerance for repetition and diverging from the topic in German styles of scientific writing. In this case, the supervisor described how she finally recognised that her student needed guidance in understanding the Anglo-American style of writing (although she would not herself have called it that) and had talked her through the approach used in some English publications: ‘let’s have a look at the papers you’ve been reading and you know . . . Yeah, in the end she took it on board and her writing got much better’ (Australian engineering supervisor 1). Although it is important that we help our students to write using this expected English style, I think the evidence suggests that the student initially interpreted this as a moment of assimilation and sought to angrily resist it. This issue also emerged in interviews with a Middle Eastern humanities student working with two Australian supervisors. She recounts her initial confusion when her supervisor gave her feedback about issues with the flow of her logic: The way we put our argument is an essay is very different. I would call it now, after six years of being here, I would call our system . . . the surprise ending system . . . with an argument you start developing, and developing

100 Assimilation and at the end you say ta-da, this is the point. This is what I was going to say. Whereas my supervisors in the first year kept saying, what is your point to this. That was a bit discouraging for me, because I thought, I’m having very clear logic. I know what I’m doing. Now I have learnt that first it should be the thesis statement and I shouldn’t beat about the bush. Whereas for me it was the normal way of argument. (Middle Eastern humanities student) Again, like the European engineering student referred to above, this Middle Eastern student’s interview demonstrates how ingrained and subconscious our argumentative writing styles are, and the ways in which it took this student a long time to be able to characterise it as a ‘surprise ending argument’. However, she believed that her supervisor’s strategy of explaining this using other publications was not as helpful as being able to see in ‘real examples of my writing, how I can restructure . . . I wanted to see the whole process’.

‘Always/already’ independent research student There is also evidence of high expectations of student autonomy and independence at the PhD level from the beginning of candidature. One Australian humanities supervisor indicated that she was a ‘hands-off’ supervisor, just as her own Asian supervisor had been (Australian humanities supervisor 1). In the interview, I had mentioned that this was called the ‘benign neglect’ approach in the literature. This prompted her to say that she believed that: one of the burdens of supervision is the lack of responsibility that students take for their own process and intellectual space and development and completion. That’s part of being in the twenty-first century . . . I spend much more of my supervisory time dealing with the other side of things than I even do with the academic side of things . . . I think a bit more benign neglect would probably be good for everyone. I think we put far too much time and effort into the whole post-graduate enterprise. (Australian humanities supervisor 1) There seemed to be little understanding that students enrolled in a PhD to learn about research, rather than arriving at the programme fully equipped with a complete understanding of the research process. This is what Johnson et al. (2000) described as the ‘always/already autonomous’ student, based on masculinist Western Enlightenment thinking. One Middle Eastern social science student described how she tried, at the beginning of candidature, to ask her European supervisor some questions, but was told, ‘you’re a PhD student. You’re supposed to know everything’ (Middle Eastern social science student). This had the effect of closing down the supervision space – ‘I decided not to ask more questions and try to get it from somewhere else’, the student explained. Similarly, a European engineering student was told that, as she was ‘a mature engineer . . . I would be

Assimilation 101 left out on my own’. Although she assumed she would have to take care of her own personal issues, such as finding accommodation and so on, she was surprised to find this ‘would also mean in the research area’ (European engineering student 1). Ultimately, she changed supervisors to find someone who might provide her with more guidance and support and who ‘would listen’.

Assimilationist supervision is not only a Western approach As we have seen throughout this chapter, it is not only Australian or European supervisors who adopt assimilationist approaches to supervision. There are two instances of Asian supervisors, in humanities and engineering, appearing to adopt a very distant and unsupportive style of supervision. The issues that have been identified by the two Asian students (neither of whom have the same nationality as their supervisors) include an absence of the personal and the relational in supervision, a lack of time spent with students and the use of harshly critical feedback. Unfortunately, my research team was unable to interview these supervisors, and so I cannot report on their views. However, in both cases, the supervisors had been working in Australian universities for some time and may have themselves studied at Western universities. It is possible that they had taken on the type of supervision that they themselves received, or had witnessed from their colleagues, or that these approaches were the result of individual personality differences.

Effects on students and supervisors The effects of assimilationist approaches to supervision on students can be devastating. Students whose cultural knowledge is not valued, whose prior intellectual and professional histories are ignored or perceived in deficit terms, and whose supervisors adopt a highly distant, research-focused approach may lose self-confidence and motivation to continue their studies. They can become hugely disempowered and fearful. Their loneliness and homesickness are compounded, and they are subject to very high stress levels, especially when their supervisors adopt a highly critical approach to their work. As one Middle Eastern social science student indicated, ‘I have always been like under lots of pressure to prepare for the next meeting and it’s always been very, very stressful and sometimes I thought that this is really end of the world’ (Middle Eastern social science student). She used the metaphor of feeling like a ‘criminal’, with supervision as a ‘trial’. Her metaphors for supervisors included ‘judges’, ‘examiners’ and ‘bosses’. In another case, a Middle Eastern science student was subjected to racist and anti-Islamic assumptions that severely damaged his working relationship with his supervisor. Students experiencing assimilationist forms of supervision may also make much slower progress with their studies, because their attempts to build bridges from their existing cultural, disciplinary and/or professional knowledge are unsupported.

102 Assimilation However, in some cases, culturally and linguistically diverse students experiencing assimilationist approaches to supervision can develop great resilience, independence and self-confidence from learning to manage assimilationist supervisors. A number of students in this study spoke about growing in confidence and independence, as a result of their studies and because their supervisors were too busy or preoccupied to help them. One Middle Eastern humanities student spoke about learning ‘how to be assertive and at the same time polite’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). Supervisors may also have negative experiences when they adopt assimilationist approaches. Some of the supervisors seemed to have a vague sense of unease about their supervision. Very often, they were extremely frustrated with their culturally and linguistically diverse students and found it very difficult to understand the source of their miscommunications with them. In some cases, they believed that their diverse students were not listening to them, or misinterpreted their instructions or their body language. For example, one Australian humanities supervisor spoke about the need for students to listen more carefully to their supervisors – ‘they could actually listen to their supervisors. In fact, that’s sometimes the missing thing’ (Australian humanities supervisor 1). She also indicated that students may misread signs such as their supervisor sighing – ‘the international student might see a kind of deep sigh as something major, whereas the domestic student will just think she’s having a bad day’.

Limits of relational supervision At this point in this chapter, it is also worth remembering, however, that depersonalised, non-relational forms of supervision pedagogy may work for some students. I am reminded of Aboriginal scholar Behrendt’s (2001) argument that she was actively seeking a remote, distant supervisor, who she would respect enough to worry about deadlines. I am also reminded of Bartlett and Mercer’s (2001) chapter, where, having had a highly relational and close experience of supervision with each other, Bartlett was shocked to discover that her first research student wanted such a businesslike supervisory approach. There was also an instance in these data where the emotional labour of the supervisory relationship became too much for both the supervisor and student to bear towards the end of candidature. They had to agree to take a break from each other. As the Australian engineering supervisor indicated, ‘it got too much at the end . . . and I said okay, we stop, this is what we’re doing and she submitted and left for Curtin University’ (Australian engineering supervisor 1). As with any form of pedagogy, there are risks, tensions and difficulties in working across, between and within cultures in intercultural supervision. Boundaries can be crossed. Flexibility and the opportunity to adopt different supervisory strategies at different stages of candidature may be necessary. In this instance, the longterm, positive working relationship between this supervisor and the student was able to continue beyond graduation after this break.

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Conclusion The key point of this chapter is that, as supervisors and as students, we need to ascertain what supervisory style each of us is looking for as we work together, and how that may need to be modified over the period we engage in supervision. The weight of my data, however, suggests that assimilationist approaches to intercultural supervision are more likely to disempower culturally and linguistically diverse students and leave some supervisors feeling uneasy. If we are aware, as supervisors, of the nature of assimilation approaches and how they operate to deny place, time and diverse cultural forms of knowledge, we may be able to avoid the worst effects of them. If we are aware of these issues as students, we may be able to articulate them to our supervisors to seek change, or at least to limit their harmful effects. As students, we may also be able to seek additional supervisors who may be able to provide space for place, time and diverse knowledge systems in supervision. In the next chapter, we will explore instances from these data of transculturation in supervision practices.

7

Transculturation

Introduction I have described the second pedagogy that I have observed occurring in the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision as transculturation. As outlined in Chapter 2, transculturation was defined by Pratt as occurring when: subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant . . . culture. While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own and what they use it for. (Pratt, 1992: 6) I have found, in my analysis of the data that I collected, that transculturation pedagogies operate by according place, time and cultural knowledge a central position in intercultural supervision. Transculturation occurs when supervisors demonstrate respect for their students’ geographies, intellectual and professional histories and cultural knowledges. These supervisors demonstrate a deep awareness that Northern knowledge is only one possible knowledge framework and encourage their students to explore Western knowledge to see what deconstructive possibilities can be achieved when aspects of this knowledge are blended with their own cultural knowledge. Very often it is this unique blending of Northern and Southern, Eastern or Indigenous knowledge that creates the student’s original contribution to the discipline. In some cases, this transculturation was not a oneway process. Many of the supervisors in this study who adopted transcultural approaches to supervision recognised and were grateful for the many things they had learned from their culturally and linguistically diverse students. The purpose of this chapter is to outline the approaches that supervisors adopting transcultural pedagogies used to incorporate place, time and diverse cultural knowledge into supervision. There are examples of transcultural supervision across each of the disciplines included in this study.

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Centrality of place It is clear from analysing the interviews with supervisors adopting transcultural approaches that they regarded place as central to intercultural supervision. Many of the Australian supervisors in this study made conscious and sustained attempts to discover more about their international students’ geographical and cultural origins. For example, one Australian humanities supervisor said, ‘I spend a lot of time asking about their own countries and I have read a lot about their own cultural practices and languages’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). Where possible, he sought to visit their countries. Another Australian social science supervisor suggested that it was only after visiting Vietnam that she began to understand how difficult it must be for her Vietnamese students to adjust to life in Australia: [Y]ou know everything in Vietnam is in public. You eat on the streets, you buy things off the markets, you know you go to the markets and we came back home and the first couple of days we were saying, if you were coming from a culture such as Vietnam, where would you eat? You drive along the streets in a car and there wouldn’t be anywhere to stop. (Australian social science supervisor 2) Another Australian social science supervisor suggested that, ‘you really need to have some kind of understanding of the [student’s] context’, especially when they are conducting fieldwork in their own country. She suggested that, ‘supervisor[s] should be funded’ to make this possible (Australian social science supervisor 2). She had also asked her international students about their countries, but had found them curiously evasive, although she learned more about their cultures indirectly, because of the social nature of their research. She speculated that their reticence could be related to their gender as males, and had sought to include male supervisors in the supervision team. An Australian humanities supervisor spoke about the importance of knowing more about the student’s home country and culture: If I’ve got a student from another culture I would want to know about that culture . . . So I think it’s beneficial for the supervisor to somehow learn about the culture . . . go and have lunch with them or watch a . . . film with them [from their country] and ask questions . . . Or talk about the politics back home or something so that they can . . . see that the supervisor is making an effort. (Australian humanities supervisor 2) Although the science supervisors in this study were less likely to refer directly to place in their interviews, one Australian engineering supervisor described how his research centre was highly multicultural, and how students were encouraged to deliver presentations about their country and culture at the centre’s annual retreat:

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Transculturation the whole feel of the place is that it is . . . multicultural . . . we have a retreat every year and . . . we’ve arranged a session where students get up and they give us a 15 or 20-minute talk about their country. And that was fascinating, ‘cause it was, people from . . . all different parts of the world . . . that was really useful for everybody else in the centre, and it was also really good for them to be able to say this is where I’m from. This is my background . . . these are thing that important to us, this is our school system, this is where I would go for holiday, this is where my family lives. (Australian engineering supervisor 2)

His Southern American student confirmed his interest in her place and culture. She described her supervisor as ‘pretty curious, so he asks me a lot of stuff: So what’s happening in your country? . . .what is done? So he’s trying to understand me, I think’ (South American engineering student). The supervisors adopting transcultural supervision approaches seemed to take great pleasure in getting to know their students and the cultural backgrounds they brought with them into supervision. As one Australian social science supervisor said, ‘that’s also what makes supervision really interesting and enjoyable because it is an opportunity to really get to know different people and not only their research but their culture and other sorts of issues’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). One Australian humanities supervisor, discussing his visit to Vietnam, described his pride and pleasure at visiting a number of former students – ‘they were delighted and proud to show me their place and I was entranced by the framework in which these very intelligent sensitive people had been formed before they come to us’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). An Australian engineering supervisor talked about how his research centre actively recruited diverse students, postdoctoral fellows, academic staff and visitors because it would enrich their research: I think what enriches the culture is just . . . a lot of different people from around the world . . . it’s not just a technical thing; it’s everything you know . . . when we started we had largely, predominantly Australian PhD students who’d been educated [in Australia] . . . So part of our objective was to get them to be aware of what else is happening, and to do that we send them overseas . . . [Now we] . . . have people here from different cultures. I’m sure all the students think that. It’s just there, it’s implicit in everything they do . . . they just meet and interact and talk. That’s really valuable. (Australian engineering supervisor 2) In some cases, these supervisors had also had experiences of living and studying or working in other countries and could relate to students’ senses of cultural dislocation and isolation. In other cases, they were originally from non-Western backgrounds or had intercultural marriages or relationships. Very often, they were experienced in working across cultures. As one Australian social science supervisor working with a number of Asian students reflected:

Transculturation 107 I’ve lived for three years in rural [Asian country] where basically I was the only English speaker. So I’m certainly aware of issues relating to language, the importance of getting things done and so forth, the difficulty then, settling into a new situation and a new country . . . Although you’re part of a particular system [when you work or study there] . . . you are external to it as well. (Australian social science supervisor 1) A European science supervisor working with a number of Asian and European students suggested that: when someone new comes I have a very good understanding of what it implies to be new in a city, in a different culture. I know because I’ve changed continent three times. Yeah, I’ve been in three continents now and that teaches you. (European science supervisor) One Australian humanities supervisor completed his PhD in an Asian country and learned to operate in this environment – ‘I knew how culturally everything worked. So long as I did the role here. You had to do the sort of Confucian thing’ (Australian humanities supervisor 2). He described how his Asian supervisor, who had worked in the West: managed the white students different to the [local Asian] students. We were aware of that too, so there’s a bit of leeway there. But basically what he said, you did . . . It wouldn’t have been a very clever thing not to do what he had told me to do. He was aware that he was more fortunate than many international students coming to Australia because he ‘knew what the rules were and [. . .] just played by those rules’. One Asian humanities supervisor who had worked in an Australian university for more than twenty years emphasised how complex her cultural identity had become, especially when she began to supervise Australian students working in her original home country. She delighted in retelling the story of how she was introduced by one of her Australian students, at his university in her home country, as ‘a guest from Australia’ (Asian humanities supervisor). She felt that her academic English was now better than her academic native language – ‘now I think my English is actually better than [my original language]. . . academically because I haven’t done post graduate study in [that language], so I feel more confident in English’. Students recognised and appreciated this sense of respectful curiosity about their home countries. As one Asian humanities student explained about working with her Australian supervisor, ‘he knows more about [her country’s] culture . . . he went to [her country] last month and when he come back he said he got a very

108 Transculturation good impression of . . . my hometown’ (Asian humanities student 1). Another Asian student working with this supervisor also confirmed that the supervisor ‘likes students [from her country] already and . . . has a very positive view of [our culture]’ (Asian humanities student 3). She spoke about both her supervisors’ ‘respect for cultural differences’ and their desire to ‘talk about the difference . . . and . . . clarify . . . the difference’. In one case, an Australian social science supervisor was initially uncomfortable about the way his Asian student treated him like an honoured ‘guest . . . like royal’ (Asian social science student 5). He was worried it was ‘not professional’, but his student had helped him see that ‘it is so common for people [from her culture] to try to do everything for the guest’.

The presence of time The presence of time was also evident within transcultural approaches to supervision in these data and was confirmed by students. This featured in supervisors’ determination to understand their students’ intellectual and professional pasts and to provide them with structured opportunities to develop a range of academic career skills that would be important to their futures. These supervisors saw their students’ intellectual and professional histories as an important part of supervision and sought to understand them and draw upon them in order to assist students to construct bridges into new knowledge and experiences. As one Australian humanities supervisor highlighted, ‘the recently arrived ones I will spend a lot of time with them just talking to try and find out how they think and . . . a little bit about their intellectual backgrounds and goals’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). An Australian social science supervisor spoke about the range of professional backgrounds and levels of experience of her students, and how these were important to take account of in supervision: I don’t make any assumptions about what they might have done and where they might be headed. Some of them are in much higher professional positions than I am or they may be heads of school or they’re policy advisors . . . It’s not that they come as a blank slate . . . its about being open to alternative pathways for doing things in terms of supervision. (Australian social science supervisor 2) These supervisors were also conscious of the need to develop students’ general academic and career skills for the future. They highlighted their responsibility to mentor students as the next generation of scholars in the discipline. These students ‘are the people who ultimately are going to be carrying on in the areas that we have been working in’ (Australian social science supervisor). As this supervisor stated, ‘I see them as future academics’, and so this meant providing active mentoring in writing for publication, grant writing, networking and other academic career-related skills: We should be working on things like publications and conferences that are coming out of their own work . . . I have tried to get them involved in . . .

Transculturation 109 writing for various things. So I’m a journal editor in the area of language planning . . . When a topic comes up that’s appropriate for one of my students they’re often alerted. Then I suggest that they put something in . . . usually I will read the paper but it’s not for me to be co-author of that paper because, first place, as an editor, it would be unethical . . . In several cases I’ve done papers with students at conferences where I’ve asked them to provide certain parts and put papers together, then based on pulling together aspects of their research of things that they’ve done . . . It has meant, with at least several of the students, and one of the visiting scholars, that there is an ongoing sort of relationship so that we still work on things and correspond on things like that. He saw this as going beyond a ‘straight advisory role’ towards a ‘mentoring process’. In this way, some of his students became ongoing research and writing collaborators with their supervisor during and after graduating. Another supervisor also spoke about the need to provide broad academic career mentoring. She argued that it was: part of my job . . . to help them become scholars. I would hope that there was some modelling and teaching around what it means to be a scholar because . . . they become the experts in their topic . . . [and] about how to be a researcher . . . what it means to work in an academic field. (Australian social science supervisor 2) These supervisors also discussed other aspects of academic work with their students, such as their work on teaching and learning committees, on designing curricula and on ‘how . . . [to] achieve balance in your academic life, which everyone struggles with . . . sometimes your priorities are about work, sometimes . . . about family’. They talked about preparing their students to be future supervisors and sought to give them experience in supervising ‘interns and undergraduate students’ (Australian engineering supervisor 3). They were aware that some of their students returned to professional practice, whereas others ‘take on a more traditional academic role’. They were also conscious of the realities many academics in developing countries faced once they returned to their universities, especially heavy teaching loads and ‘find[ing] themselves inundated with administration and policy making’. They recognised that they could ‘model . . . [academic life] to some extent but what we’re modelling is possibilities, not necessarily their realities’. An Australian humanities supervisor also described how he incorporated a variety of experiences into his students’ study plan: All the way through we plan their studies so that they will acquire some supervision experience, some conference experience and some publication experience so that when they leave us they’ve got as much as we can give them, which will make them employable and so these things involve forward planning as well as familiarisation. (Australian humanities supervisor 3)

110 Transculturation To illustrate these points, he spoke with great pride about one of his diverse students who had: matured enormously over the last 18 months, got through confirmation . . . and she has been doing conference presentations, she has been on radio here and she has taken every opportunity and turned it into good outcomes. She has now got herself hooked up with international networks. One engineering supervisor had valued overall professional and career development for his students so much that he had developed a portfolio tool with an interdisciplinary group of colleagues from education and science. This gave students a structured approach to developing their research skills, communication and understanding of their industry, beyond the expectations of a PhD (Australian engineering supervisor 2). The science and engineering supervisors adopting transcultural approaches in supervision were particularly conscious of the need to mentor culturally diverse students in writing publications. One Australian engineering supervisor described how he spent ‘a lot more time trying to help them with preparing their first paper or preparing their first presentation’, and that he was ‘keener for them to start writing material, to prepare material particularly for publication or for a conference paper earlier than . . . an equivalent domestic student’ (Australian engineering supervisor). Some supervisors visited their students in their home countries to fully understand their intellectual and professional histories and experiences. One Asian social science student spoke about how her Australian supervisor had visited her at her university, ‘to try to get an understanding of my work’ (Asian social science student 6). In another case, an Australian supervisor first met his student in her home country, to get to ‘know me and my academic background . . . [which was] a good step for understanding and knowing each other’ (Asian social science student 7). Students also appreciated assistance from their supervisors in developing their academic career skills. For example, one Asian humanities student described how her Australian supervisor had offered a different model of supervision that she was keen to adopt and implement in her own country, when she returned after completing her Masters thesis in Australia. She spoke about the typical role of the supervisor in her home country, saying ‘the supervisor is the only means of information’ (Asian humanities student 1). She now believed ‘it’s not right [to] rely a lot on teachers and the supervisor’. She revelled in the freedom her supervisor gave her. Her supervisor: always encourage his students . . . he always appreciate what we are doing and even when he doesn’t particularly like the idea he has [laughs] very good way to ask us to improve it . . . He gently helps you to improve . . . he never really impose his ideas.

Transculturation 111 This same supervisor had inspired her, during her Masters studies, to change her own supervisory practice. When she returned to her home country, she began to give her own Masters students more autonomy, while understanding their need for guidance and direction. She encouraged them to explore their own ideas, but also made sure she gave them enough structure within which to practice their new-found independence (Asian humanities student 1, additional comments on supervision). Another Middle Eastern humanities student, working with the same supervisor, emphasised how he helped her to ‘have a vision for the future . . . to see my PhD in context – what I could do with it’ and offered her opportunities to co-lecture with him and gain experience in conference presenting and organising and writing for publication (Middle Eastern humanities student). An Asian social science student indicated how motivating it was when her supervisor ‘always just encourage me to learn as a researcher. Like . . . conference and publication and . . . so I learn about the life of a researcher’ (Asian social science student 3). He also encouraged her to seek out opportunities to tutor and do research assistant work in the school. She discussed about how she plans to ‘use some of his techniques to supervise my student in the future’.

Relational open supervision: incorporating the personal and the body Another key feature of transcultural pedagogies in intercultural supervision is a focus on relational and open supervision that incorporates the personal and the body. These supervisors recognise the ways in which personal and social issues involved in doing research studies are intimately intertwined with academic matters, and that students will not necessarily make good progress in their studies until they have sorted out the myriad of issues involved in living in a new country and culture and have begun to establish new social support networks. Interviews with their students confirmed the importance of incorporating the personal in supervision as a significant way of building trust and openness. One Australian social science supervisor emphasised that his culturally and linguistically diverse students experienced ‘both personal and academic kinds of issues’, and that these factors were all ‘really bound up’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). He encouraged his students to call him ‘Uncle’, in order to capture a sense of family relation as well as respect. He argued that his students required ‘someone to listen to them’ and someone that they could feel comfortable enough to ask about: housing problems, or get you to write a letter so they can get a part-time job or talk to you about other matters sometimes too. I mean, you’re not trying to take the place of a counsellor but you’re trying to provide somewhere where they feel really comfortable to come. He was aware of some students’ religious and cultural practices and allowed students to ‘use my office to pray’ or to consume food during evening classes in

112 Transculturation Ramadan. Getting to know students better allowed him to ‘understand why they’re sort of coming from the place they do’. Another Australian social science supervisor believed that culturally and linguistically diverse students had two key challenges – ‘settling into the country and the other is settling into the academic culture’, and that, ‘sometimes [these] issues go hand in hand’ (Australian social science supervisor). All of this meant that, ‘there needs to be quite a lot of flexibility at first in getting them just used to being here’. Supervisors adopting transcultural pedagogies recognised the impact personal issues could have on students’ ability to study. They were active in asking their students how life was going and invited them to discuss personal issues if they needed to. As one European science supervisor emphasised, it was important to ‘check with [students] . . . that they are doing fine . . . because I am human’ (European science supervisor). For him, providing personal support to students involved inviting them to sporting sessions, weekend bushwalks and other social activities, especially after they had just arrived. He saw this as an integral part of helping students settle into their studies, and he encouraged all the members of his lab to ‘check they are fine’. An Australian engineering supervisor spoke about how taking care of the non-academic side of life was ‘your job’ as a supervisor, and so his centre often funds new students’ first week of accommodation, and he ensures that someone in his research centre picks new students up from the airport. He also sought to help them access peer support by ‘pair[ing] them up with either a more experienced student or a post doc[toral fellow]’. Organising domestic things such as accommodation and shopping was recognised as a challenge for Asian students by one supervisor, whose memories of his own experience of arriving in a new country led him to pick up students from the airport and assist them with finding accommodation if necessary. He encouraged his more experienced students to mentor new students, so that they ‘feel at home more quickly . . . [and] have a first point of contact when they have a questions about the life here’ (Asian engineering supervisor). An Asian humanities supervisor also spoke about the importance of understanding the student’s identity and motivation. She always asked students, ‘why you wanna do this [research]? And who you are . . . as a researcher and what kind of role you going to play’ (Asian humanities supervisor). She spoke about the Western tendency to ‘over-theorize everything’ and believed it was very important to ‘talk about how you feel about things’. She has found that her efforts to treat students holistically ‘seems to work quite well’, because it brings ‘you and students closer’. Their students confirmed the importance of these personal, relational approaches to supervision and believed they suggested that their supervisor treated them as colleagues in this way. A European engineering student summed this up when he said he was ‘considered as a peer . . . not as a number’. A Middle Eastern humanities student suggested that her Australian supervisor ‘saw me as a whole person, not just as a student who is here to finish her PhD’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). When she had a miscarriage, it was this supervisor who supported her and offered her time off to return home if necessary. An Asian student working with the same supervisor appreciated the ways in which they:

Transculturation 113 ask me how I am and how about my personal life, what’s my daughters like and what is she enjoy school and do I have any problems. Even when I have a problem I can tell them I have a problem and they say, know that we’re here and we’re your friends. (Asian humanities student 2) Another Asian humanities student emphasised that her supervisor: cares a lot . . . He often come up to . . . in my first five or six month here . . . he come up to my office every three or four days to see if I was ok . . . I can share with him . . . my problems and he is always willing to help with them . . . he . . . is always by your side. (Asian humanities student 1) One Southern American engineering student also spoke about how her English supervisor: Looks [at] . . . the student, the PhD student, not just in an academic way. He’s aware that we have several dimensions. I mean, he asked me for how is my life, how have I been settling down, besides the academic thing. So he has helped a lot in that way. So I feel very confident to tell him my stuff. It’s just helping me a lot (South American engineering student) An Asian social science student spoke about how he felt comfortable with one of his supervisors – ‘I try to express my feelings. And sometimes express my ideas with her. And I know that she would not be judgmental and she would be accommodating to me’ (Asian social science student 4).

‘Thesis family’: creating culturally appropriate support Two supervisors extended this personal support further by creating what they called the ‘thesis family’. This was a form of group supervision involving four Asian students who all commenced their studies at similar times. As one of these supervisors reflected, the students ‘call us . . . mum and dad [and] the students are sisters’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). These supervisors were aware of their students’ need for a social support network and sought to extend the culturally appropriate concept of the extended family to supervision: We’ve actually tried to set them up as an extended family to support each other and also for us to interact. So, what we want them to be is kind of a social network and that seems to be working well. But also a network for sharing ideas around the thesis to each other and be encouraging for each other and have somebody else to talk to about the thesis . . . it stops us from having to repeat the same things four times. Because they’re coming in

114 Transculturation together, they’re all dealing with literature reviews or research questions and opening chapters and setting a context. Recognising that their students were more used to being part of a collectivist culture also involved modifying a supervision communication and expectations resource (the Role Perception Rating Scale) they had come across. The Australian social science supervisor described how, instead of administering this resource and reporting responses individually, she and her co-supervisor had ‘collated the answers’ to the questions about students’ expectations of their supervisors. She explained that they used it as a group, ‘so that people didn’t have to take risks’. They also invited some of their more experienced students to attend some thesis family sessions to share their experiences with the new students. In these ways, they sought to help students to see that they were not alone, and that their challenges and issues were often experienced by other students. In this way, they were seeking to provide culturally appropriate support for their Asian students, drawing upon their knowledge of Asian culture. This was a transcultural form of supervision where more general approaches to group supervision had been given a culturally familiar ethos. These strategies are incorporated into relational and open ways of supervising that acknowledge Eastern ways of being. Their students confirmed the helpfulness of this transcultural approach to supervision. Each of the students in the thesis family submitted their writing tasks, not only to their two supervisors, but also to their peers. This allowed them, not only to learn from each other, but also to join in the discussion of each student’s work (Asian social science student 2). One student in this thesis family spoke about how they were able to adjust to their academic work more quickly, because they could seek help from their peers as well as their supervisors (Asian social science student 1). This student also believed that learning this ‘new way of supervising’ was important for students, and she was keen to ‘bring this idea to my country’ in the future.

Additional forms of group supervision Another Australian humanities supervisor in this study adopted a group approach to supervision because he recognised that, ‘some of the students were a little bit intellectually and socially isolated’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). He established what he called the ‘Research Foundry’, which was both an online website and a face-to-face discussion group. On the website, he provided information about research techniques and approaches, meeting times and topics, and an online discussion forum. He introduced his new students to other students, in the online discussion forum, even before they arrived in Australia. He also encouraged students with similar topics or interests to talk together and share their resources, either by meeting in person or by chatting using email. Regular Research Foundry meetings were held and involved discussions about particular research strategies or theories and about issues such as ‘culture shock . . . and . . . intellectual culture shock’. Sometimes, the supervisor and students planned

Transculturation 115 additional collaborative research and writing projects together. For example, he describes a project on the uses of the phrase ‘God willing’ in Arabic, Persian, French, Spanish and English, where he was ‘being the anchor person doing most of the work and they are getting the data and thinking hard about how to make an argument out of it’. One Australian humanities supervisor was conscious of the need to encourage group interaction between domestic and international students. He organised group meetings to ‘talk about generic issues’ such as writing and to get ‘a bit of dialogue going’ between his Australian and international students, so that they could gain ‘an insight into how the other students see the work’ and build ‘rapport’ between diverse students. He actively encouraged them to ‘bounc[e] ideas off each other’ and to recognise that, ‘they’re not alone in their struggles’ (Australian humanities supervisor 2).

Life outside research These supervisors also recognised the importance of encouraging students to have a life outside their research. They especially demonstrated an awareness of the particular pressures international students experienced. One Australian humanities supervisor spoke of these pressures, especially when they have had to leave their partners and children in their home countries, and described how he would ‘try and get my students to pace themselves so they have time to ride a bike, go to a concert, go to the beach, go shopping, sit down with friends’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). An Australian social science supervisor recognised that the pressure on international students was huge – ‘they’ve had to jump through a lot of hoops. They’re here on government sponsored scholarships, they’ve got a certain amount of time to work’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). This resulted in them feeling that: they should be here seven days a week, 24 hours a day and not get any sleep . . . they’ve been quite surprised and relieved when we’ve said, you know, we expect you to enjoy being here, we expect you to take holidays. There are things that you need to do with your families and first thing, a PhD is not life. Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches also sought, where appropriate, to share their own personal stories. As the same supervisor suggested, ‘it’s about keeping those lines of communication open’ and about modelling with the cosupervisor how academic colleagues interact – ‘we tell jokes, we tell stories and share things that are happening in our lives if it’s relevant’. Again, their students recognised all of these strategies and appreciated them highly. As one Asian humanities student stated, her supervisors would check that she had ‘plans for the weekend’ and discussed with her ‘balancing . . . [her] personal life’ and work (Asian humanities student 2). Many of the students in this study recognised that establishing ‘open communication’ was also the responsibility

116 Transculturation of the student (Asian humanities student 2). This Asian humanities student also spoke about the respect that her supervisors had for her and for each other, and how they were careful to engage in ‘very respectful turn taking’ in their communication with each other.

Both-ways communication: respecting difference Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision respected the need to treat students from diverse cultures differently. This did not mean unequal treatment, but rather a sense of respecting that communication styles and patterns, the types of statement that are regarded as polite or supportive and approaches to issues and challenges may be different across and between cultures. As one Australian humanities supervisor suggested: I will always treat people differentially because that’s the way I live culturally or the way they live culturally and I may make jokes with the Anglo students that I may not make with the Asian students or at least not the same sort of jokes. (Australian humanities supervisor 3) Several European and Asian students also understood the need for this kind of cultural reflexivity and sensitivity. One Asian engineering student spoke about having friends from different cultures and learning to modify his behaviour and communication style to suit – ‘we know if you have two friends, one is Chinese, one is Australian, I know I need to treat them differently’ (Asian engineering student 2). A European engineering student also spoke about this need to be aware that, ‘different people have different reaction to different things. So you just try to adjust yourself to their situation’ (European engineering student 2). Therefore, he emphasised: I refer to different people in a different way, depending on how confident I am with their feelings . . . if I no clue about their cultural behaviour and what they’re used to, I’m not going to be, like, saying jokes and stuff. Supervisors who themselves were from different cultures, or who were particularly familiar with different cultural styles of thinking and being, were also able to adopt what Aspland (1999) has called ‘both-ways’ supervision. One Asian engineering student suggested that: Two of my supervisors are [Asian]. . . . They will give you, well, sort of another way to communicate with them. If you want to do like all the other guys . . . they will treat you just like an Australian student. If you want to treat them in [Asian] way, then they also maybe can do it in [Asian] way, so it depends on you. (Asian engineering student 2)

Transculturation 117 He was aware that his Asian supervisors had become adept at adopting both Australian and Chinese approaches to supervision, and that he, as their student, had the power to select whichever form of interaction suited him best. This situation demonstrates the intercultural pedagogical repertoire supervisors who have operated across and between different cultures are able to offer students. Another humanities supervisor, who specialised in the study of an Asian culture, recognised that some students from different cultural backgrounds would require a more directive approach to supervision, ‘right up [until] the end’ of candidature. This experience had taught him to be ‘patient’ with ‘internalised culture’ and to realise that, ‘this issue will remain right through the candidature. So you just have to reframe your expectations and not let it make you get cranky’ (Australian humanities supervisor 2). An Asian engineering student also spoke about learning to operate in both cultures. He emphasised that he no longer experienced much ‘cultural separation’, because he ‘actually live in two different cultures and keep always knowing what’s happening’ in both cultures and countries (Asian engineering student 2). A Middle Eastern humanities student also spoke about her transcultural identity. Being here for six years I have come to a point that I feel I do not belong to Australia and neither do I belong to [Middle Eastern country]. I have my own self-culture and I have elements of either culture, both of them. It doesn’t mean that I’m rejecting or negating either of them but I have chosen my own thing and I feel very comfortable having my own self-culture because I can be whatever I want. In Australia, if I’m not like the norm they would say, well she’s from another culture. In [my country] they would say, oh well she has been away. (Middle Eastern humanities student) Some of the students in this study also recognised that full intercultural understanding was not always possible or desirable, and that you have to accept the times when concepts are untranslatable, or that different knowledges are impossible to fully reconcile: ‘we know it’s impossible for people to totally understand each other . . . If people don’t understand, that’s normal. Because you don’t understand every detail’ (Asian engineering student 2).

Building students’ peer support networks/research culture Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision were also particularly aware of the isolation faced by culturally and linguistically diverse students. As one Australian social science supervisor suggested, ‘you have to establish . . . all of the networks because it isn’t just the language. It’s establishing all of these networks’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). Therefore, they took active steps, not only to provide group supervision experiences in some cases and to pair students up with dedicated mentors or postdoctoral fellows, but also to assist students to form their own peer support networks. The two social science

118 Transculturation supervisors who had established the ‘thesis family’ model of supervision encouraged their students to meet separately as a group on the weeks that they were not meeting with their supervisors. One Australian humanities supervisor also spoke about how he encourages his students to network with each other, and, as a result, his students are very active and have now organised regular morning teas and lunches for other students, so that they feel part of a research community. As he commented, ‘incoming students are now more or less swallowed up by this social group . . . I just make sure that the introductions are made and then let the students get on with it’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). An Australian social science supervisor believed that students had a great opportunity to ‘network with the other students that are here’. He actively encouraged his students to: take advantage of the fact that these students are here, they’ve had experience, they know about the various people . . . they have had experience in doing a wide range of things. In most cases, they’re only too happy to share that experience. (Australian social science supervisor) These supervisors also modelled collegial behaviour with their co-supervisors and colleagues and took an active part in the school or research centre’s research culture. These supervisors were very proud of the ‘strong international network within the school’ and spoke at length about the ‘strong social presence’ international students had within the school, and how they showcased their cultures in the school by putting ‘on lunches for the whole school’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). They also ensured that their students met some of the ‘senior students . . . [to] help them with the[ir] social networks’. A European science supervisor spoke about encouraging students to ‘get excited about the things that are being done in the group’ and conducted weekly group meetings and encouraged students to attend seminars and to ‘be critical. Just because it’s a talk doesn’t mean that you’re going to learn anything’ (European science supervisor). One of the research centres, where several engineering supervisors participating in this study worked, dedicated a great deal of time and thought to building a vibrant and inclusive research culture. In addition to deliberately seeking culturally diverse students, postdoctoral fellows and visitors from around the globe, this centre had a programme of formal and informal activities designed to create a strong research culture. This included formal mentoring and buddying programmes between new and experienced students, weekly research team meetings, seminar series and an annual centre retreat. Several schools had an annual postgraduate student conference and encouraged their students to present in their early years of study and, ultimately, to take part in ‘hopefully . . . organising as they get to the senior years’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). Their students commented on the effectiveness of these strategies to help them build peer support networks and be part of a vibrant research culture. Asian humanities and social science students described the ways their supervisors encouraged them to connect with others socially and in seminars and other

Transculturation 119 research-based networks. As one student commented, she made ‘a point to go and see what other people are doing’ and attended school seminars, read research posters and went to any relevant sessions on campus (Asian social science student 2). An Asian humanities student outlined how she took part in social and research activities to prevent stress – ‘it’s much better getting around with some people’ (Asian humanities student 2). The engineering students in the research centre described above also confirmed how much they valued all of the strategies the centre used to include them in an active research culture. Indeed, one Asian student spoke about how participating in the research culture was simply expected behaviour: I feel a part of the research culture because it is our centre policy as well. Not only to gain knowledge or get something for the research you have to know what other people are doing. This is the motto of research for our centre . . . You have to know what is happening, what other people are doing and what you’re doing and share that. That’s what the seminars, you have to present your things, share that and discuss. (Asian engineering student 1) He also confirmed that the students themselves organised many social activities. However, one of these students, from Southern America, emphasised the need for more support and structure around intercultural interactions, rather than assuming that merely co-locating students from different cultural groups would automatically create intercultural understanding. She felt that there was a clear division between ‘the European group, the Chinese group . . . we are not . . . interacting between nationalities. It’s just like Oh, you’re European so we just go together’ (South American engineering student). For her, this meant that, ‘you don’t understand why they do that and we don’t understand why they do that’. In some cases, these students became highly proactive in setting up social activities for other students and took on active mentoring roles or formal student representative roles within their schools or research centres. Occasionally, they believed that this relied more on students taking the initiative, rather than waiting for the school to set up an active, inclusive research culture. One Middle Eastern humanities student spoke about afternoon tea meetings she and some other students established: A kind of tea club for the students. So that by 4 o’clock every day we knew we could go to the tearoom and chat and our heads were steaming from whatever we had studied. So we could talk about . . . the issues we had immediately related to the research but then we would open up to different things. We might even suggest a restaurant to go [to]. (Middle Eastern humanities student) Another Asian humanities student in the same school confirmed how useful these tea meetings were:

120 Transculturation It is a good opportunity for people to catch up . . . they make you feel that you are not alone and other people are in the same boat and you feel like you have similarities in common . . . they also have to struggle to with the sort of method like you. (Asian humanities student 1) In these ways, academic and social interactions were closely intertwined, and students were able to create their own networks that would provide avenues for both. The Middle Eastern humanities student was also highly active in organising an annual postgraduate conference, which ‘turned up being an international postgrad conference’, because the students had ‘advertise[d] it well’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). These activities relied on having a group of proactive students where newer students were prepared to take on these roles after other students graduated, however. A number of supervisors and students participating in this study spoke about how these activities might only continue while there was a critical mass of highly active students.

Building students’ confidence towards research independence: bridges into Western knowledge Supervisors adopting transcultural pedagogies did not assume that students were ‘always/already’ independent. Rather, they recognised that they would need to provide structured supervision to build students’ confidence, so that they could, by the end of candidature, become independent researchers. As one Australian social science supervisor reflected, he had to keep reminding himself that, ‘each student is new and different and starting from the beginning’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). For the supervisors in this study, structured supervision included: • • • • • • •

providing structured help with the literature review and other research tasks; providing oral and written feedback; encouraging students even when early drafts required a lot of work; encouraging students to use tape recorders in meetings; guiding and supporting writing for publication; providing career mentoring about what it means to be a researcher (discussed in the section above on future-focused supervision); helping students to develop their own voice.

In particular, these supervisors understood students’ need for ‘security because it’s an environment in which they can take risks with their learning . . . and [build] the sense of that . . . confidence’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). Several students of these supervisors suggested that they did indeed feel ‘secure and comfortable when [they] get supervision’ (Asian social science student 1). In these ways, these supervisors sought to create a bridge into Western knowledge and research practices for their students. Supervisors following

Transculturation 121 transcultural approaches to supervision were especially aware of the fact that diverse students were adjusting to a different education system that had a raft of unspoken and assumed patterns of behaviour, communication and expectations. As one Australian social science supervisor emphasised, ‘so they don’t know how the educational system works specifically. There are also a whole range of cultural issues so they don’t know what the appropriate behaviours are’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). Students may also initially experience ‘a lot of kind of rejectory behaviours. They’re doing what they think . . . works and it’s not working’. These supervisors were aware of not only trying to make expectations and ways of operating in Western education systems explicit, but also accepting that students would require some time and practice to learn these new behaviours and styles of communication. They recognised how ingrained and subconscious cultural practices are. Providing structured help with the literature review and other research tasks Transcultural approaches to supervision incorporated a realisation that students often required structured support with reviewing the literature and performing other key research tasks. Working together in the ‘thesis family’ group, two Australian social science supervisors described their approach to helping students to grapple with the literature review. One of these supervisors explained that, ‘enculturating somebody into research paradigm[s] . . . [is] actually a serious teaching opportunity as well . . . it’s an important part of teaching and learning’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). She provided a particularly detailed account of their strategies for teaching students to engage in reviewing the literature and defining their research questions. First, these two supervisors asked students to ‘find three articles that they think might be useful and then to review those and we give them some headings and actually talk them through the kinds of things they need to say’. Students then submitted their reviews to both supervisors and each of the other students in the thesis family, prior to the meeting. In each meeting, the supervisors provided detailed written and oral feedback on each piece of writing and plenty of opportunity for the group to discuss each piece. As students began to master the task of reviewing individual articles, they then moved on to explaining how to construct coherent and persuasive literature reviews. They explained to students that literature reviews are ‘chain[s] of evidence’. They also emphasised that literature reviews are about ‘making a case’ and asked the students to think and write about, ‘what’s the point you are trying to make? You need to argue something’. By requiring students to complete detailed and structured tasks early in candidature, these supervisors felt it made the process ‘much faster and more efficient’ for students and supervisors. The students experiencing this structured approach to developing their reading and writing skills confirmed how beneficial this approach was and how it allowed them to develop their skills. One Asian social science student also spoke about

122 Transculturation the benefits of reading her fellow students’ work as well (as highlighted above). She also described how much she had learned from her supervisors about structuring her writing and including ‘topic sentences’ and trying to use writing outlines to enhance the logical flow of her argument (Asian social science student 2). Other supervisors in this study spoke about the need to break down the daunting task of producing a thesis into smaller, more manageable tasks. One Asian humanities supervisor spoke about, ‘showing the big goal but then breaking down to smaller steps and then [showing] how you go about it’ (Asian humanities supervisor). She tried to demonstrate to students ‘the different parts’ of the thesis and ‘how each different part [was] created’. Another, Australian, humanities supervisor spoke about the need to scaffold the process of doing research and how, as the students ‘grow in confidence . . . I, with their agreement, I remove bits of the scaffolding and see how they go’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). An Australian engineering supervisor spoke about the need ‘to be more prescriptive and more structured and to give them more instructions at the start and then gradually try to give them more independence’ (Australian-English engineering supervisor 2). A European science supervisor reflected that, over time as a supervisor, he had learned more about the balance between allowing the student to explore on their own and when to provide more direction or, as he put it, ‘when to give more space and when to say that’s enough [exploring]’ (European science supervisor). He tended to provide a great deal of guidance to the student when they were completing the first project, including ‘I will discuss with them, okay, learn about this, read this, ask me questions you have now, now do this, do that’. However, by the second project, he would tell students: This is what you should look into, come back with specific questions if you have them . . . The next stage is someday the students come and say, okay, I think that this one should be very interesting and this is how I would like to address it and this and that and then I say, okay, well that sounds good.

Providing constructive oral and written feedback An important part of supervision for these supervisors was the need to provide detailed and constructive oral and written feedback on students’ writing. These supervisors were particularly aware of the need to be encouraging, even when some of the students’ early drafts required a lot of work. As an Australian social science supervisor explained, ‘no matter how terrible some of the stuff is that you’re getting to read, you can, there are always some positive things that you can find about it’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). He actively sought to ‘give them the confidence to be able to . . . do good pieces of work’. The two supervisors working together in the thesis family sought to ‘fram[e] meetings in positive ways’ and to carefully ‘watch student reactions . . . You’re always checking, looking for things and if they understand . . . saying, well have they really got that. Do I need

Transculturation 123 to rephrase it?’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). Another Australian humanities supervisor spoke about how he gave gentle feedback to his culturally diverse students, using ‘a lot of hedges in language . . . like perhaps and maybe’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). These supervisors sought to reassure students that a lot of feedback was actually a good thing, because, ‘they’re moving forward and that even though . . . there’s a lot of scribble on their work, that it’s progressing’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). A number of supervisors in this study showed their students copies of their own early drafts from their thesis, to emphasise the point that everyone has to write multiple drafts. As one social science supervisor described: I still keep some of my early drafts of my thesis because they’re terrible and I show them to my students. I should take them along to this group that are just starting because they’re feeling a bit fragile at the moment because they’re just getting into their literature reviews. (Australian social science supervisor 2) In particular, she highlights the ‘supervisor’s comments which are negative or not constructive’, and ‘some of them have a look at them and think, oh God’. She also explains how she ‘just hated doing literature reviews [as a student]. Going back to it at the end of the third year to try and write it, I found it really hard and I hated it’. Similarly, an Australian humanities supervisor shows his early drafts of his work in his group supervision meetings. As he outlined, ‘I present a piece of my work you see. So they get to look at that and we can talk about that as a group.’ He then discusses ‘how I’ve changed it’ in order to present a clearer, more coherent argument. His key message is, ‘see . . . even I bugger it up. But it’s not about getting it wrong, it’s about improving, getting feedback on it and getting it right’ (Australian humanities supervisor 2). They found that it was helpful to remind students that the articles they read are the ‘outcome of . . . many years of work . . . [and] many drafts . . . That’s not their first draft, it’s their last draft’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). One Australian social science supervisor recognised that some students required a great deal of feedback and support to clarify their ideas and arguments throughout their candidature. She described an international student who was drafting the conclusion to her thesis. She and the other supervisor recognised that this student’s first drafts were always highly descriptive, even towards the end of her candidature. What she needed was ‘interactions with us’ to ask a range of critical questions, which then prompted her to ‘get her head around the discussion and the critical thinking’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). Students appreciated detailed constructive feedback and the opportunity to discuss this in detail with their supervisors and, sometimes, with their fellow students. Two Asian social science students, in different disciplines, described the effect of supervision meetings: ‘I feel lighter’ (Asian social science student 2); ‘when I meet with my supervisor, I just have the enthusiasm to work again’ (Asian social

124 Transculturation science student 6). A further three Asian students described how helpful it was when supervisors explained things specifically, such as ‘why this is too broad’ (Asian social science student 1). They were also aware and appreciative of the gentle, constructive approach their supervisors took to giving feedback and reassuring them of their progress: I think our supervisors also try . . . not to give a kind of strong comment . . . because . . . they tried not to discourage the students. (Asian social science student 1) [My supervisor] always comfort me . . . he never show that he disappointed about my writing . . . he says ‘that’s ok, that’s a first draft’. (Asian social science student 3) Especially I am not usually so pleased with my processes. So slow. But they encourage me and they . . . describe my process for me. So they describe . . . my achievement for me so that I realise that, oh yeah I have done this. (Asian humanities student 2) Some of the engineering students participating in this study also confirmed how helpful and supportive their supervisors’ feedback was. One European engineering student spoke about how he felt that, for his supervisors, ‘there’s never a problem to give good feedback to students, no, like – because it’s not so vertical’. He felt they treated him like a colleague and were always happy to say ‘yeah . . . you did great’ (European engineering student 2). He also found them encouraging when he had not performed well in a presentation. He had been in his country speaking his own language for a long period and had tried to prepare his presentation quickly, on the plane on the way to the conference. When he saw his supervisor after the conference, he explained that, ‘I performed really badly’. The supervisor was kind and supportive, saying: Yeah, you know, it’s true, you didn’t do a good job. I was expecting you to have a better performance, but it’s not the end of the world and next time you’re going to be better, I know, because now you’re feeling so bad, now the next time is going to be much better. Another Asian engineering student spoke about the guidance and feedback her Australian supervisor had given her in preparing for her confirmation presentation. She explained that: When I was planning for my confirmation, like he gave me a lot of details about – like oh this is what you should be looking for, like in your presentation, what you should – the structure, how you should present it. They’re looking for this particular aspect and you should just shine in these areas. (Asian engineering student 3)

Transculturation 125 Encouraging students to use audio recorders in meetings A number of supervisors in this study encouraged students to audio-record supervision meetings, so that they would not have to engage in the complex tasks of listening, taking notes and contributing to the conversation simultaneously. As one Australian humanities supervisor suggested, his students found that: if we’ve got the recorder, we can concentrate on the issues without having to concentrate on making the notes . . . and then after the session we go back and listen through it and pick up the details and transcribe everything that needs to be transcribed. (Australian humanities supervisor 3) The social science supervisors working together in the thesis family argued that the oral English skills of many of their students were better than their writing skills, and they found that many students were able to more effectively crystallise their thoughts and arguments through speaking rather than writing. As one of them outlined: One of the things that I think works very well is when we have students come in to have a discussion . . . so we’re trying to build in an opportunity for them to talk about what they’ve been doing, how it’s been going. With some students often that’s better than the work they’ve submitted. If they’ve . . . tape recorded it then they can go back and listen to that. (Australian social science supervisor 1) Guiding and supporting writing for publication The engineering supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision in this study focused a lot of their feedback on guiding and supporting students to write for publication. By providing a lot of feedback on the technical, grammatical and structural aspects of writing for publication, one supervisor noticed that, ‘the next time he [the student] wrote a paper those mistakes were missing and his structure had improved’. An Asian engineering supervisor spoke about the importance of spending time with students, helping them understand how to structure journal articles. The students ‘always have the first go and then . . . we have discussions . . . and then some of the structures need to be changed’ (Asian engineering supervisor). Their students confirmed that the time their supervisors put into demonstrating how to write for publication and how to structure arguments was highly valuable. One European engineering student spoke about learning to ‘write [papers] which was a big . . . major gap at the beginning’ (European engineering student 2). One of his supervisors spent several hours working through this process with him: He called me . . . ‘I’m reading your paper, you should really come here. I stay with you for a couple of hours and I teach you how to write paper’, and

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Transculturation we had a long meeting . . . just for me, and he taught me . . . how to structure my idea first, and I using that method ever since.

He found that the second time he wrote a paper, the process was much faster, and his other supervisors complimented him on his ‘really big improvement since last time’. Helping students become independent The ultimate goal of these supervisors is to ensure that their students become independent researchers. An Australian engineering supervisor encouraged students, as they went through their PhD, to ‘take more responsibility . . . to get more confidence in their own standing in [their area of work]’ (Australian engineering supervisor). As one Australian social science supervisor explained, ‘if students cannot ultimately go on and define, continue to define their own topics, they have no future as a researcher, only as a research assistant to somebody’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). As a step towards this, after a semester of running the thesis family and providing students with structured tasks aimed at helping them grapple with their literature reviews and define their topics, the supervisors began asking students to: Set the agenda for this meeting . . . organise [it] amongst yourselves. Take it in turns, decide what [we’ll be] . . . talking about. Either send it to us or we meet in one of the rooms . . . put it up on the whiteboard. You need to take more control of the meeting. (Australian social science supervisor 2) One of their students appreciated this, regarding it as evidence that her supervisors ‘are receptive to our suggestions’ (Asian social science student 2). One of the European engineering students also appreciated the responsibility that supervisors placed upon him to be responsible for his research. He suggested that they ‘treat you more as a responsible person . . . [and not] just a lab rat that is working there’ (European engineering student 2). He appreciated the trust they placed in him and recognised that he had had to earn their trust. He stated that, ‘you have to take responsibility, but you’re also aware that to take responsibility requires that . . . people have to trust you. The trust doesn’t come for nothing, so you need to gain trust of people’. Developing voice The supervisors adopting transcultural approaches sought culturally respectful ways of helping the students to develop their own voice. They recognised that this could be particularly challenging for students from some cultures where they had not previously been encouraged to debate issues with authority figures. One Australian–American social science supervisor discussed this issue especially in

Transculturation 127 relation to many of his students who were academics in their home countries. He argued that some of his students, ‘if they’ve been sitting at the sort of beginning lecturer level for a while in their universities, they have no voice anyway. So suddenly you’re asking them to speak and they think, who am I to say anything?’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). This respect for authority figures also extended to the ways literature reviews and writing were constructed in a number of different cultures. As one Australian social science supervisor mentioned, her students emphasised that, when they were conducting research ‘back home the way that we would write a literature review is to say these are the voices of the experts and I’m following that’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). She explained to her students that the style of argumentation generally used in the West was where, ‘we hear your voice and you use the evidence of others to support you’. This was an inversion of the structure of writing that students from different cultures were used to. They had learned to recognise that a student nodding in a meeting did not necessarily mean that they agreed with what their supervisor was saying, but that they may be just showing respect. As one Australian social science supervisor indicated, her Asian and Pacific students ‘agree with everything’. She had learned to accept this and to recognise that the sign of disagreement ‘probably shows up in them not following up on things’ (Australian social science supervisor 4). An Asian engineering supervisor also spoke about the need to ‘encourage . . . [Asian students] to be more vocal . . . to express themselves rather than sitting there and just saying yes’ (Asian engineering supervisor). Although he had always been quite independent, even as a student, he recognised how difficult developing a voice was for Asian students, ‘because I’m Asian myself’. In some cases, these supervisors had developed innovative and culturally respectful ways of allowing students to deliver a polite and delayed ‘no’. In particular, an Australian humanities supervisor had developed an evocative metaphor to capture his strategy for allowing his students to choose which of the many suggestions he made to follow up on. It was his Middle Eastern student who described this metaphor of yeast in detail in her interview. She described how her supervisor had noticed that: I was grabbing whatever he told me and I would just go and do it without questioning. Then, well, in the beginning he would tell me something, I would grab it and the next time he would tell me something else, even sometimes contradictory and I would grab it as well. (Middle Eastern humanities student) After about two months of supervision, her supervisor took her aside and suggested: whatever . . . I tell you, you should treat it as a yeast. Put it at the back of your mind, sleep on it. If it grows, then it means that you are happy to follow that and that it is in line with your interest. If not, let it go. It doesn’t mean that just because it came from me you have to follow it.

128 Transculturation Even then, she suggested, it still took her a long time ‘to internalise what he actually means [because I was] interpreting everything through my own cultural filters’. These supervisors also actively sought to build the students’ critical thinking skills and their ability to take positions and develop arguments. Importantly, they recognised that, sometimes, their diverse students were able to verbally discuss issues in critical terms, but this took longer to be reflected in their writing. As one Australian social science supervisor suggested: When you ask them a question they talk through it in critical terms, but in their writing it’s very descriptive and so we often say go back, listen to this and use some of the language that you used when you were talking to us in your writing. Because you’re thinking critically and you’re speaking critically but that’s not what’s coming out in your writing. Indeed, as Singh and Huang (2012) argued, Chinese knowledge construction does not lack criticality. It is just expressed in a different way to how it is often approached in the West. This was confirmed by one of the Asian engineering students in this study, when he sought to challenge stereotypes about Asian students being dependent and passive. He argued that, during undergraduate study in his home country, they were ‘also encouraged to be independent and to act actively in the [my home country’s] system’ (Asian engineering student 2). The engineering and science supervisors included in this study were more likely to describe critical thinking skills as ‘scientific rigour’ (Asian engineering supervisor). Very often, they believed that this was one of the key things their students had learned from them. In some cases, these supervisors were aware that learning these rigorous approaches to research was particularly important for students planning to go on to be academics. One Asian engineering supervisor, who was aware that approximately half of his students went on to work in the consulting industry rather than academe, spoke about how ‘productivity is more important than the rigour . . . in consulting’ (Asian engineering supervisor). In some cases, supervisors sought to model how to conduct polite debates with their co-supervisors. For example, an Australian social science supervisor described how: We often get quite good interaction between us as well as the student. The student can see that there are different points of view, that there are different opinions . . . They need . . . to see that there is debate in the academic community and that ultimately they have to take positions on particular . . . issues. (Australian social science supervisor 1) The students of supervisors adopting transcultural approaches recognised and appreciated their supervisors’ attempts to help them develop their own voices. One Middle Eastern humanities student spoke about how it was not until she had submitted the whole draft of her thesis and was about three years into her PhD

Transculturation 129 studies that she ‘started actually arguing’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). She understood now that she ‘had to always answer the question why. Why you say so, how do you justify’. She believed that she had become ‘more analytical’. When she finally argued with them, her supervisors encouraged her, exclaiming ‘ah-ha now we can see your voice. Now it’s to your credit that you can argue back’. This could be challenging for some students, where their cultures valued listening over arguing – ‘in my country we listen first before we speak’ (Asian humanities student 2). She had, however, learned ‘how to ask questions’ and to develop her own critical thinking skills. An Asian social science student also discussed this issue, quoting a saying from her country – ‘the true philosopher . . . is the one that is quiet and calm . . . Because they feel comfortable with themselves, they don’t need to raise their hand up and say stuff’. She had learned, however, in a Western context that, ‘to look competent . . . you have to be outspoken’. The engineering students in this study also reflected on how, in some cultures, it was important to show supervisors and teachers great respect and to agree with and obey their suggestions. One Asian engineering student said that, in his culture, speaking out might be ‘a little bit offensive’ (Asian engineering student 2). As he explained, ‘you should respect your supervisor. He’s your master’. He pointed out that, very often, students from his culture would not disagree with their supervisors directly, but would find a more polite, indirect way of disagreeing – ‘they’ll try to express it another way which will make it less offensive’. These issues were not only confined to Asian or Middle Eastern cultures either. A European engineering student also suggested that supervision in his country was also ‘extremely vertical’ and ‘very formal’ (European engineering student 2). As a result, it also took him some time to realise that he should ‘just speak up’. The engineering students also confirmed that their supervisors had encouraged them to develop their voices and their scientific rigour. An Asian engineering student recognised that he had developed ‘a sense of critical thinking’ and stated, ‘I can make better judgement[s]’ (Asian engineering student 2). Another Asian engineering student described how he had learned to be ‘more critical in analysing or reviewing an article or writing as well’ (Asian engineering student 1). He had also learned to argue with his supervisors in meetings to progress what he needed to do.

Respecting Southern cultural knowledge All of these strategies, which supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision used to help diverse students build bridges into Western knowledge, did not come at the expense of ‘Southern’ (i.e. non-Western) cultural knowledge, however. These supervisors were strongly aware of the many different cultural ways knowledge can be constructed. They were also not expecting that their students would abandon or move away from their own forms of cultural knowledge. Instead, they recognised that Western knowledge and research practices were merely an additional set of theoretical and methodological resources that

130 Transculturation students sought to add to their repertoire. For example, one Australian humanities supervisor argued that: [I am] constantly reminded the way I look at things is not the only way . . . I’ve come to understand much more . . . how intellectual activity looks when you start from different cultural positions . . . and in some cases different gendered positions . . . I’ve learnt heaps from them about cultural practices . . . cultural taboos . . . about intercultural sensitivity . . . the validity of different ways of doing intellectual things. He also spoke passionately about the need to understand from his international students, ‘the steps it takes . . . to accommodate to working in an Australian cultural and intellectual framework’ and also the steps that he could ‘take towards them which will help to narrow the gap’. However, he was conscious that he should ‘help students not give up the sorts of intellectual values they have at home’. He also sought to avoid imposing his view on students’ research, but to help students build and justify their own views instead. Interviews with his students confirm their appreciation of their supervisors’ attempts to accommodate their supervision style to their needs. One Asian humanities student described how: I can always talk about [anything]. . . with [my supervisor] and give insights into [my country’s] culture and before he ask me to do anything he always ask for [my] perspectives and he tries to understand why I am thinking the way I am thinking . . . he draws out my strengths. (Asian humanities student 1) One of this supervisor’s Middle Eastern students also spoke about the ways in which this supervisor respected her cultural knowledge systems. Another humanities student talked about how she and her supervisors talked about Asian communication styles, where people sought to listen to other people’s views, and compared them with the continental European communication style of one of her supervisors, where, ‘if you don’t respond, if you don’t argue . . . it means you don’t respect’. Being open and seeking to understand how cultural differences were operating in their supervision meetings ensured mutual respect and a productive working relationship. The student called this ‘communication both ways’. An Asian humanities supervisor who worked with a number of students working in universities in her original home country spoke about the different expectations in these universities about research and publications, and how she had to help her students negotiate both Western and Asian university systems. She explained that many Asian universities expected their academic staff to publish in in-house journals rather than international journals. She felt that it was inappropriate of academics in Western universities to say, ‘that’s not really good enough’ (Asian humanities supervisor). She felt it was very important to help students negotiate between the Western system of doctoral education that they had enrolled in and

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their own university system, and to help them think about, ‘how does that research [that they complete in Western universities] fit in with their work context or their professional context back home’. Although engineering and science supervisors were more likely to believe that scientific knowledge was universal and global, rather than culturally based (for more detail, see Chapter 9), a number of the engineering supervisors recognised that culturally and linguistically diverse students brought different technical skills, educational backgrounds and professional knowledge (Australian engineering supervisor 2). They believed this diversity added greatly to the richness of their research culture (as discussed above). These supervisors were also very aware of what Singh (2009: 186) calls their own ‘cross-cultural ignorance’ and their ability to often only function within an English-speaking, Western framework. An Australian humanities supervisor spoke about how he had become aware of the ‘very narrow Western model of search[ing] for truth’, and how supervising students from different cultures helped him to appreciate new aspects of knowledge (Australian humanities supervisor 3). An Australian social science supervisor was very aware of the dangers of assimilation and of making ‘assumption[s] that there might only be one way to do . . . [a PhD] or . . . one way to teach it and one way to supervise’ (Australian social science supervisor). An Australian social science supervisor discussed how much one of his Asian students was able to teach him about philosophical sayings from his home country, and how he was able to draw upon these to develop his research ideas. As this supervisor recalled, ‘you’ll say something and he will give you a [Asian country] saying to illustrate that and . . . what a [Asian country] person would say to reflect on this situation’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). Therefore, he felt, when he was working with this student, he was ‘constantly seeing this other perspective’. Therefore, these supervisors were very aware of how much they were changed by engaging in intercultural supervision. As one Australian humanities supervisor exclaimed, ‘I have become a different person because of supervision [and have learned so many] new things [from my students]’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3).

Facilitating transcultural knowledge and identities In addition to respecting Southern cultural knowledge and seeking to help students construct bridges into Western knowledge, these supervisors also sought to allow students to have the opportunity to create transcultural knowledge by blending aspects of Western knowledge that they found useful and relevant with their own cultural knowledge, to create unique, new knowledge. This was an empowering process for students and a highly rewarding experience for supervisors. There is evidence in this study that some of the students engaged in constructing a creative collage, where parts of Western culture that they found interesting or useful became connected with elements of their own world-view and culture. The culturally and linguistically diverse students in this study discussed how they had changed as a result of their studies in Australia. They spoke of gaining

132 Transculturation more confidence and the ability to operate effectively as an independent researcher in several different cultural contexts. For example, a Middle Eastern humanities student spoke about feeling more confident and said, ‘PhD . . . it’s really hard and when you go through the process, you feel more confident’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). She also stated that she ‘had definitely changed . . . I had learnt how to be assertive and at the same time polite’. She had become more assertive partly as a result of having to have some justification for whatever she said. She explained, ‘that makes me more assertive because I know how I can assert my point and justify’. There were some instances of the creation of transcultural knowledge in these data, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where constructions of knowledge were often more open to diverse cultural influences. For example, one Asian humanities supervisor described her own difficulties, as a PhD student, in reconciling her values about collectivity, reciprocity and holistic connections between her mind, body and spirit, with Western individualistic and rational approaches to research. She described her experiences of transculturation, where she was able to adapt largely Western, postmodernist theories about identity and subjectivity and blend them with her values to produce her original contribution to knowledge. Her experience was similar to those of the current international students, whose comments are explored above. In writing her thesis, she had huge difficulties seeing these people as my subjects, feeling instead that, ‘it was a real intrusion and exploitation’ (Asian humanities supervisor). After meeting an anthropologist who introduced her to some new ways to see subjectivity, she was able to recast her thesis as ‘my own journey . . . questioning of my own identity’. This ensured that it was a ‘kind of collaborative project’, and she laughingly explained that, ‘so long as it’s a collaboration and reciprocal relationship, then it’s ok [laughs]’. This experience also shaped her philosophy as a supervisor. She laughed as she realised that, ‘now I’m asking students “what you think” or “what you feel is the important thing” ’. She now finds that students respond really well to her encouragement to find ‘something that you can only say’. In some cases, culturally diverse students were eager to adopt transcultural approaches to supervision practice as well. For example, one Asian humanities student sought to incorporate the positive aspects of both of the cultural approaches to supervision she had experienced, in Australia and in her home country – a combination of independence and structured guidance. She spoke about the common features she had observed about supervision in her home country, where ‘the supervisor is the only means of information’, and where there was a great deal of reliance ‘on the teachers and the supervisor’ (Asian humanities student 1). During her MA studies in Australia, she realised that students were required to decide about their own reading lists and to demonstrate greater independence and ownership in terms of determining which information was valid evidence and how they would focus their own research topic. This was one of the reasons why she found it ‘a bit difficult when the first time I come here’. Fortunately, she found that her supervisor understood her home education system and assisted her to slowly get used to taking her own initiative and trying to solve some of the

Transculturation 133 research problems herself. In these ways, he modelled for her how to provide students with structured guidance, so that they had opportunities to practise their independence gradually. In a sense, he was demonstrating how to accomplish bothways supervision. She spoke about how she successfully completed her MA and returned home to continue working as an academic. She understood her students’ need for guidance, but wanted them to experience some of the advantages of creating their own ideas and having the freedom to make their own decisions about their research, as she had done in Australia. She described how she slowly began to adopt the supervision practices her Australian supervisor had used with her own students. She noticed that they found this different approach to supervision puzzling and difficult at first, but she was able to reassure them that she would continue to provide them with structured guidance, so that by the end of their studies they would become more independent. She recognised that they gradually began to enjoy opportunities to shape their own research and to develop their own knowledge. In another case, an Asian social science student’s views about social issues such as gender had been challenged by his interactions with one of his Western supervisors. Although he did not choose to speak about this, one of his supervisors spoke about how he had had ‘to move out of [his] comfort zone’ to study ‘a different religious perspective’. She also spoke about how she had been ‘very upfront with him’ about her particular belief system, which would be ‘absolutely opposed to his’. He was able to accept this difference, and they were able to develop a good relationship because they respected each other (Australian social science supervisor 2). This resulted in his adoption of new perspectives about gender identities that enriched his research. There were also examples of the formation of transcultural identities in these data. For example, a Middle Eastern humanities student spoke about having a unique transcultural identity that was both Middle Eastern and Australian. She described this as ‘having my own self-culture’, which was a unique blend of ‘elements of either culture, both of them’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). Rather than making her feel like she didn’t belong in Australia or [Middle Eastern country], this transcultural identity resulted in her feeling adept in both cultural settings and allowed her the freedom to ‘be whatever I want’. This transcultural identity was also intimately entwined with her ‘professional identity as a researcher’. Although diverse engineering students were less likely to have opportunities to create transcultural knowledge, there were some instances in these data of engineering students developing transcultural identities. For example, one Asian engineering student spoke about how he was comfortable living ‘in two different cultures’ (Australia and his Asian home country) (Asian engineering student 2). He explained that with ‘the Internet . . . even TV programs . . . the culture separation, it’s not that big’, because he was able to keep up with what was happening in both places. He also indicated that he had had prior experience of becoming used to a different culture when he had moved many years ago from his ‘hometown . . . in the North of [home country]’ to ‘university . . . in the South

134 Transculturation of [home country]’. In this way, he highlighted the internal cultural diversity within his home country. He emphasised that, in many ways, the ‘difference between the two cultures I don’t think it was smaller than the gap between Australian and [my home country’s] cultures [in different regions]’. An Asian humanities supervisor also spoke about the complexities of her transcultural identity now that she had returned to working in her home country, after living and working in Australian universities for more than twenty years. She recognised that, although ‘living in [her home language] speaking world and the English speaking world is absolutely different’, she had become adept at negotiating both cultural spaces and languages (Asian humanities supervisor). Interestingly, she found that many ‘local communities’ in her home country treated her as: a kind of foreigner who can conveniently understand [the local language] as well and then I am the kind of sort of connection with the outside of [home country]. So they are quite happy that I’m quite different and they quite enjoy that sort of aspect. In these ways, she found that her ‘overseas experience was quite respected’. She enjoyed the feeling of being ‘kind of planted . . . in [her home country’s] context’ again. This transcultural identity also allowed her to understand the challenges faced by her students, who were trying to fulfil Western university expectations of their PhD research, while at the same time living up to the expectations of their home universities in a range of Asian countries (as discussed above).

Transculturation for supervisors: opportunities for mutual learning Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision regarded supervision as an opportunity for them to learn a great deal from their students. They often mentioned these opportunities before being asked this question in their interviews. For example, one Australian social science supervisor spoke about how he saw working with research students as: a primary way that . . . I can learn new things about research in my area . . . some people take students very narrowly. I tend to take students a bit more broadly. So I see it as a way of expanding the things that I know something about. For me, if you have a good student, it’s an opportunity to learn a lot of new things. (Australian social science supervisor 1) He also believed that his students broadened his perspective, and that ‘there’s a degree of mutuality about that’. An Australian humanities supervisor also emphasised that his international students ‘offer me some new things’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). He agreed that he had become ‘a different person

Transculturation 135 because of [intercultural] supervision’. Another Australian social science supervisor also agreed that she had changed as a result of her intercultural supervision and claimed, ‘I have become much more relaxed . . . I have lived my life [before that] according to time frames and deadlines and dates and structure’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). An Asian humanities supervisor described the ways in which giving students feedback on their writing has ‘helped me a lot in a way with my own writing . . . with my own thinking processes . . . I think we really help each other in many ways . . . and we are colleagues in that way’ (Asian humanities supervisor). She regarded supervision as a ‘collaborative process . . . [where] I learn as much as they learn’. An Asian engineering supervisor also believed that supervisors and students ‘learn together . . . when we do research together we learn about all new discoveries . . . and it’s quite exciting’ (Asian engineering supervisor).

Conclusion Therefore, supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision recognised the centrality of place, time and knowledge in supervision. These supervisors demonstrated a great deal of curiosity and respect for students’ geographies. Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches to supervision also believed that time and history were of fundamental importance in helping their diverse students achieve high research outcomes and originality. They were deliberately conscious of both students’ past intellectual and professional histories and the need to be future-focused in their commitment to assisting students to develop into independent researchers and to achieve their academic and career goals. They sought to ensure that supervision was an open, relational space where improvisation and the creation of transcultural knowledge were encouraged. These supervisors respected and were curious about Southern knowledge and sought ways to understand the diverse cultural knowledge that their students brought with them into supervision, and how this could be harnessed and built upon in their students’ research. They recognised the need to build students’ confidence, so that they could become, by the end of their candidature, independent researchers. This also involved creating bridges for students into Western knowledge, which they saw as just one of the many forms of significant cultural knowledge that their students were seeking to develop. Finally, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, these supervisors sought to create opportunities for their students to create transcultural knowledge that blended their existing cultural knowledge with forms of Western knowledge students found useful, to create their own unique contribution. In many cases across the disciplines, their students also developed transcultural identities and the ability to live, work and research in many cultural contexts and knowledge systems. In some cases, taking a transcultural approach to supervision also enabled some of these supervisors to experience forms of transculturation as well. However, supervision across, between and within cultures is never simple and may also include ambivalence, tension and unhomeliness, which we will explore in the next chapter.

8

Unhomeliness

Introduction Working across, between and within cultures is hard work. One of the key experiences that supervisors and students working interculturally may undergo is a sense of unhomeliness. As outlined in Chapter 2, unhomeliness is a concept developed by Bhabha (1994: 9) to describe ‘the estranging sense of the relocation of home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations’ that migrant workers, refugees, Indigenous peoples and cultural minorities may experience. The trope of unhomeliness seeks to capture the cultural alienation, sense of uncertainty and discomfort that people experience as they adjust to new cultural practices. These experiences often impact upon people’s identities and senses of self, as they grapple with new cultural experiences and decide which ways of being to adapt to and which to avoid. Culturally diverse students experience this, not only in adjusting to the Australian context, but also in adapting to the Western educational system and the implicit cultural expectations supervisors may have of them. Supervisors who are seeking to adapt their supervision style to their students’ learning needs in a culturally sensitive way may also become uncomfortable, as they adopt unfamiliar strategies and roles (e.g., Cadman and Ha, 2001). My analysis of the interview data in this study demonstrates the extent to which unhomeliness is a common experience in intercultural supervision, particularly for students, as they grapple with unfamiliar research paradigms and cultural ways of thinking and being. My data also show that supervisors may also experience unhomeliness, as they try to work with and understand their students. It appears that unhomeliness, or ambivalence and discomfort, is a feature of the ‘inter’ in intercultural, or working within the contact zone of intercultural supervision. Unhomeliness seems to be inherent in efforts to work across cultures. In these data, unhomeliness emerges in relation to place and knowledge, as students and supervisors attempt to engage with unfamiliar places, spaces, ways of relating and ways of knowing and being. Interestingly, time did not seem to surface in these experiences of unhomeliness. Given that unhomeliness was a stronger, more pronounced experience for students in this study, I analysed the student data first for instances of unhomeliness, and then the supervisor interviews.

Unhomeliness 137

Unhomely locations: adjusting to new places and languages and building networks Homesickness is a huge part of adjusting to new locations. One South American engineering student described this as ‘the shock of moving’ (South American engineering student). This homesickness was often compounded if students had had to leave partners or children behind in their home countries. As one Asian humanities student explained, ‘my [baby] daughter is still at home . . . with my family’, which had made her ‘terribly homesick’ (Asian humanities student 1). Although it was often more homely to bring partners and children with them, a number of students in this study experienced challenges in helping their families settle into new locations. Even finding accommodation for a family was more difficult than finding a ‘small room or share house [when you are on your own]’ (Middle Eastern science student). As one Asian social science student explained, his wife found it difficult to settle into Australia at first, because, ‘she used to work back home. She is much of a career person herself. And by coming here in the beginning she was searching for job . . . She had to be at home pretty much of her time’ (Asian social science student 4). Eventually, she was able to find a job and began to engage with members of her home community located in Brisbane. There were instances in these data when students’ relationships broke down completely in the face of adjusting to a new life. International students’ children sometimes found it challenging to adjust to the Australian school system. As one Middle Eastern science student described, ‘my daughter was in first year at school so we had again this difficulties to get her familiar with the system, language and culture’ (Middle Eastern science student). Many of the students in this study highlighted the differences between their home countries and Brisbane. For example, one Asian social science student described how she ‘miss[ed] our exciting life’, because Brisbane ‘is a little bit quiet’ (Asian social science student 3). Another Asian engineering student spoke about how things were ‘rather slow’ in Brisbane compared with where she was from, where ‘everything . . . [is] a fast pace’ (Asian engineering student 3). In some cases, even the local community that shared the same ethnicity as students was also very different, as a result of a range of factors such as migration, political beliefs, social background and so on. As one Asian social science student emphasised, ‘the [home country] community here in Brisbane . . . [does not] feel like that’s our community. It’s very different’ (Asian social science student 3). Many international students in this study experienced difficulties in gaining suitable accommodation, especially in the early stages of their candidature. In a number of cases, they were repeatedly not selected when they applied for a room in shared housing (e.g., Asian engineering student 1). In other cases, students and their families were forced to stay with friends for lengthy periods, while they were searching for accommodation, which was ‘very uncomfortable’ (Asian social science student 2). For some students, workspace and office accommodation were difficult. One Asian humanities student was not allocated a desk or an office on campus for the first three months of her studies. Not only did this mean that she had to ‘carry all the books and your lunchbox’ between her home and the library

138 Unhomeliness every day, but she struggled to understand, ‘what a PhD student should be like and how a PhD student life should be like. Because I didn’t have an office . . . I didn’t know the learning strategies, like how a PhD student uses her time’ (Asian humanities student 3). Learning how everyday activities such as shopping and banking took place in a new culture was initially very challenging. Many shared stories of having to go hungry the first night, if they arrived late, because they had assumed that shops would be open late, as they were in their home countries. In other instances, if they shared accommodation, they were conscious of different cultural practices around food and wondered whether flatmates would appreciate them cooking late in the evening. For example, one Asian engineering student spoke about how, if he got home at 9 p.m., it could be difficult to cook and not disturb his flatmates, because ‘Asian cooking . . . takes long time’ (Asian engineering student 1). Some students from developing countries had not had a credit card before and found it difficult to set up bank accounts (e.g., Middle Eastern science student). Many of the students interviewed in this study believed that it took a considerable period of time to adjust to a new place. For example, one European engineering student indicated that, ‘you need between four, five, six months to get familiar with the new place’ (European engineering student 2). For him, the unhomeliness had been increased by the fact that he lived ‘on an island’ in his home country, with a ‘close’ village life and few opportunities to travel outside Europe, and so the ‘cultural gap’ between home and Brisbane, a medium-sized, subtropical city of 2 million people, was huge for him. Becoming more proficient in a new language is also an unhomely experience for students, accompanied by a great deal of frustration and embarrassment. For example, one South American engineering student described that: Sometimes in some meetings, I just can’t get to the point, and I think it’s the language, and I don’t want them to feel that I don’t know the things. But it’s like, I just really cannot express, and sometimes it’s so frustrating. (South American engineering student) She also spoke about being ‘afraid of the language’ and avoiding ‘asking questions because I think they’re stupid or they are not well-translated’. A European engineering student also described his first few meetings with his supervisors as ‘horrible’, because ‘I couldn’t talk proper English’ (European engineering student 2). This experience left him ‘feeling so stressed and . . . frustrated because I really thought I’m never going to make it’. An Asian social science student also spoke about the difficulties he experienced in ‘convey[ing] what I have in mind . . . it’s not easy to get it out . . . to express’ (Asian social science student 4). This also affected the pace of his research. He emphasised how he felt ‘awkward’, because it was ‘not as easy for me to accumulate the knowledge and produce everything in comparison to a local student’. Language issues affected, not only supervision, but also students’ abilities to socialise with other colleagues and build networks. As one Asian engineering student described:

Unhomeliness 139 It’s difficult if you don’t understand correctly, you don’t understand the TV series they watch, so you don’t have something to talk about at lunch . . . It’s very difficult for me to express myself exactly what I mean in English. (Asian engineering student 2) Friendship practices and ways of socialising are often highly culturally based as well. They may be different when there are many local students with alreadyestablished networks and only a few newcomers, or in situations where people move frequently. One South American engineering student spoke about how different collegial friendships were in her own country compared with Australia: During my Masters degree in [South American country], we were all together and working . . . I made really good friends there and we were all together, out and stuff. Here, that has been difficult. Everybody is just doing their own thing, and nobody [has] enough interaction, so I miss out a lot. (South American engineering student) Although she mentioned the tradition among the students of going to the staff club for drinks on Friday nights, she argued that, ‘I feel like there’s no chemistry’. She spoke about how she often made friends and ‘good networks’ with other newcomers, but they were usually on short-term research exchanges or visits and returned home after short periods, leaving behind only ‘the people that have a long time here and they already have their own networks and it’s very difficult to come into them’. The longer established groups are ‘very closed . . . they are so used to each other that they have their own thing, they have their own chemistry’. Two students in this study described the compounding effect of all of these instances of unhomeliness. One described the feeling as being ‘abandoned and . . . disempowered . . . this is not my place and nobody wants me here’ (Asian social science student 5). The other highlighted that the ‘homesickness and loneliness’ were magnified by the lack of ‘a network’, and that this impacts on your research. She explained that all of this ‘make[s] you sad, so when you are sad and then you couldn’t study’ (Asian humanities student 3).

Unhomely gendered bodies There was also one instance when a female South American engineering student described the challenges she faced as an expressive and affectionate South American person. She characterised her own culture as ‘very open and [with] . . . very deep friendships everywhere . . . you hug each other . . . so I really need that, even the physical contact, to be able to say hello’, whereas, ‘here . . . it’s like you come into the office and nobody cares’ (South American engineering student). It is quite possible that gender was playing a role here, as the vast majority of students and staff in the centre were male, although the student did not think so. She compared her experience with that of one of her South American male friends and argued ‘we have pretty much the same stuff ’.

140 Unhomeliness

Unhomely identities Students often felt they became very different people when they sought to work in a new culture and context. For example, a South American student described how, ‘here I find myself a pretty serious person . . . [who was] very shy’, whereas, in her home country, she was ‘always joking’ (South American engineering student). A large part of this was because ‘I cannot be completely myself because of the language thing’. An Asian engineering student grappling with the unhomeliness of being required to be fully independent in her research found that she had become ‘easily agitated . . . and . . . really pressurised’, because she had no one to reassure her she was on the right track (Asian engineering student 3). Returning to being positioned as a student after being an experienced professional was particularly unhomely for some students. For example, a European engineering student described that she: had an extremely good reputation . . . I published, and I had written some books and book chapters in the technical area. I was leading a really prestigious project in [her previous work country] for five years . . . and I had a status. But I came here, and all of a sudden I felt thrown back into a student position without any possibilities to really do something . . . just getting lost in a huge research area that I had no idea about. (European engineering student 1)

Reverse culture shock: becoming unhomely in your own culture Studying internationally was a transformative experience, leaving some students feeling unhomely when they returned to their own countries. For example, one European engineering student spoke about how different he had become from his friends from the island he grew up on – ‘we [are] still very good friends . . . but we see things in a different way. So my priorities are different’ (European engineering student 2). Some students, who had become adept at living in two different cultures (as discussed in Chapter 7), did not experience unhomeliness as such, but merely noted the differences between the two places. For example, one of the Asian engineering students spoke about how, in his home country, ‘they will drive without seat belts after drinking’, and that they ‘enjoy food lots more than Aussies’ (Asian engineering student). Another Asian engineering student described how she missed aspects of both places. She commented that what she missed about her home country was ‘her family . . . the culture . . . the food and how everything is done so efficiently [there]’ (Asian engineering student 3). Meanwhile, the Australian things she missed included ‘the river and the nature . . . the forest . . . Sunday markets and organic produce . . . [cultural] festivals [like] the Greek festival . . . the Buddhist festival’. Some of the supervisors in this study were aware of reverse culture shock and sought to prepare students for feeling unhomely in their own cultures. As one

Unhomeliness 141 Australian humanities supervisor indicated, some of his students’ parents had said to him that they had sent him their child ‘as a nice obedient quiet [Asian] daughter and . . . [she’s] come back argumentative’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). He elaborated on this point, suggesting that, ‘cultural practices have a way of leaking in . . . and it takes a while to leak them out again’. Another Australian social science supervisor made a point of pre-warning her students that, ‘you are not exactly the same person that you [were when] you came here’, and that international studies were an opportunity ‘to find out who they really are . . . to explore’ (Australian social science supervisor 4). Although these experiences could be positive, they certainly provoked a great deal of questioning of identity, leaving some students feeling doubly displaced.

Unhomely communication Seeking to communicate between cultures can be particularly challenging at times, because the norms of politeness are so culturally inflected. For example, one South American engineering student described how, if you broke something in the lab, an email would be sent to the whole lab – ‘here’s like an email . . . in front of everyone’ (South American engineering student). In her culture, it would be more common to discuss this privately with the person, because, in her country, ‘if we have to say bad things, we take a long time or try to be nice with people’. So too, the ability to ask questions and to seek help with difficulties is greatly influenced by cultural norms of communication. For example, one European engineering student described how people from her region were ‘very introverted’, and ‘they don’t really know how to express that they have difficulties’ (European engineering student 1). Instead, they seek to impress people by working very hard. So it became a ‘cultural difficulty’ when she had to confront the issues she was having with one supervisor, who provided very little guidance, and move to a new supervisor. Even when supervisors were welcoming and supportive, some students found it difficult to ask questions, especially at times other than during formal appointments. For example, one Asian social science student said that, ‘if there are questions I need to ask outside of the appointment time I don’t feel comfortable to go and knock and ask’ (Asian social science student 2). This also extended to finding out what resources and facilities they were able to access. Learning how to deal with feedback and supervisor comments can also be an unhomely experience for students, particularly if they perceive feedback as highlighting all of the mistakes they have made. One Asian social science student spoke about how one of her student peers found it difficult to accept feedback from her supervisors, and from her student colleagues as well. As she explained, her friend misunderstood the purpose of feedback and ‘complained . . . again, this many mistakes, oh again’ (Asian social science student 1). She read the student’s work and could see ‘that what the supervisor suggested was actually true’, but the student was not prepared to accept these comments as suggestions for improvement.

142 Unhomeliness

Unhomely research cultures At times, students reported unhomely experiences in trying to be part of the school’s or centre’s broader research cultures. For example, one Asian social science student spoke about how it was difficult for international students to participate in some of the larger school meetings. She indicated that these meetings were ‘dominated by Australian students’, and she had ‘difficulties in understanding the whole discussion’ and was ‘sometimes . . . a bit reluctant to join [in]’ (Asian social science student 1). These experiences ensured that she felt it was ‘useless’ to attend these meetings, and so she stopped going. These experiences were shared by another Middle Eastern student, enrolled in the same school, who indicated that she had not ‘found . . . [these meetings] very useful because . . . I haven’t been able to say what I think . . . I thought they won’t listen’ (Middle Eastern social science student). In other cases, schools had research seminar programmes, but students felt unable to contribute to the discussion of presentations. One Asian humanities student spoke about how she did not feel part of ‘the research culture’, because, ‘I don’t know how to express myself’ (Asian humanities student 3). Her experience was not an isolated one in this school, as other student interviews confirmed. A Middle Eastern humanities student suggested that there was a ‘clear division between the staff and the students’, with students ‘always reminded that [they] are just students here . . . the hierarchy is in place’ (Middle Eastern humanities student). She had dealt with this unhomely research culture by creating a vibrant and supportive culture among research students and organising many regular social events and postgraduate conferences. On other occasions, it proved difficult to establish a research culture in a centre or school. There was little sense of connection between students and little desire to build links. For example, one European engineering student described how her supervisor asked his students to organise a meeting of all students every fortnight, ‘to report about their research’, but ‘it didn’t happen because the students were all so wrapped up in their own research’ (European engineering student 1). In other cases, students studying in several different disciplines or with an interdisciplinary supervision team became aware that some research cultures were more unhomely than others. For example, one Asian social science student, with supervisors in two different schools, described one department as ‘individualistic . . . I don’t feel the cohesiveness in [this school]’ (Asian social science student 4). He believed the other school was more homely – ‘more family like’. In order to address this feeling of unhomeliness in the first school, the student got involved in tutoring undergraduate students.

Unhomely knowledges and research practices There were instances of unhomeliness for students when research practices around topic selection and the scope of disciplinary areas were different from their previous experiences. For example, a European engineering student was surprised to discover that her subfield of engineering was ‘much broader’ in Australia than

Unhomeliness

143

in her home country (European engineering student 1). She found it difficult to adjust to the idea that, instead of selecting a pre-set topic established by the supervisor (which is a common practice in many subfields of engineering in Australia and certainly in her home country), her supervisors were happy to allow her to select and refine her own research topic. As she suggested, ‘I had all this flexibility and freedom and I didn’t know what to do with it.’ Some students also experienced unhomeliness in grappling with different approaches to research problems. For example, the same European engineering student described that, in her home culture, it was seen as important to fully define a research problem and to categorise it ‘in boxes’. Although she recognised that this could be ‘very restricted and inflexible’, it did ensure that the research problem was well defined. She discovered, when working professionally in South America, that the typical approach was to address issues without fully exploring the central problem. She characterised the approach in Australia as ‘somewhat in between’, with a focus on trying to understand many different angles and perspectives. This left her feeling ‘completely lost because I had lost my basis of approaching my problem’. For other students, research problems in developing countries were based on real-world situations and issues, rather than abstract academic ones. As one Middle Eastern science student emphasised, ‘if you’re coming from, for example, third world countries with real problems’, you want to address these issues in your research (Middle Eastern science student). However, he believed in Western science, ‘you have to be detached from the real world to a dream world again to expand your ideas only in your papers’. This example is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 6 and highlights the dominance of Northern approaches to research. In other cases, students found the process of writing to structured, linear outlines unhomely. As one Asian social science student explained, ‘I cannot see what I want to write yet’, and so she found it difficult to create outlines of her chapter headings and subheadings and to forecast the content of all of her thesis chapters at the beginning of her study (Asian social science student 2). As she explained, ‘we are still struggling with the literature review’, and so she was uncertain about what shape the rest of her thesis would take. This may also reflect a more intuitive, creative approach to writing, where the specific direction of the argument only emerges through the writing process itself. This was also linked to unhomeliness in adjusting to the level of critical thinking and the logical, argumentative style expected in Western research. As one Asian social science student commented, writing in Australia is expected to ‘be really critical . . . and . . . very logical, to be very argumentative . . . It’s different from my way of learning back in my country’ (Asian social science student 3). Adjusting to the independence expected of PhD students in Australia could be challenging for some students. There are many instances in these data of students’ surprise when supervisors do not provide students with reading lists, but require them to locate their own appropriate readings. For example, one Asian social science student described how supervisors in her own country always directed students (Asian social science student 1). She characterised this as the ‘spoon fed

144 Unhomeliness model’. Another Asian social science student described this as feeling as if his supervisor had ‘actually thrown me out into the world’ (Asian social science student 4). There could also be unhomely moments in supervision, as supervisors began to slowly recognise students’ individual, preferred approaches to learning. This is not necessarily a cultural issue. For example, one South American engineering student indicated that she ‘prefer[s] to read by myself and learn things by myself’ rather than attending courses (South American engineering student). Initially, her supervisor thought she was not learning, but gradually he recognised that she had different learning preferences.

Unhomeliness for supervisors The supervisors in this study appeared to experience unhomeliness mostly when they sought to adapt their regular supervision and communication styles to those that might match their students’ expectations and approaches. This could cause uncertainty, ambivalence and discomfort, as they adopted new or different ways of being. For example, one Australian engineering supervisor spoke about how difficult he found it initially to adopt a more formal, hierarchical role with his culturally diverse students. On the first occasion that this happened with an Asian student, he decided to ‘find him an Asian supervisor’, because he found it so uncomfortable that his student was expecting ‘a hierarchical approach . . . he couldn’t work with me because I didn’t adopt a hierarchical approach’ (Australian engineering supervisor 2). He saw this as his own failure, stating, ‘so first of all I had to fail. So, it was supervising an [Asian country] student that taught me initially that I had no idea what the hell was going on’. This experience taught him that he would have to go outside his supervisory comfort zone and adopt a more structured, prescriptive and formal supervisory approach in supervising diverse students. He explained that, now, as an experienced supervisor, ‘I’m more comfortable doing that . . . I think my approach is to be more prescriptive and more structured and to give them more instructions at the start and then gradually try to give them more independence’. There were also occasions when supervisors found the changes they had to make to their supervisory approaches clashed with their own personal values. For example, an Australian social science supervisory team, with an older, more experienced male supervisor and a younger, more junior female supervisor, found it a very unhomely experience when they worked with male students who ignored the advice and comments of the female supervisor. As the male supervisor indicated, ‘I’ve had several students really talk to me as if she [the other supervisor] wasn’t in the room’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). The female supervisor spoke about these instances and described how they had to work around the issue by meeting together before meeting the student: I would say to him [the other supervisor] that these are the things that we really need to talk about, you lead the session. There wasn’t any point in

Unhomeliness 145 being confrontational about it because it was clear that this was something I had to deal with as an ongoing issue. I had to either accept it was going to happen and then work around it, because it wasn’t an issue that was going to change. Neither the student nor I would be able to change something that was embedded. (Australian social science supervisor 2) This made the male supervisor feel uncomfortable, but there appeared to be no way around having to modify their team supervisory approach. In another case, an Australian engineering female supervisor spoke about how some of her European students (both male and female) were prepared to challenge her advice, but would not question anything her more senior male colleagues had said. As she explained, ‘these two students . . . would question everything I said, which was good, but would not question what the professor was saying’ (Australian engineering supervisor 1). Similarly, a female Asian supervisor working with an Australian male student spoke about how her student ‘wasted his [first] year [and had] his confirmation . . . postponed’, because he would not listen to her advice. She wondered whether this was because ‘he had . . .[an] expectation of me being a [Asian country] person, female [and thought] . . . he . . . can get away with it’ (Asian humanities supervisor). Fortunately in this case, having his confirmation postponed helped the student to begin to take the supervisor’s advice more seriously. At other times, gender unhomeliness played out for female supervisors in this study when they were required to undertake all of the emotional labour of supervision. In one case, an Australian engineering supervisor spoke about how many of her female students would cry in her office and expect that she would sort out their problems. As she outlined: they . . . forget to see us as a human . . . [a student] would come in here and just cry and . . . [believed] that I would sort it out for her and she would go away and she didn’t think about me and what an effect that would have on me. (Australian engineering supervisor 1) She felt that her students believed she was ‘not capable of feeling upset about their actions’. On many occasions, she was worried that she had inadvertently done something to upset her students, but was told by another student, ‘you project a sort of an aura of it will be all right if you do that [cry] in [your] . . . office and you’ll sort it out’. Several supervisors in this study also reported experiencing unhomeliness and uncertainty, when students politely agreed with what they were saying, or agreed to undertake some actions, but then did not follow up on them. For example, one Australian engineering supervisor spoke about an Asian student who, despite promising to do so, would not submit any of his writing unless he was convinced it was excellent. As the supervisor explained:

146 Unhomeliness His approach is he won’t give us anything until he thinks it’s a really good standard. We keep saying just give us it, we will tell you if it’s the right direction or where you’re going, or things to expect. But, yes, yes, yes, yes, [then] nothing happens. We have another meeting. Can you just give it to us? Yes, yes, yes, yes, nothing happens. So it’s very, the communication thing is extremely difficult. (Australian-English engineering supervisor 2) Supervisors can also experience unhomeliness when all their usual communication strategies seem to fail with particular students. For example, one social science supervisor spoke about the difficulty she had with one Asian student, who was ‘doing well but wouldn’t say anything in supervision meetings and we would have to prompt, she wouldn’t initiate things in supervision meetings’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). Eventually, after building significant levels of trust with her supervisors, the student revealed the type of supervision she had received during her Masters in her Asian home country, which explained her current behaviour. As her supervisor recounted: She was supervised by a male supervisor who basically made her stand up during the whole session and who . . . was very aggressive and who shouted at her and who basically didn’t allow her to challenge any of his advice or any of his suggestions or suggest how things might be done. (Australian social science supervisor 2) Ultimately, the supervisors were able to reassure the student that they were taking the opposite approach and were very keen to encourage her input during supervision meetings. Occasionally, supervisors from diverse cultural backgrounds experienced the unhomeliness of being allocated heavier, and often unseen, supervision workloads because they came to be known as highly effective and compassionate supervisors. For example, one Asian supervisor spoke about the number of international and local Australian students who approached him informally for assistance. He believed that he had developed a reputation as ‘Mr Fix-It’, because he adopted a more caring, engaged approach to supervision than many of his colleagues. His approach was more in line with some Eastern expectations about supervisors as parental figures. As he explained, ‘they expect you to . . . [be] like parents’ (Asian social science supervisor) (although this is clearly different to the hierarchical Asian supervisor featured in the previous example). This ensured that his supervision workload doubled, but in a hidden, inequitable way.

Unhomely relational spaces and ways of interacting in supervision There were times, in these data, when supervisors had unhomely moments in adjusting to their students’ cultural ways of interacting in supervision. These

Unhomeliness 147 included times when supervisors assumed all non-Western students were the same, or that all people from one culture were the same. They also involved the challenges of grappling with the interplay of personality differences and culture and some concerns about a student’s cultural form of dressing. Making assumptions: Orientalism? Another interesting issue that emerged in these data was a tendency for some supervisors to assume that all culturally diverse students required the same kind of approach. There are faint echoes of the kind of Orientalism that was common during colonial times, when all non-Western people were viewed through the same template, regardless of culture, geographical location and history (Said, 1994). An Australian engineering supervisor, working with a South American student, believed that all of his non-Western research students required an authoritative and directive approach from their supervisors. He argued that he had learned this from a challenging experience supervising an Asian student. What he learned was that his Asian student was: definitely looking for the hierarchy and they want that hierarchy . . . I do that now, I’m more comfortable doing that, but I can still see there’s a challenge there when I occasionally step out of the trying to be the senior person . . . I just now try to be more prescriptive at the start . . . and more structured and to give them more instructions at the start and then gradually try to give them more independence. (Australian engineering supervisor 2) He then automatically applied this lesson to all of his non-Western students, including his current South American student. However, his student was ambivalent about this and described the experience from her own, rather different, perspective: I think at the beginning they were treating me as very paternal kind of way . . . I don’t know, maybe people have the impression that we are slower, or something . . . I have the sense that they have more confidence with the domestic [students]. (South American engineering student) She had had the opposite experience in South America, where her previous Masters supervisor expected high levels of independence from her. As a result, she became determined to demonstrate her ‘initiative’ and was able to impress her supervisors, whom she believed ‘didn’t expect me to do so much’. She was able to challenge their deficit readings of her ability to be independent. Generally, she encouraged all supervisors to ‘be more confident in your international students as a supervisor’. By the same token, however, she had mixed feelings about this issue, because she also appreciated her supervisor’s structure and support – ‘he

148 Unhomeliness sits with you and gives you the directions . . . [he] make you clear what are your goals, and he makes pretty much very easy to follow the research’. This instance demonstrates that there can be many unhomely moments for students, as they appreciate their supervisor’s attempts to provide them with clear guidance and structure, but, at the same time, feel uncomfortable about being treated with paternalism and, therefore, resist attempts be positioned as dependent or less able learners. Assuming people from the same cultures are all the same: essentialism There were also a number of instances where supervisors recognised that they had mistakenly assumed that people from the same cultures would all share the same opinion or approach. As one Australian engineering supervisor highlighted, he was on a confirmation committee and was shocked to discover that there were serious disagreements between an Asian student and an Asian supervisor, coming from the same culture. He recognised that this ‘was a shortcoming on my part’ (Australian engineering supervisor 3). As he explained: The student was [Asian] and he had an [Asian] supervisor [from the same country] and I’d made the assumption that all [Asian people from this country] had the same way of thinking about it, but it was only very late in the review where we discovered that the student and his associate supervisor were actually at complete loggerheads, but it was primarily because of their – it was something either political or to do with where they had been born or what universities. In fact he changed his supervisory team after that. So that was a real shock to me. (Australian engineering supervisor 3) In another instance in these data, an Asian humanities student spoke about her challenges in dealing with her Asian supervisor, who was very aloof and uncaring. She explained that: In Asian culture maybe the supervisor has more power. The student never questions, like the example I gave you. The supervisor has more power, the student has less power, so the student can be in a position of being passive – couldn’t voice themselves. So this kind of power relationship – in Asian culture it is more serious. (Asian humanities student 3) Although she understood the cultural positioning of supervisors in some Asian cultures, she felt that the power differential should mean that the supervisor should be even more conscious of the student’s powerless position and ‘be considerate’.

Unhomeliness 149 Grappling with differences within cultures: the interplay of personal histories These data demonstrate that cultural difference is not a simple phenomenon, separate from other characteristics such as personal histories and experiences. This situation is illustrated by an Asian supervisor, who describes some difficulties he had in supervising an Asian student from his home country: I had one case, it was an [Asian] student actually, that’s interesting, I’m [Asian] myself and he discussed with me about a number of ideas and I’ve probably rejected those ideas too quickly and he never complained and they always said yes, yes, yes . . . Then . . . I was inviting him to come over to my office we have a meeting and I did not receive a reply from him. Then I thought something was wrong. Then I emailed him again and said can we have a meeting and this time he replied, he said oh can we communicate by email I don’t want to have meetings with you . . . I thought oh, this is serious . . . I invited him to have a coffee elsewhere, not in the office. Office is too serious sometimes. So we had a coffee . . . and I talked with him to see what was wrong . . . I learned . . . he felt that I had rejected his ideas too often and probably too quick . . . Well two things there, I think in my case one is I’ve been living in the Western world for a long time. You know, I went out from [Asia] . . . already nearly 20 years . . . The other thing is . . . even when I was a student [in Asia] . . . I was independent. I had my strong opinions and when I had opinions, which were different from those from my supervisors, I would debate. (Asian engineering supervisor) This example highlights the complex interplay of culture, personality and personal, intellectual histories, experiences and preferences that both the supervisors and the student bring to supervision. Even though the supervisor and student were from the same culture, there were some significant differences that created misunderstandings. The supervisor recognised, eventually, that his longer experience of working in the West and his more assertive personality had resulted in greater confidence to debate issues with his own supervisors. He had expected that his Asian student would behave similarly. On the other hand, his student did not feel it was appropriate to openly disagree with his supervisor, but did, in the end, address this problem by indicating he did not want to meet with his supervisor any more. This situation illustrates the dangers of being overly culturally deterministic and thinking that intercultural supervision issues will be automatically solved by pairing supervisors with students from the same culture, as we have seen in other instances in these data. It is also a reminder that culture is not that simple, and that stereotypes about the typical ways in which supervisors and students from various cultures are likely to behave can also become barriers to effective communication and understanding.

150 Unhomeliness Unhomely concerns regarding cultural dress One European science supervisor in this study spoke about initially being uncomfortable about his Sikh student wearing a turban. Although he reported being primarily concerned that the student would not be accepted by other students or colleagues, it appeared that he also found it difficult to adjust to this different form of cultural dress. As he explained, ‘when this student arrived I was a bit concerned . . . about social aspects of life in Brisbane’, and that, ‘maybe people react with fear from what they don’t know’ (European science supervisor). The student was not concerned and told the supervisor ‘not to worry’. Eventually, this supervisor believed that his student had ‘taught me a lesson’, because his student was able to bridge any gaps people in the lab may have experienced with him. The supervisor spoke about how this student ‘sticks to how he wants to be and people have learned to respect that very much . . . when I see him I no longer realise he is wearing a turban’.

Conclusion As this chapter has demonstrated, students in this study experienced a great deal of unhomeliness as they adjusted to the new culture, location and education system in Australia. Supervisors experienced unhomeliness as they sought to adapt their supervisory styles to their students’ needs. Unhomeliness appears to be a key feature of the ‘inter’ in intercultural supervision, or the contact zone and meeting place where supervisors and students work together. The issue of time did not appear to be evident in these experiences of unhomeliness. This suggests the need for further research on this, which I will outline in Chapter 10. However, before I conclude this book, there is one remaining issue to explore in these data, and that is the question of disciplinary differences in intercultural supervision, which will be investigated in Chapter 9.

9

Disciplines Do they make a difference?

Introduction Having explored the ways in which place, time and knowledge play out in the two key pedagogies of the postcolonial intercultural contact zone (assimilation and transculturation), and the ways in which place and knowledge are involved in students’ and supervisors’ experiences of unhomeliness, it is now time to begin thinking about whether disciplines make a difference in intercultural supervision. Very often, when I speak about the usefulness of postcolonial theory to reimagine intercultural supervision, many can see its relevance for humanities and social science students, but may be less sure that it is applicable to the sciences and engineering. This is particularly the case with the prevalence of greater commitments to the objectivity, impartiality and universality of knowledge in fields such as science and engineering. What clearly emerges from this study is that moments of transculturation, unhomeliness and assimilation appear to be just as likely to occur across all of the disciplines included. My study also demonstrates that supervisors adopting primarily transcultural or assimilationist approaches occur across all of the represented disciplines. The significance of place and time emerges in each of the disciplines covered in my study. Although less acknowledgement of the role of culture in knowledge creation may be present in the science and engineering supervisor and student interviews in this study, there is certainly an emphasis on how culture can shape approaches to problem-solving, communication and other research practices. There are also some intriguing differences that are worth exploring. First, there is a strong discourse about individual and personality differences outweighing cultural differences in the engineering and science supervisor interviews collected for this study. This contrasts with the views of some of their students. These discourses are largely absent from interviews with humanities and social science supervisors and students. Indeed, one humanities supervisor in particular reflects on how much more difficult supervising across and between cultures must be when you do not explore culture as part of your research. Second, there was a different level of emphasis on preparing students to perform presentations and to write for publication across the disciplines represented in this study. Engineering and science supervisors spoke in much more detail about the

152 Disciplines importance of these research practices than their counterparts in the humanities or the social sciences. This is not to say these discussions were entirely absent from interviews with humanities or social science supervisors. Instead, there was a greater focus on thesis writing, although the importance of helping students write for publication was acknowledged. There was also more emphasis on joint publications in the sciences and engineering, although there were instances of joint publication in the humanities and social science interviews. These differences were more related to diverse research histories and practices, rather than cultural issues. However, before exploring the emergence of disciplinary similarities and differences in this study, it is important to introduce a few caveats. First, this was not a study that sought to prove generalisability, and only focused on a relatively small number of intercultural supervision teams. There were fewer engineering and science supervisors (five in total) and students (seven in total) than there were humanities and social science supervisors (ten) and students (eleven). Science is especially underrepresented, with only one supervisor and one student interview, and they are not matched interviews. Initially, I included two students from an agricultural research area in the science category, but realised on closer examination that they were at the social science end of agriculture. I was unable to interview any of their supervisors. Recruitment of participants proved to be more difficult in engineering and science. Despite this, these interviews provide rich accounts of how these particular supervisors and students engaged in intercultural supervision. Second, two of the engineering supervisors and four of the engineering students were from an interdisciplinary research centre, which may have been unusual in its focus on both cultural and disciplinary diversity, as opposed to patterns that may be found in more general engineering schools or departments.

Disciplinary experiences of transculturation, assimilation and unhomeliness As highlighted in preceding chapters, there appear to be few disciplinary differences between the humanities, social sciences, engineering and the sciences in the likelihood of supervisors in this study adopting primarily transcultural or assimilative approaches to supervision. Students and supervisors across the disciplines were all equally likely to experience moments of unhomeliness. The fact that some supervisors might investigate culture and language in their own research was no guarantee that they would necessarily adopt transcultural approaches to supervision or understand how their supervision practices might restrict or stifle the development of transcultural knowledge in their students. As each of these chapters demonstrates in detail, there were instances of transcultural and assimilative approaches to supervision and experiences of unhomeliness in each of the disciplines represented in this study. The sensitivity (or the lack of it) to the role of place and time in supervision relationships was present in supervisor interviews across the humanities, social

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sciences, engineering and the sciences. As highlighted in detail in Chapters 6 and 7 on assimilation and transculturation, place was either entirely absent or central to supervisors’ understanding of their students’ perspectives, desires, goals and dreams. Understanding supervision as an open, relational space, where the personal was as important as the academic work of supervision, was also either lacking completely or highly significant. Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches attached a great deal of importance to understanding each of their students’ prior cultural and professional knowledge and expertise and actively planned opportunities for their students to develop all of the skills and knowledges required to become future researchers. Supervisors adopting transcultural approaches were interested in students’ past histories and were future-focused in their desire to mentor students to become independent researchers. Time, therefore, was essential to their supervisory practices. On the other hand, supervisors adopting assimilation approaches to supervision were more likely to ignore students’ past histories and were very focused on the students’ work in the present moment – that is, on successfully completing their doctorates – rather than also helping them work towards futures as independent researchers. There appeared to be few disciplinary differences in whether supervisors had these understandings about supervision or not.

Disciplinary experiences of knowledge and culture One area of difference between the humanities and social sciences, and engineering and the sciences is the way in which knowledge is viewed as either culturally inflected or universal. This is because what counts as knowledge in engineering and the sciences is more likely to be regarded as universal knowledge, rather than culturally specific. As outlined in Chapter 4, disciplines such as engineering and science often present their knowledge as rational and Western, and as not attentive to, nor altered by, specificities of time, place and culture. Connell (2007) has called this Northern theory, and Chakrabarty (2007) questions how these kinds of knowledge position themselves as from both ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’. Torres Strait Islander Indigenous researcher Nakata (2002: 284) argues that Western scientific knowledge is just as ‘socially and culturally embedded’ as any other knowledge system. These questions about knowledge and culture are less likely to be consciously explored, however, in these disciplines. This issue was discussed by only one of the supervisors in this study, although the interview questions did not directly explore this area (see Chapter 5). This European science supervisor spoke about a sense of being part of ‘a scientific community which is international’ and that, although culture is important in the ways we ‘relate to other people . . . when it comes to research and supervision on research I think that most of the people have been exposed to an international context and . . . references’ (European science supervisor). The fact that cultural knowledge is ignored in Western science was raised by the Middle Eastern student, described in the discussion on assimilation in Chapter 6, when he spoke about the multiple cultural and religious meanings of water. He

154 Disciplines emphasised the multiple cultural and religious meanings of water, as well as its scientific definition as H2O – ‘it’s not H2O, it is water with traditional religious applications . . . it’s a glass of ideology . . . a package of ideology plus science’ (Middle Eastern science student). There was just no way that it was possible to create a space for a multilayered understanding of water in the discipline of science, however, particularly as his supervisors adopted a highly assimilationist approach to supervision and knowledge construction. He experienced this one-dimensional understanding of the phenomenon of water as a ‘kind of barrier between you and the person without that kind of information and background’. The engineering and science supervisors and students in this study did acknowledge that problem-solving approaches, communication and other research practices might be different in diverse cultures. This was covered in more detail in Chapter 7, on transculturation, and Chapter 8, on unhomeliness, and so I will only include a couple of examples here. For example, a European engineering student spoke about the ways in which engineering problem-solving varied between the European country she was from, the South American country where she had worked and Australia where she was studying. She suggested that, in her home culture, it was seen as important to fully define a research problem. Although she recognised that this could be ‘very restricted and inflexible’, it did ensure that the research problem was well defined. She discovered, when working professionally in South America, that the typical approach there was to address issues without fully exploring the central problem. She characterised the approach in Australia as ‘somewhat in between’, with a focus on trying to understand many different angles and perspectives. The same student also described how the disciplinary boundaries and nature of subdisciplines such as environmental engineering could be different across cultures. As she suggested, ‘environmental engineering in Australia is much broader. You are not so restricted to really the original engineering field’. Clearly, this is an area that requires a great deal of further study. Such a study would involve interviewing a greater number of matched engineering and science supervisors and students, and asking direct questions about the nature of knowledge in their field and whether they perceived it as socially and culturally situated or universal. This future study would need to be carried out in the humanities and social sciences as well, as Connell (2007) argues that these fields may also be dominated by Northern theory, which positions itself as universal and date free. The extent to which universalist knowledge discourses in engineering and the sciences are being challenged by feminist, Indigenous and postcolonial scholars, within and outside these disciplines is also becoming clear (Harding and Hintikka, 1983; Harding, 1991; 2011a; Verran 2001; Nakata, 2006; Sillitoe, 2007). A quick exploration of the large body of literature on the philosophy of science demonstrates the significant shifts occurring in many of these fields, although they may not yet be very visible in university engineering and science curricula (Harding, 2011a). Scientists and social scientists exploring the philosophy of science are beginning to acknowledge the origins of what has come to be regarded as Western scientific knowledge in medieval Islamic thought and in knowledge appropriated

Disciplines 155 from ongoing interactions with many Asian and Middle Eastern countries since 500 CE and during colonial times (Sillitoe, 2007; Hobson, 2011). Hobson (2011) argues for the notion of an ‘Oriental West’, rather than a ‘pristine West’, because the European rise to power was fuelled by the active diffusion of Eastern and Middle Eastern knowledge and technologies, which the West assimilated prior to the era of imperialism and European expansion and the active appropriation of Eastern land, labour, markets and other economic resources during the colonial era. Challenging the construction of the East as ‘a passive bystander in the story of world historical development or a victim or bearer of Western power’, Hobson (2011: 41, 40) demonstrates that the East ‘actively created and maintained a global economy after 500 CE’. As Harding (2011b: 34) argues, ‘some of the older [science] traditions of China, India, and other cultures in Asia and the Middle East were more sophisticated than European ones until the European industrial revolution in the Nineteenth Century.’ Some engineers and scientists are also challenging the ways in which Western science has been constructed through patriarchal lenses designed to continually provide evidence to support the ongoing dominance of white male world-views, priorities and interests. Nelson and Nelson (2002) provide a useful summary of the key arguments and ideas put forward about the philosophy of science by key feminist scientists and social scientists such as Harding (1991), Longino (1990), Wylie (2000), Haraway (1991) and others. Since the 1970s, feminist scientists have demonstrated that, ‘the goals, research questions, methods, organising principles and theories in their disciplines’ (and in most other disciplines) are male-centric or ‘androcentric’ (Nelson and Nelson, 2002: 314). Feminist scientists have raised questions about the apparent neutrality and objectivity of science and suggested instead that, just like other disciplines, it is a ‘human and culturally bound activity’ that is not individual but developed within scientific communities that have their own historical, political, social, cultural and economic commitments and perspectives (Nelson and Nelson, 2002: 316). They have particularly challenged the epistemic features supporting claims of objectivity, such as ideas about ‘empirical accuracy, generality of scope, simplicity and so forth’ (Nelson and Nelson, 2002: 324). There has also been an emerging and significant, though often still marginalised, body of postcolonial and Indigenous work on the engineering and science disciplines, which particularly draws attention to the ways in which what is perceived as universal, global scientific knowledge is actually located in a very culturally specific Euro-American view of the world (Sillitoe, 2007). For example, Sillitoe (2007: 1) has edited a collection of essays on local or Indigenous and global sciences that seeks to create spaces for dialogue and discussion between the many forms of science developed around the world, based on the central premise of treating ‘local and global science as culturally equal’. As Sillitoe (2007: 5) argues in his introduction, ‘science is not culturally disembodied knowledge but prejudiced by social factors such as worldview, verbal categories, semantics and shared practices’. In a statement particularly relevant for the argument of this book, Sillitoe (2007: 13) emphasises that ‘place, culture and time heavily inform’ science.

156 Disciplines Adopting a both/and argument, Sillitoe (2007: 16–17) advocates for the creation of ‘space for others’ ideas’, particularly because Western science has proven to be ‘dangerously partial’, with ‘fundamental gaps in its worldview’ that are ‘unhealthy’ for our planet and all human beings. He suggests, as Nakata (2006) and Hountondji (1996) do, that all scientific knowledge systems have their inherent strengths and weaknesses and need to be carefully evaluated and learned from. Harding (2011a) has edited a recent collection of essays that present a range of postcolonial and feminist interpretations of science and technology studies. In her introduction to this volume, Harding (2011b: 5–6) argues for the need for what she calls a ‘postcolonial science theory’ that acknowledges the existence of ‘multiple modernities with their multiple sciences’. She critiques the dominance in the West of ‘exceptionalist and triumphalist’ views of science, where ‘there is only one world, and it has a single internal order. One and only one science is capable of understanding that order . . . and . . . producing that science’ (Harding, 2011b: 6). She provides a compelling argument for the need to bring postcolonial and feminist explorations of science and technology together into a more productive dialogue. She advocates the use of standpoint theory as a way to bridge the gaps and silences between these two fields. Torres Strait Islander Australian Indigenous scholar Nakata, drawing explicitly on feminist work, recommended Indigenous standpoint theory as a way to assert Indigenous knowledge claims back in 2002. These two volumes and an emerging body of literature provide detailed explorations of the ways in which patterns of logic, language and cultural worldviews shape different cultural approaches to mathematics, science and technology (Sillitoe, 2007; Harding, 2011a). For example, Sillitoe’s (2007) chapter looks at the differences between circular and linear logic and the ways these impact upon cultural systems of counting. Goodenough (2011) outlines Pacific approaches to navigation in the Western Caroline Islands. Verran’s (2001) work on science and Yoruba logic in Nigeria challenges scientists to acknowledge difference in scientific practices across cultures and seeks to grapple with the pedagogical implications of this for the teaching of science and mathematics in postcolonial contexts. She argues that the key question for postcolonial science is not a debate between universalism and particularism, or between objectivity and relativity, but about ‘bi- or multilingualism in scientific and cultural literacy’ and the ways in which language shapes approaches to logical thinking and scientific and mathematical reasoning, as summarised in a review of her book (Nwamaka, 2004: 493). She is currently working on a similar exploration of science and the Dreaming in a Yolngu Australian Aboriginal context. These developments in the fields of engineering and science are increasingly opening spaces for the types of transculturation envisaged by postcolonial theorists and discussed in Chapter 7 of this book. This will undoubtedly change the nature of intercultural supervision in engineering and the sciences into the future.

Discourses of individual difference There was a strong discourse about individual and personality differences being more important than cultural differences in interviews with engineering and

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science supervisors in this study. For example, one Australian engineering supervisor emphasised the fact (for him) that, ‘people are very different’, and that he would not ‘put any of those [differences] to the fact that the students come from another culture’ (Australian engineering supervisor 3). Throughout his interview, he stressed the primary importance of individual differences and appeared to find it difficult to tease out if he thought differences were ‘more again a cultural or a personal thing’. He certainly found it easier to discuss his students individually, as the interviewer encouraged him to do after some questioning about cultural difference. Another Australian engineering supervisor also emphasised individual differences and other factors, such as age and levels of professional experience, rather than culture, to explain student difference. She argued that, ‘they are all individual and they all have different needs’ (Australian engineering supervisor 1). This also emerged in the situation described in detail in Chapter 8, on unhomeliness, when an Asian engineering supervisor was experiencing difficulties in supervising an Asian student. A European science supervisor spoke a good deal about individual differences, arguing that there may be some ‘situations where maybe the culture makes a difference but I still think that mostly it’s personal’ (European science supervisor). This discourse seems to suggest a lack of comfort with thinking about the role of culture in intercultural supervision, and a preference to stay with more psychological discourses about personality differences. Although these supervisors may have been eager to avoid using stereotypes about culture, there is also a suggestion of that disavowal of difference that is common to liberal discourses about multiculturalism (Bhabha, 1994). However, several of the diverse engineering students in this study were more likely to emphasise cultural, rather than individual, differences. For example, one European engineering student argued that, ‘culture can be much more important than everything else and maybe is something that is most of the time underestimated from people that come here’ (European engineering student 2). ‘Culture is definitely . . . the major issue’, he reiterated at the end of his interview. An Asian engineering student believed that, ‘understanding different cultures . . . [is] the first priority’ in effective supervision. He recognised those differences in his Australian and Asian supervisors and ‘would treat them different’ (Asian engineering student 2). A South American engineering student also spent a great deal of her interview discussing the cultural differences between her culture and that of Australia and believed cultural differences were more significant than gender differences in explaining her experiences. Each of these students was from the interdisciplinary engineering research centre. The two other engineering students in the study also reflected on cultural, rather than individual, differences. The science student also emphasised the importance of cultural differences in supervision. This is an intriguing difference between the views of the mostly Australian engineering and science supervisors and their culturally diverse research students. I think it demonstrates that, when you are not different from the dominant cultural group in a society, you may not always be aware of the extent to which culture matters in research interactions. For the students in this study, their lived experience of cultural difference enabled them to recognise the significance of culture in research.

158 Disciplines There is an absence of a discourse about individual differences in most of the interviews with humanities and social science supervisors and students. One Australian humanities supervisor highlighted how difficult intercultural supervision would be if you did not have research-based and highly nuanced understandings of cultural difference. Transcultural approaches to supervision came as second nature to him. As he argued, ‘I remember my disciplinary background is intercultural studies . . . [so] all that’s given’ (Australian humanities supervisor 2). He emphasised that he could not ‘imagine coping’ with intercultural supervision if he had ‘nothing to do with cross cultural studies’. The only supervisor in these groups to mention individual differences was an Australian social science supervisor whose research was at the more scientific, psychological end of the social science spectrum. She suggested that, ‘a lot of it is personality and not his culture’, when talking about one of her culturally and linguistically diverse students (Australian social science supervisor 1). However, she only made one reference to this issue at the end of her interview, which contrasts with several of the interviews with the engineering and science supervisors, who returned repeatedly to the discourse of individual difference in their interview.

Emphasis on presentations and writing for publication Another key disciplinary difference evident in these data was the emphasis engineering and science supervisors placed on preparing students to give presentations and to write for publication. Many of the engineering and science supervisors in this study discussed these forms of knowledge dissemination together. For example, one Australian engineering supervisor spoke about the need for students whose first language was not English to ‘start writing material, to prepare material particularly for publication or for a conference paper earlier than, for example, an equivalent domestic student’ (Australian engineering supervisor). He took an active role in helping them achieve these goals, stating, ‘I will spend a lot more time trying to help them with preparing their first paper or preparing their first presentation’. An Asian engineering supervisor also spoke about his structured approach to helping students write for publication: I do give them the opportunity to . . . write paper[s] and I normally say okay you put a structure together and then we sit down, we discuss about the structure. They always have the first go and then only at that time and we have discussions and so on. (Asian engineering supervisor) Their students really appreciated this high level of support in preparing presentations and papers for publication, as indicated in more detail in Chapter 7. It appeared to be standard practice in engineering and science to have regular research group meetings where students were given additional opportunities to present their work, either formally or informally. As a European science supervisor emphasised, ‘when the person joins the group they should see a culture of . . .

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making presentations’ (European science supervisor). These examples are also discussed in Chapter 7, in the sections on future-focused supervision and career mentoring and in the section on making bridges into Western knowledge and research practices. There was much less emphasis in these interviews about writing thesis chapters. This is likely to reflect the research practices common in these disciplines, where group research projects and joint authorship of papers between students and supervisors are the norm, and where thesis by publication is more of a standard practice than in the humanities and social sciences. By contrast, supervisors in the humanities and social sciences spoke about spending more time assisting students with writing thesis chapters, particularly the literature review chapter. As one Australian social science supervisor emphasised, ‘I . . . do . . . explicit teaching . . . around argumentation . . . and that the thesis is counted as structured argument’ (Australian social science supervisor 2). Another Australian social science supervisor spoke about trying to ‘focus them [his students] on the steps that are required to write a thesis’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). These supervisors also emphasised the importance of producing publications during and after candidature and, in some cases, provided students with active assistance in producing these publications. For example, one Australian social science supervisor, who is a journal editor, seeks to alert his students to writing a journal article for his journal, ‘when a topic comes up that’s appropriate for one of my students’. He emphasised how he provides students with additional feedback on their manuscripts, but does not co-author with them – ‘I will read the paper but it’s not for me to be co-author of that paper because . . . as an editor, it would be unethical I believe’ (Australian social science supervisor 1). There were some instances of joint authorship with their students, but this was far less common than in engineering and the sciences. For example, one Australian humanities supervisor spoke about a joint writing project about the ways in which the phrase ‘God willing’ appears in a range of different cultures and languages, which he had initiated with his students. As he explained, ‘I’m being the anchor person . . . [and] they are getting the data and thinking hard about how to make an argument out of it’ (Australian humanities supervisor 3). As outlined in more detail in Chapter 7, their students greatly appreciated these opportunities to gain assistance in writing for publication. Although there was some discussion in these interviews about helping students prepare for presentations, these were mostly focused on preparing for the confirmation presentation. The differences highlighted here are related more to the diverse research histories and practices of these disciplines, than to the ways in which they seek to grapple with cultural issues. However, as there were few differences that emerged from these supervisor and student interviews, they were important to include in this chapter.

Conclusion This chapter suggests that, for the participants in this study at least, there may be fewer disciplinary differences in intercultural supervision than we might normally

160 Disciplines imagine. Among the supervisors represented in this study, it seems that the pedagogies of assimilation and transculturation and experiences of unhomeliness are just as likely to occur in the humanities, the social sciences, engineering and the sciences. Place and time certainly feature as significant aspects of the postcolonial intercultural contact zone in each of these disciplines. Although there may be less emphasis on the role of culture in knowledge construction in interviews with the engineering and science supervisors and students in this study, there was a discussion of the ways in which culture might influence approaches to problemsolving, communication and other research practices. Only two clear disciplinary differences emerged in these interviews. They were an emphasis on individual and personality differences as more important than cultural differences (although culturally diverse engineering and science students had a different position on this issue) and an emphasis on performing presentations and writing for publication. This is only the beginning of this conversation, however, and a great deal of further research is required to explore disciplinary differences in intercultural supervision more thoroughly. Such an investigation will be greatly assisted by the growing influence of postcolonial, Indigenous and feminist theories about science and the philosophy of science. The final chapter will now seek to draw all of these theories, arguments and findings together.

10 Conclusion

Introduction In this chapter, I will demonstrate how reading postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theories about time, place and knowledge pedagogically allows us to theorise the ‘inter’ in intercultural supervision. I will summarise the key messages these theories present to us about how to re-read history, geography and epistemology from Southern and other non-dominant positions, and the implications each of these ideas has for intercultural supervision pedagogy. Exploring these theories through a pedagogical lens allows us to enrich, unsettle and challenge our understandings of the intercultural supervision postcolonial contact zone. It allows us to rethink under what conditions and with what historical, geographical and epistemological legacies and resources supervisors and students work together in intercultural supervision. I have applied these theoretical resources to the empirical data I collected about supervisors’ and students’ experiences of intercultural supervision, in order to investigate what kinds of new light they shed on intercultural supervision. Following Trowler’s (2012) and Ashwin’s (2012) arguments about how data should also seek to refine, extend and develop theory, I also explored how my data challenge and talk back to these theoretical resources, or remain silent about some issues, especially time. This then led me to musings about areas for future research. Finally, I conclude with an invitation to my readers to continue grappling with, thinking about and contesting my arguments, so that we may all understand the complexities and the rewards of intercultural supervision in more depth.

Reading time pedagogically The collection of theories that I explored in depth in Chapters 3 and 4 have sought to problematise dominant Western or Northern understandings of time, place and knowledge. Although, as you will have seen, all of these concepts are totally intertwined, I have tried to separate them out to some degree for the purposes of analysis. First of all, postcolonial, social, feminist and cultural geography scholars, such as Chakrabarty (2007), Dube (2004), Hall (1996b), Adam (2004), Adam and Groves (2007), Clegg (2010), Massey (2005) and others, have demonstrated that

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time is not a single, universal, linear, secular and homogenous concept, and that history does not lead inexorably to the triumph of rationality, modernity and ‘development’, along European Enlightenment lines. Instead, they suggest that time and history are coeval. Different peoples around the globe were (and are) immersed in their own historical pathways, their own pasts, presents and futures, and met up (and continue to meet up) at precisely the same time in their multiple trajectories. This is what Massey (2005: 99) calls ‘radical contemporaneity’, and Chakrabarty (2004: 240) describes as ‘a shared, constant now’, as discussed in Chapter 3. As a result, time and history are both religious and secular, mythical and rational and eternal, cyclical and linear. Understandings of time and history are always contradictory and imbued with power struggles, truth claims and multiple possible [re]readings and [re]interpretations. Historians understand this. This is part of the attraction of history as a field of research. There is always room for yet one more interpretation of the past, yet one more argument about a neglected perspective, angle or position. In other words, time and history are heterogeneous, plural, political and entangled. These theorists also challenge notions that our contemporary digital age is timeless, that it is a continuous present or a ‘present future’ (Adam and Groves, 2007: 11) that floats freely from past experiences and future possibilities and responsibilities. Such an ahistorical understanding of the present is not only unethical to both our ancestors and our future generations, but it also only serves to compound dominant Northern understandings of knowledge as universal and timeless, and to further entrench Northern power. I was also able to locate two explicitly pedagogical explorations of time in highereducation institutions that shed light on the operations of time in intercultural doctoral supervision. Clegg (2010: 346) argues that the dominant approach in university teaching and learning for undergraduates is what she calls a ‘time future’ discourse, where students are constantly required to focus on their long-term career goals, often through compulsory personal development programmes. She demonstrates how students are not always future-focused, but frequently draw upon the past and reconstruct their stated career goals and achievements into tidy linear stories after the fact (Clegg, 2010: 346). Reflecting specifically on Portuguese experiences of doctoral studies, Araújo (2005: 202) suggests that these students experience their studies as ‘the permanent invasion of the present by the “future”’, or a kind of suspended present, where other goals and normal life are put on hold until after completing the PhD. If we are to read all of these theoretical resources pedagogically, as I have done in Chapter 3, how does time get reconstructed in intercultural supervision? Reviewing the ideas of time as heterogeneous, mythical and rational, secular and religious, I have argued that these constructions of time enable us to think about the usefulness of broadening disciplinary-based understandings of legitimate forms of evidence and analysis when we engage in intercultural supervision. As the detailed historical work of Subaltern Studies scholars demonstrates, myths, legends and religious beliefs continue to shape the present realities of people around the globe and challenge modernist binaries between myth and history, the modern

Conclusion 163 and the traditional (Dube, 2004; Chakrabarty, 2007). This could involve gathering many forms of data, including myths and legends, literary and artistic representations, proverbs and wise sayings, oral histories and stories, as well as documentary, scientific and other types of source. Postcolonial theorists have also developed methodologies for thinking otherwise, thinking again and reading against the grain that enable us to circumvent the confines of Enlightenment logic and rationality (Dube, 2004). These kinds of approach are already occurring in some humanities and social science fields, where Indigenous (e.g., Henry with the Institute of Koorie Education, 2007; McKinley et al., 2011; Ford, 2012) and Cambodian (Devos and Somerville, 2012) doctoral students have completed highly original, culturally responsive research where time and history have been interpreted in multiple, heterogeneous and coeval ways. These types of research create respectful space for doctoral students’ cultural knowledge and wisdom and the central role they assign to their ancestors and to other forms of spirituality in undertaking and guiding their research. I have also argued that these theoretical readings of time suggest that students should be encouraged to investigate the multiple histories of the phenomenon or field they are studying. For example, in my discipline of education, I encourage my students to develop an in-depth and critical understanding of the multiple histories of the education systems they are investigating and to share these with me, so that I may learn more about the many ways in which education has come to be constructed around the globe. This involves, not only exploring the usual documentary evidence about these histories, but also thinking about how their education systems are represented through oral history sources, art, literature, other media, dance and ceremony over time; the cultural metaphors, proverbs and sayings that are used to describe education; and how experiences of colonisation may have changed the education system. This then leads into the need to also understand the histories of the discipline or interdisciplines that students are conducting their research within. Supervisors need to actively induct doctoral students into these (inter)disciplines, and, therefore, they require a good working knowledge of how this disciplinary knowledge has been formed over time. This also involves becoming alert to the ways in which it has been (and continues to be) heavily implicated in European imperialism and ongoing Northern epistemological domination (Smith, 1999; Connell, 2007). Related to this is the need to carefully interrogate the ways in which the particular culture, time and place in which key theorists wrote have inflected their research and the shape of knowledge in our fields. My argument builds on one of the key points that Chakrabarty (2007) makes about the treatment of European theorists as if they were our contemporaries, and Connell’s (2007) argument about the problems with universalising Northern theory, which remains undated, unlocated in any particular time or place. This kind of work is evident, for example, in Singh and Huang’s (2012) article, where they remind us of the colonial foundations of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and the many slippages of language and interpretation that have occurred, as Bourdieu’s concepts, which

164 Conclusion were originally developed in France and Algeria in the 1970s, are consumed in anglophone countries (Singh and Huang, 2012). Although some of these possibilities of acknowledging time and history as multiple, heterogeneous and coeval are already making inroads in the humanities and social sciences, many colleagues have argued that they are not useful or relevant to the sciences and engineering disciplines. I have challenged this view particularly, because all researchers need to develop sophisticated and critical ways of understanding the history of the object or phenomenon they are studying, the historical origins and trajectories of disciplinary-based concepts, theories and ideas and the ways in which the work of key theorists in any discipline will have inevitably been shaped by the time (and place and culture and gendered position) they were researching in and from. As outlined in Chapter 9, recent scholarship by those investigating the philosophy of science argues just how culturally specific ‘universal’ scientific concepts are, and how many of these concepts were originally derived from Eastern, Middle Eastern, African and South American knowledge systems (Nakata, 2002; Sillitoe, 2007; Hobson, 2011). Some of my suggestions about broadening the scope of legitimate evidence may be more difficult to apply to some scientific and engineering research, but evidence from these theorists suggests that this is likely to change in this millennium, especially if we are to understand more about the dire environmental plight of our planet (Sillitoe, 2007). For example, the many scientific and religious ways of understanding water are an important issue in research, as discussed by one of the science students in my study. Finally, I argued in Chapter 3 that the ‘waiting room of history’ metaphor, developed by Chakrabarty (2007), has a double resonance for Indigenous, Eastern, Middle Eastern, African and South American doctoral students. Many research students experience the PhD as a type of waiting period before they can be fully recognised and credentialled as members of academic disciplines, or as a suspended present devoted to future goals, as Araújo (2005) argues. However, given the dominance of Eurocentric perspectives about being the first to develop, students from non-Western backgrounds have also had to wait a long time for their cultural knowledge, forms of evidence, theories and beliefs to be recognised by the academy as Knowledge. Furthermore, the pedagogical readings of time in undergraduate and doctoral programmes by Clegg (2012) and Araújo (2005) have significant ramifications for supervisors and students working across cultures. In the case of undergraduate students, Clegg (2012: 346) found that, whereas the university presupposed a ‘time future’ discourse about students’ personal development planning, students were often drawing upon their past histories and experiences and their messy serendipitous presents in order to create tidy accounts of their work towards achieving their future career goals. Araújo (2005) argued that doctoral studies were a period of liminality or in-between-ness based upon complex combinations of the past and the future, but lived in a suspended present that was sacrificed to achieve the future goal of completing the PhD. In other words, the experience of time was incredibly complex, cyclical and multiple, rather than linear, as

Conclusion 165 presupposed in university discourses, and caused students a great deal of heartache and difficulty. This emerged strongly in my data analysis on assimilation and transculturation in Chapters 6 and 7 and has clear ramifications for intercultural supervision (and probably any form of supervision). As I have argued in Chapter 3, there is so much history in the room when we supervise students from diverse cultural backgrounds. Supervisors and students both bring their own personal and intellectual histories and the histories of their cultures with them into the supervision space. In some cases, they may come from cultures that have entangled, highly contested and oppositional understandings of history. Then, we add in the layers of the multiple histories of the phenomena they are studying, the discipline(s) they are working in, and the theorists they are working with; also, the ways in which time is circular, and a complex and strange combination of the past, present and future in doctoral studies. Time and history would then appear to be central to intercultural supervision.

Reading place pedagogically I then sought to draw together a wide range of cultural geography and postcolonial, poststructural and Indigenous theoretical resources about place to see how they challenge Western understandings. It quickly became clear that it was difficult to separate place from time. Indeed, these theorists often made a deliberate case for the intertwined and inseparable nature of place and time, in contrast with Western theories. So, what follows is a summary of how these theorists combined considerations of place and time, and how this combination was also evident in the field of place-based pedagogical research. These theories about place and time are then read pedagogically, in order to understand their implications for intercultural supervision. The most important argument made by these theorists is the need to retrieve notions of place and locate them at the heart of research and of human experience. In other words, these theoretical resources challenge the absence or universality of place in Northern knowledge construction (where place is both ‘nowhere’ and ‘everywhere’). They also analyse the historical ways in which Western scholars and explorers have portrayed space as a surface to be crossed, appropriated and exploited (Massey, 2005). They trace how these horizontal and unoccupied or unpopulated notions of space continue, in our current era, to drive Northern corporations’ exploitation of the places and resources of Indigenous people around the globe (Nakata, 2002). Some of these theorists also challenge contemporary arguments about ‘time–space compression’, suggesting that they represent ‘a Western colonizer’s view’, and a male one at that (Massey, 1997: 315). These theorists suggest that places are multiply constructed, contested and always unfinished. They also create a space to rethink the impact of technological nonplaces, such as the Internet, Skype and email. They demonstrate that places are both social and relational and make a case for a politics of responsibility, care, connectivity and hospitality (Massey, 2005). They show how place is inextricably intertwined with memory and time and various interpretations of history. They

166 Conclusion make a case for the need to consider how the operations of place and time are intertwined, rather than separate entities, as they have been often positioned in Western scholarship. I was also fortunate to be able to draw upon the rich and growing literature on place-based pedagogies that seek to position place (and time) at the centre of learning processes at all levels of education. I drew upon postcolonial, poststructural and Indigenous explorations of place-based pedagogies, in order to understand the impact of place on a range of teaching contexts. These interpretations stress the importance of multiple stories and representations of place, the ways in which bodies are positioned within and interact in places, and conceptualise place as a postcolonial contact zone (Somerville, 2010). They also emphasise the relationality and interdependence of the human and non-human beings located within space and call for an understanding of difference that foregrounds hospitality and generosity, rather than assimilation and suppression (Martin, 2000; Somerville et al., 2011). They demonstrate the ways in which past and present geographies experienced by teachers and students influence teaching and learning, and the ways in which place is simultaneously local and global (Ruitenberg, 2005). Indigenous pedagogies of place are built upon Indigenous understandings of place as central to being human, and upon a formal relationship between people and their environments and an intrinsic link between the mind, body and spirit (Penetito, 2009). They also regard place or ‘country’ as a living being, with a past, present and future – again emphasising the interconnected nature of place and time (Rose, 1996). If we are to read all of these theoretical resources pedagogically, as I have done in Chapter 3, how does place (and time) get reconstructed in intercultural supervision? Because many of the authors working on place-based pedagogies have drawn heavily on the theoretical explorations of place from cultural geographers and other theorists, I consider all of this material together here. First of all, I have argued in Chapter 3 that these theoretical and pedagogical understandings remind us to locate place at the centre of intercultural supervision. Rather than being ignored or seen as unimportant – a mere backdrop to our research and our interactions – place plays a highly significant role in intercultural supervision. This includes the places that have influenced the supervisor’s and the students’ past and present thinking and learning (Ruitenberg, 2005), as well as the place in which they engage in supervision together. As intercultural students, and sometimes their supervisors, have often had to leave their home places to study and to work together (or they may engage in the non-place of the Internet, email and Skype), intercultural supervision brings with it, not only a consciousness about place, but also experiences of displacement and dislocation and opportunities to learn about new places. I argue that we should, therefore, encourage students to (re)tell stories of their home places in our supervision meetings and in their research. I think we should also create space for them to discuss their (and sometimes our) experiences of dislocation and displacement and of discovering new places, if they want to. Many doctoral students also choose to research an aspect of their own home countries’ issues or institutions, and so I argue that we could encourage our

Conclusion 167 research students to think about the many contested stories that circulate about their research site. This could include the stories the researcher, the participants, the literature and others have about the place where the research is situated. In many cases, especially in African, Pacific Island and some Asian countries, there is very little existing literature to draw on to understand the stories of these places. We could, therefore, encourage our students to identify the dominant stories, to unearth alternative storylines and to generate new stories about their places of research, as Somerville (2010) encourages us to do. As these theories about place emphasise, this would also draw in time and the ways in which understandings of places have shifted and changed over time. In the case of my students, this would involve (re)thinking and (re)storying how place (and time) influence the aspects of education that they are investigating. As a supervisor, I would need to enable my students to interrogate how the places of education in their countries are founded upon contested interpretations; how the histories of these places continue to remain present in these education spaces; and how they might envision multiple possible futures for these pedagogical places, as Ruitenberg (2005) suggests. We could also need to encourage students to grapple with other forms of representation of stories of place, beyond written texts. Some supervisors and their students are experimenting with oral, visual and digital methodologies and forms of data gathering and ‘story-telling’. Theses by Indigenous students in particular are exploring ways of incorporating these additional types of representation. Theses by creative works incorporate these forms of representation as a central feature of the research. All of this creates opportunities for our students to begin building these literatures about their places, histories and cultures, and making their own unique contribution to knowledge. It also ensures that supervision becomes a place of mutual and reciprocal learning, as students are able to educate their supervisors about their own places and cultural knowledge. It also allows me to acknowledge my own ‘cross-cultural ignorance’, as Singh (2009: 186) encourages supervisors to do. These theoretical resources also emphasise that place is a social and relational category. Supervision is also a heavily relational pedagogy, requiring trust and respect. An important part of building this kind of supervision space is the inclusion of the body and the personal in supervision discussions, as well as the mind and the academic. Of course, this occurs within appropriate professional boundaries and respect for the privacy of both parties. However, as research by Lovitts (2001) and my data reinforce, doctoral students require both academic and social integration. If we take into account these understandings of place, we recognise that supervision is an interdependent space of mutual learning and hospitality and generosity, as Martin (2000) and Somerville et al. (2011) argue.

Reading knowledge pedagogically I have also sought to problematise dominant Northern understandings of knowledge by deliberately subjecting Western knowledge to the gaze of Southern

168 Conclusion postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theorists in Chapter 4. I am purposefully engaging in a project of ‘deimperialisation’, as Chen (2010) encourages settler/invader scholars to do. Critically, these theorists make convincing arguments that all knowledge is culturally, historically and geographically situated. These arguments challenge constructions of Western knowledge as universal, timeless and more advanced. Knowledge is at the heart of the supervision enterprise, as I demonstrate in Chapter 4, drawing upon Lusted’s (1986) and Grant’s (2003) readings of pedagogy. Doctoral students are expected to make an original and significant contribution to knowledge. If we are to democratise knowledge and the academy, as Connell (2007) argues we should, then we need to create space for Southern knowledge and theory within intercultural supervision and within research generally. The ongoing and limited focus on Northern knowledge of many disciplines is problematic for all supervisors and students, and for the academy generally, if we are to grapple with the ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973), entangled and complex problems of the twenty-first century and draw upon all of the cultural knowledge resources developed by people around the globe. In order to create space for diverse cultural knowledges, we need to first of all understand the history (time) of Western knowledge and how it sought to colonise all Other knowledges. This involves acknowledging and understanding how Northern knowledge and its academy were heavily implicated in the process of colonisation. European colonisation represented not only territorial and physical invading and conquering of other people’s land, resources and peoples. It also involved the processes of cultural imperialism and cultural genocide. This included the wholesale appropriation of Other knowledges (Sillitoe, 2007; Hobson, 2011), or completely discrediting and destroying these epistemologies. As outlined in Chapter 4, Smith (1999) demonstrates how European notions of difference were transformed into a racialised discourse during European modernity. Western binary logic was applied to all thinking through the philosophy Said (1994) called ‘Orientalism’, and all non-dominant groups (non-Europeans, women, workingclass people, gay and lesbian people, people with disabilities, etc.) were categorised as the abject and inferior Other of the white, upper-class, able-bodied, heterosexual male. The knowledge that these groups possessed was constructed as inferior, weak, primitive, superstitious and insignificant. These forces of cultural imperialism not only gave Europeans an inflated sense of self-worth and importance, they also worked towards what Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (1986) called the ‘colonisation of the mind’, which has had very long-lasting and tragic effects. This phenomenon is what Al-e Ahmad (1984) called gharbzadegi or ‘Westoxication’ or ‘Occidentosis’. It operates by diminishing colonised people’s self-belief and destroying their knowledge systems so completely that they come to believe that only the West has the answers, and they come to see themselves only as reflected through Western research. As a result of these forces, Europe came to be positioned as the source of all knowledge and theory, and the South was perceived as a giant laboratory to test European theories and as a site for gathering data about people, flora and fauna

Conclusion 169 (Al-e Ahmad, 1984; Smith, 1999; Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007). This dominance was established by the claim that Western knowledge was universal, instead of highly inflected by the time, place and cultures within which it originated, as Nakata (2006), Smith (1999) and Chakrabarty (2007) illustrate. Similarly, European theories came to be regarded as universally applicable, regardless of the time, place, culture, gender and other positionings these theorists may have had (Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007). Second, if we are to create space for Southern theory and knowledge within intercultural supervision pedagogy and the academy as a whole, we need to acknowledge that the history of colonial discourses is not behind us. As Thomas (1994: 195) persuasively argues, we have not yet ‘transcended the cultural forms and procedures associated with colonial dominance’. Indeed, the contemporary forces of globalisation and neo-liberalism have, in many ways, made colonial scripts and Northern hegemony even more entrenched (Smith, 1999; Nakata, 2002; Massey, 2005; Adam and Grove, 2007; Connell, 2007). ICTs and the global reach of capitalism have enabled some groups to enjoy ‘time–space compression’, while Others are subjected to just as many time and place restrictions as always, as Massey (2005) argues. It is not only multinational corporations and governments that perpetuate these injustices. The academy and the ways in which it allows Northern disciplinary knowledge and theory to remain dominant are just as culpable. The academy is not some faceless group of university managers, either. It is composed of academics and scholars such as you and me. Therefore, I argue that each of us has a responsibility to act upon these ongoing power imbalances, and one of the key ways we can make a start in the process of decolonising and deimperialising epistemology is to create space for Southern knowledge and theory in intercultural supervision. So, how do we go about such a revolutionary and daunting endeavour as this? How can we make intercultural supervision one of the major sites for the development of Southern theory? How do we support our Southern, Eastern and Indigenous colleagues and students who have already begun this crucial work? Some key pedagogical strategies lie in the scholarship and research of postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theorists. As I have argued in Chapter 4, we need to discuss with all our research students the histories of our (inter)disciplinary knowledge and the ways in which it was (and still is) entangled with colonisation. We also need to encourage our doctoral students to locate the theorists they work with in terms of time, place, culture, gender and other subjectivities, in order to help them expose the reasons why theories developed in particular ways and the limitations and blind spots these theories inevitably contain (Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007). We need to learn from our students, investigate the theorists from their contexts, cultures, countries and regions. We should encourage them to draw upon their knowledge in order to build and extend transcultural knowledge. I argue for a form of both-ways transculturation, where Northern and Southern theories are brought into equal and respectful dialogue, especially when working in Southern, Eastern and Indigenous research sites. This is the kind of both/and logic that is

170 Conclusion characteristic of postcolonial and poststructural thought (e.g., Chakrabarty, 2007). I also argue for transculturation for the North, where Northern scholars (including myself) actively seek to engage with and draw upon Southern theory, not in order to appropriate it, but so that we can learn from it and work towards the democratisation of knowledge and theory (Connell, 2007). I have also suggested creating more space for South–South intellectual dialogue and theoretical work in intercultural supervision. Lingard (2007) demonstrates how useful Smith’s (1999) work on decolonising methodologies has been for Caribbean doctoral students who are seeking to move beyond, and challenge the dominance of, Western secondary sources and theories in their research. Chen (2010: 212) recommends the use of Asia as method as a new way of interpreting world history, which could be through engaging with ‘the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point’. Using Asia as method has highly productive and radical implications for the work of our intercultural research students from a range of Southern locations and for the ways in which we grapple with knowledge production in intercultural supervision. There is a particular role I argue for settlers/invaders such as myself, located in peripheral but wealthy nations such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Connell, 2007) (or what Alatas (2003) calls the semi-periphery). As the main beneficiaries of the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in our countries, it is the basic minimum I can do to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and work towards ending the one-sided domination of Northern Knowledge and Theory (McLaughlin and Whatman, 2011). I have also argued that this will, at times, involve respecting, but not integrating, knowledge systems. As many scholars suggest, there are times when cultural knowledge systems are incompatible and irreconcilable. These are risky places for supervisors and students to inhabit, but supervisors, students and examiners must eventually enter these postcolonial contact zones and cultural interfaces, if we are to ever truly decolonise knowledge and the academy (McKinley et al., 2011; Devos and Somerville, 2012; Ford, 2012). Finally, we need to encourage our doctoral students to engage in respectful and rigorous critiques of Southern knowledges, and we must have the courage and the sensitivity to model this ourselves. While always remaining conscious of the different criteria that can be used to evaluate Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledge systems (Nakata, 2007), we need to critique all epistemologies. In order to enact this, I have recommended that we can draw on the work of Southern theorists such as Hountondji (1996) and Nakata (2007), who have been involved in critiquing African philosophy and Indigenous knowledge, respectively. As Hountondji (1996: xix) passionately argues, ‘we must be particularly careful and demanding when the knowledge at stake is about ourselves’. Nakata puts forward a strong case for Indigenous standpoint theory, recommending that, ‘these arguments still need to be rational and reasoned; they need to answer to the logic and assumptions on which they are built . . . what is said must be able to be accounted for’ (2007: 11). All of this requires ‘reflexivity and careful listening, and . . . a willingness to suspend meaning . . . [and demonstrate] mutual responsibility’ (Somerville, 2010: 6). If we engage in all of these endeavours, then we can begin

Conclusion 171 to reimagine knowledge in intercultural supervision and ensure that supervision becomes a key site for the decolonisation of the academy.

Working with theory Of course, all of these arguments about reimagining time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision are all very fine at an aspirational level. This is why I wanted to gather empirical data from supervisors and students working across, between and within cultures at an Australian university, to ground my attempts to read these theoretical resources pedagogically in the experiences of supervisors and students. In line with Trowler’s (2012) and Ashwin’s (2012) arguments about the need, not only to apply theory, but also to extend and challenge it, this book has sought to grapple with how my data confirm, extend, talk back to and unsettle these theories about time, place and knowledge. In so doing, I have been particularly guided by Trowler’s (2012) reflection questions on the ‘wicked’ problem of the relationship between theory and data. I have addressed the first four of these questions in Chapter 5. Here, I would particularly like to address his question about understanding the ways I have tried to grapple with the relationship between theory and data in this book (Trowler, 2012). I have used theory to understand, in more depth, the categories that I have been applying to intercultural supervision for some time now – assimilation and transculturation (two pedagogies of the intercultural supervision contact zone) and unhomeliness (a key experience of students and supervisors working in this postcolonial cultural interface). Exploring these theoretical understandings of time, place and knowledge pedagogically has allowed me to uncover more about the features and operations of assimilation, transculturation and unhomeliness. So, these theories have extended and deepened the ways in which we might think about intercultural supervision. The process I have taken has involved two layers of pedagogical reading. First of all, I developed a series of aspirations about the pedagogical implications of reimagining time, place and knowledge in intercultural supervision, in Chapters 3 and 4. Then, I interrogated empirical data about the experiences supervisors and students identified to see how time, place and knowledge might play out in lived pedagogical moments, in Chapters 6–9. In the next few sections, I will demonstrate which aspects of my theoretically based pedagogical speculations in the early chapters were confirmed and illustrated by my data. I will then explore how my data spoke back to and unsettled my pedagogical readings of these theories. This has led me to identify some of the key issues that require further research.

Assimilation: the absence of place and Other cultural knowledge and a present-time focus One of the pedagogies that emerged from my previous studies of the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision was assimilation. Reading the data my research team and I collected from supervisors and students working across

172 Conclusion cultures, through the lenses of key theoretical resources, powerfully demonstrates the ways in which place and Other cultural knowledge are largely absent, or viewed as a deficit, when supervisors adopt an assimilationist approach (outlined in Chapter 6). Interviews with supervisors enacting a primarily assimilationist pedagogy appear to show how these supervisors did not seem to have time to understand the geographies that had shaped their students’ intellectual journeys. This was confirmed by interviews with their students. These supervisors appeared to subscribe to standard Western approaches that regard knowledge as universal and unlocated. If place and culture were considered at all, these supervisors tended to present negative or deficit views. There seemed to be a focus on a lack of English language skills. These supervisors also had far lower expectations of what their culturally diverse students were likely to be able to achieve during their PhD studies, suggesting that these students were unlikely to make significant theoretical breakthroughs. These views were, at times, accompanied by quite destructive patterns of feedback or critical questioning techniques, as in the case of a Middle Eastern science student who had serious accusations made against him, including possible involvement in terrorism. The theorists whom I have drawn upon in this book emphasise how place is a relational, social phenomenon, which led me to think about the ways in which supervision spaces are also deeply relational and social. This also ties in with Lovitt’s (2001) research that suggests doctoral students require both academic and social integration to succeed in their studies. My data also show that there is an absence of the body, the personal and the relational in assimilationist supervision pedagogies. These supervisors appear to regard their students’ personal experiences, issues and challenges as irrelevant and quite separate from their engagement in research. The focus in supervision meetings is only on the research. The time and care it takes to build rapport and trust with the students these supervisors were working with did not appear to be available and was not regarded as important in achieving creative and innovative research. Supervision was, therefore, not relational, but a mere business transaction: research to be managed, accounted for and ticked off, and publications to be written. Although not all students are looking for relational supervision (Bartlett and Mercer, 2001; Behrendt, 2001), there are risks associated with this style of supervision, and many of the students in this study were disappointed by the lack of opportunities to relate to their supervisors as fellow human beings. It is important to emphasise at this point that, in this study, it was not only Australian or European supervisors who appeared to be adopt an assimilationist pedagogy and largely ignore place and relationality. There are two instances in these data of Asian supervisors, in the humanities and engineering, appearing to adopt a very distant and unsupportive style of supervision. The issues that have been identified by the two Asian students (neither of whom has the same nationality as their supervisors) included an absence of the personal and the relational in supervision, a lack of time spent with students, and the use of harshly critical feedback. Unfortunately, my research team was unable to interview these supervisors, and so I cannot report on the views of these supervisors. However,

Conclusion 173 in both cases, the supervisors had been working in Australian universities for some time and may have themselves studied at Western universities. It is also possible that these more assimilationist approaches were the result of individual approaches to supervision. Northern Knowledge and Theory appeared to be seen as universal by supervisors adopting assimilationist pedagogies. Some of these supervisors were very directive about the research approaches students had to take and appeared to be unaware that knowledge is culturally inflected. Students noticed how abstract research in Western contexts appeared to be, in contrast to their own home countries, where researchers sought to deal with real-world, pressing, national problems. Although it is important to acknowledge that international students were seeking Western knowledge by enrolling at an Australian university, it is clear that they had not expected to have to abandon their other knowledge systems entirely. Instead, they often entered their doctoral studies planning to add Western knowledge to the range of knowledge systems they were able to access. There also appeared to be a belief among supervisors adopting mainly assimilationist supervision pedagogies that Northern research and publication practices were universal. This emerged in these interviews as a strong belief in there being one way to engage in research practices such as asking questions, critical thinking, debating with supervisors and writing for publication. In some cultures, asking questions was not a regular part of educational experience, and so some students, who were instructed in all good faith by their supervisor to explore the literature and come and talk to the supervisor if they had any questions, were faced with a serious impasse. Although critical thinking takes on many cultural forms, as Singh and Huang (2012) demonstrated, the style of critical thinking in Northern research often appeared to some of the culturally diverse students in this study as ‘peer attack’ rather than peer review (Middle Eastern humanities student). They found the continual, harsh critique to which the supervisors subjected their work painful, but they acknowledged that they did eventually acquire additional critical thinking skills. Some of the students in this study also emphasised the difficulties of breaking their own cultural norms and debating or disagreeing with supervisors. In many cases, they simply agreed to everything the supervisor suggested and then, later, selected which approaches they would put into action. This resulted in some supervisors feeling frustrated and confused. Writing practices and the ways of structuring argument were found to be highly culturally specific and quite different within the Western world, let alone in nonWestern cultures, although several supervisors in this study appeared to be unaware of this. The argumentative style required by most English-language publications is essentially anglophone or North Atlantic and is linear in nature – state the argument at the beginning, prove the argument throughout and then repeat the argument at the end. French, German and other continental European styles of logic will not necessarily fit this norm (Clyne, 1987). The example of this in my data appeared as the difficulties a European student and an Australian supervisor had when discussing writing and presenting logical arguments. For students from Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American and Indigenous cultures, writing

174 Conclusion in an anglophone style was also difficult and counter-intuitive. In many languages other than English, logic is more circular, arguments may be placed at the end, and there is often greater tolerance for divergence and respect for the abilities of the reader to interpret the text (Clyne, 1987). This was clearly explained by an Australian humanities supervisor in this study with expertise in Confucian heritage cultures, who argued that the style of writing in many Confucian heritage cultures is ‘less direct and very much more tangential’ (Australian humanities supervisor 2). The emphasis on individuality, autonomy and independence prevalent in Western Enlightenment thinking was also evident in the expectations of some of the supervisors in this study that their students would be ‘always/already autonomous’ (Johnson et al., 2000) from the beginning of their candidature. Supervisors adopting a largely assimilationist supervision pedagogy were quick to point out to their students that they were expected to solve all their own research problems. In one case, this had the effect of closing down the supervision space. As one Middle Eastern social science student explained, ‘I decided not to ask more questions and try to get it from somewhere else’ (Middle Eastern social science student). Therefore, assimilationist supervision pedagogies appear to be characterised by a view of Northern knowledge and research practices as universal and seem to create very little space for the inclusion of Other cultural knowledge. An absence of a sense of time and history is also apparent when supervisors adopt an assimilationist pedagogy. These supervisors do not seek to recognise, respect and build upon students’ personal, intellectual and professional histories or the histories of their societies and cultures. Supervisors adopting assimilationist approaches seemed to disregard the prior professional and cultural knowledge students brought with them into PhD studies. They also did not appear to focus on their students’ future careers. As a result, there seems to be a tendency of these supervisors to ignore past and future time and zone in only on present time. Their supervision seems to be designed to simply get students through their doctoral studies. Although this is the main goal of supervision and it fits with all of the linear, rational guidelines on supervision, adopting a present-time-only focus does not capitalise on the prior knowledge and strengths that research students bring to their studies. It does not enable research students to further develop all of the networking, publication, grant-writing and other research skills that are essential for future success as researchers either. In these ways, the present-time focus of assimilationist supervision pedagogies short-changes culturally diverse students.

Impact of assimilationist pedagogies My study has demonstrated the potentially devastating effect an absence of place and Other cultural knowledge and a time-present focus have on culturally diverse students. They may lose self-confidence and motivation to continue their studies. They may make much slower progress with their studies, because their attempts to build bridges between their existing cultural, disciplinary and/or professional knowledge are unsupported. They can become hugely disempowered and fearful

Conclusion 175 or angry, especially when subjected to clearly racist stereotypes. Their loneliness and homesickness are compounded, and they are subject to very high stress levels, especially when their supervisors adopt a highly critical approach to their work. Even if they eventually develop great resilience, independence and self-confidence from learning to manage assimilationist supervisors, it comes at a very high cost. Students’ use of metaphors such as feeling like a ‘criminal’, supervision constructed as a ‘trial’ and supervisors as ‘judges’, ‘examiners’ and ‘bosses’ points to scenarios that are not satisfactory or productive for anyone. Supervisors may also have negative experiences when they adopt assimilationist approaches. Many of these supervisors seemed to have a vague sense of unease about their supervision. Very often, they were extremely frustrated with their culturally and linguistically diverse students and found it very difficult to understand the source of their miscommunications with them. In some cases, they believed that their diverse students were not listening to them or misinterpreted their instructions or their body language. Overall, adopting assimilationist pedagogies in the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision appeared to produce negative and even harmful effects on students and supervisors alike. As a result, this book argues that productive supervision pedagogies locate place, relationality, time and diverse cultural knowledge at the centre of the supervision process.

Transculturation: the centrality of place, time and Other cultural knowledge Transcultural approaches to supervision pedagogy (the second form of pedagogy I have observed in the cultural interface of intercultural supervision) seek to situate place, time and diverse cultural knowledge at the heart of supervision (as discussed in Chapter 7). This book demonstrates that transculturation can be facilitated when place is accorded a central position in supervision. To achieve this, the supervisors in this study demonstrate a deep respect for, and curiosity about, the students’ geographies. They also discuss how they seek to make supervision an open, relational space, where experimentation and improvisation become possible. These supervisors recognise the ways in which the personal and social issues involved in doing research studies are intimately intertwined with academic matters, and that students will not necessarily make good progress in their studies until they have sorted out the myriad of issues involved in living in a new country and culture and have begun to establish new social support networks. They routinely checked how their students were settling in and encouraged them to have a life outside their research and to seek a healthy work–life balance. This approach was best summed up by one European science supervisor in this study, who said he liked to ‘check with [students] . . . that they are doing fine . . . because I am human’ (European science supervisor). These supervisors also adopted a range of approaches to group supervision, in addition to individual meetings with students, in order to help break down the isolation that students reported having experienced during their doctoral studies. These included regular group meetings with all of their students, sometimes with

176 Conclusion their co-supervisors and the students of other colleagues. Very often, the activities planned for these group meetings were decided upon by the students and included discussions of research techniques, theories and methodologies, opportunities to present work, invited guest speakers, and so on. In one case, two social science supervisors developed what they called the ‘thesis family’ for several of their new Asian research students, who were all starting at similar times. Building upon culturally appropriate notions of the extended family, this group became a place where students worked together to provide feedback on each other’s draft writing, and supervisors helped students grapple with constructing literature reviews and other research tasks. These supervisors also sought other ways to help their students build peer support networks and become part of an inclusive and vibrant research culture. These supervisors were often highly aware of different cultural communication styles and sought, where possible, to adapt to the students’ preferred communication approach, as in the case of one Asian engineering supervisor, who offered his Asian students opportunities to select the style of interaction they preferred. Some of the students in this study also spoke about how they had learned to operate effectively in several different cultural locations. At times, this could involve recognising that full understanding or agreement across cultures was not always possible, picking up on the point made by a number of postcolonial theorists (Jones, 1999; Connell, 2007; Somerville, 2011) that there are times when you have to hold ideas in creative tension and not seek false consensus. Time was also accorded a special place by these supervisors. Not only did they recognise that transcultural supervision requires time, commitment, patience and trust, but they also respected their students’ intellectual and professional histories and helped them build promising futures as independent scholars. They were active in mentoring students in writing for publication, grant writing, networking and other research career abilities. In these ways, they focused on past, present and future time in supervision, which is a much more holistic and circular construction of time than traditionally linear Western approaches. These strategies also built students’ confidence in the value of their own cultural knowledge and prepared them extremely well for their future work as researchers. Supervisors adopting a primarily transcultural supervision pedagogy also perceived knowledge as culturally constructed and were often aware of some of the key differences in approaches to knowledge adopted by different cultures. They were curious about their students’ own cultural knowledge and aware that intercultural research students were seeking to add Western knowledge to their repertoires as an additional set of theoretical and methodological resources. They also demonstrated respect and interest in Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges and provided opportunities for their students to blend aspects of their own knowledge with Western knowledge, to create unique, new knowledge. These supervisors recognised that their students might require structured opportunities to build their confidence in their own knowledge and in acquiring Northern knowledge, before they could become independent researchers. They provided structured assistance to their students in the following ways:

Conclusion 177 • • • • • • •

offering structured help with the literature review and other research tasks; offering constructive oral and written feedback; encouraging students even when early drafts required a lot of work; encouraging students to use tape recorders in meetings; guiding and supporting writing for publication; performing career mentoring about what it means to be a researcher; helping students to develop their own voice (including critical thinking skills and taking positions).

In these ways, supervisors sought to provide their students with a bridge into Western knowledge and research practices. They had learned to interpret some students’ propensity to say yes to everything as a way of showing respect and were not surprised if they later discovered students did not follow up on things they had originally said yes to. The students of supervisors who adopted transcultural approaches powerfully illustrated, in the interview data, how these strategies supported them as they made the many cultural, social and economic adjustments necessary to study in a new language, culture and place, and to produce transcultural, original knowledge. They spoke of gaining more confidence and the ability to operate effectively as independent researchers in several different cultural contexts. In some cases, culturally diverse students were eager to adopt transcultural approaches to supervision practice as well, planning to draw upon their supervisors’ strategies as models for their own future practice. Transculturation was not always a one-way process. Many of the supervisors in this study recognised, and were grateful for, the many things they had learned from their culturally and linguistically diverse students. Indeed, many of them spoke about the opportunities intercultural supervision had provided them with to learn about a vast array of cultural knowledges and ways of being, thinking and researching. While fully aware of the challenges and complexities of engaging in intercultural supervision, they saw intercultural supervision as a chance to enhance their intercultural knowledge and understanding. In line with Singh’s (2009: 186) work, they recognised their own ‘cross-cultural ignorance’, regarded their intercultural students as intellectual equals and sought to create opportunities for their students to capitalise on their intercultural and bilingual knowledge. Therefore, my study confirms the importance of situating place, time and diverse cultural knowledge at the centre of supervision pedagogy and allows us to understand, in more detail, how supervisors adopting a mainly transcultural approach to supervision work to achieve this.

Unhomely places, knowledges and research practices Working in the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision is not easy, however. One of the major experiences identified by students and supervisors in my previous studies has been that of unhomeliness. This book has demonstrated the extent to which unhomeliness is a common experience in intercultural

178 Conclusion supervision, particularly for students, as they grapple with unfamiliar research paradigms and cultural ways of thinking and being (as described in Chapter 8). My data have also shown that supervisors may also experience unhomeliness, as they try to work with and understand their students. It appears that unhomeliness, or ambivalence and discomfort, is a feature of the ‘inter’ in intercultural supervision. In these data, unhomeliness emerged in relation to place and knowledge, as students and supervisors attempted to engage with unfamiliar places, spaces, ways of relating and ways of knowing and being. The interviews with students revealed the unhomeliness of adjusting to new places, languages and cultures and seeking to build new support networks. Students described their battles with homesickness, their difficulties in finding suitable accommodation and how everyday activities such as shopping and banking could be challenging in a new culture. They discussed the difficulties of grappling with the English language and the ways in which friendship practices and ways of socialising were different in the Australian context. Some students felt they became quieter and different in their new context, often because of a lack of English fluency. The students often experienced the unhomeliness of reverse culture shock when they returned home for fieldwork or holidays, although some of them discussed how they had learned to operate proficiently in both cultures. There were also unhomely moments in communication with supervisors or colleagues, when their cultural politeness rules were different from those operating in Australia. Learning to accept critical feedback, even when it was delivered gently, was a difficult adjustment for some students. In several cases, these students felt unhomely in their school’s or centre’s research culture, particularly when they felt that conversation was dominated by Australian students. In a number of instances, some students were proactive in addressing these concerns by establishing supportive peer networks, welcoming new students, organising student conferences and volunteering to become student representatives on school committees. Students also spoke of their unhomely moments in coming to terms with Western knowledge and research practices. In some instances, the initial freedom and scope they were given to select their research topics, find their own readings and conduct their research were challenging. In other instances, they struggled with the Western focus on abstract research problems, rather than urgent practical issues that required solutions in their own home countries. Some students found structured, linear approaches to writing difficult, and several found the type of critical thinking and linear logic expected in Western writing very challenging. Some supervisors also experienced unhomely moments in intercultural supervision, when they sought to adapt their regular supervision and communication styles to those that might match their students’ expectations and approaches. This could cause uncertainty, ambivalence and discomfort, as they adopted new or different ways of being. In one case, an Australian engineering supervisor struggled to adopt a more formal approach for his Asian students, who were disconcerted by his friendly, relaxed approach. In another case, supervisors found

Conclusion 179 the changes they had to make to their supervisory approaches clashed a great deal with their own personal values and beliefs about gender equity. Supervisors also had unhomely moments in adjusting to their students’ cultural ways of interacting in supervision. In some cases, supervisors mistakenly believed that all non-Western students expected the same kind of highly directive, formal approach to supervision, forgetting some of the significant cultural and personal differences between students from different parts of the globe. This carried the faint echo of Orientalism, or the practice of constructing all Others as the same. There were other instances where supervisors mistakenly believed that all people from one culture were the same, as shown by the example in which a Chinese supervisor and student were unable to work well together. Interestingly, time did not seem to surface in these experiences of unhomeliness, which I will discuss more below. Clearly though, place and knowledge were important aspects of unhomeliness in intercultural supervision, especially for students.

Disciplinary influences on the intercultural supervision contact zone: beginning the conversation Finally, this book has begun an exploration of how disciplinary differences might influence the intercultural supervision contact zone, in Chapter 9. Although the numbers of supervisors and students in this study were small, especially where engineering and science were concerned, and I was not seeking to make any generalisations from these data, this study has allowed me to begin making some speculations about disciplinary differences in intercultural supervision that will need to be investigated more in future studies. Very often, when I have spoken about the usefulness of postcolonial theory to reimagine intercultural supervision, many have been able see its relevance for humanities and social science students, but have been less sure that it is applicable to the sciences and engineering. This was particularly the case with the prevalence of greater commitments to the objectivity, impartiality and universality of knowledge in fields such as science and engineering. This study has clearly shown that moments of transculturation, unhomeliness and assimilation appear to be equally likely to occur across all of the disciplines included. It also demonstrates that supervisors adopting primarily transcultural or assimilationist approaches can be found in all of the represented disciplines. The significance of place and time emerges as important factors in each of the disciplines covered in my study. Although there was less acknowledgement of the role of culture in knowledge creation in the science and engineering supervisor and student interviews in this study, there is certainly an emphasis on how culture can shape approaches to problem-solving, communication and other research practices. It is clear that universalist knowledge discourses in engineering and the sciences are now being challenged by feminist, Indigenous and postcolonial scholars, within and outside these disciplines (Harding and Hintikka, 1983; Harding, 1991; 2011a; Verran 2001; Nakata, 2006; Sillitoe, 2007). The developments in the fields of engineering and science are increasingly opening spaces for the types of transculturation envisaged

180 Conclusion by postcolonial theorists and discussed in this book. This will undoubtedly change the nature of intercultural supervision in engineering and the sciences in the future. There were only two clear disciplinary differences that emerged in this small study. First, there was a strong discourse about individual and personality differences outweighing cultural differences in the engineering and science supervisor interviews collected for this study. This discourse seemed to suggest a lack of comfort with thinking about the role of culture in intercultural supervision and a preference to stay with safer, more psychological discourses about personality differences. Although these supervisors might have been eager to avoid using stereotypes about culture, there was also a suggestion of the disavowal of difference that is common to liberal discourses about multiculturalism (Bhabha, 1994). Interestingly, however, a number of diverse engineering students emphasised the importance of cultural differences more than their supervisors. This highlighted an intriguing difference between the views of the mostly Australian engineering and science supervisors and their culturally diverse research students in this study. I think it demonstrates that, when you are from the dominant cultural group in a society, you might not always be aware of the extent to which culture matters in research interactions. For the students in this study, their lived experience of cultural difference enabled them to recognise the significance of culture in research. These discourses about individual differences were largely absent from interviews with humanities and social science supervisors and students. Indeed, one humanities supervisor reflected on how much more difficult supervising across and between cultures must be, when you do not explore culture as part of your research. Second, there was a different level of emphasis on preparing students to perform presentations and to write for publication across the disciplines represented in this study. Engineering and science supervisors spoke in much more detail about the importance of these research practices than their counterparts in the humanities or the social sciences. This is not to say these discussions were entirely absent from interviews with humanities or social science supervisors. Instead, there was a greater focus on thesis writing, although the importance of helping students write for publication was acknowledged. There was also more emphasis on joint publications in the sciences and engineering, although there were instances of joint publication in the humanities and social science interviews. These differences were related more to diverse research histories and practices, rather than cultural issues, but they are interesting nonetheless. In the paragraphs above, I have summarised the ways that my data have confirmed and illustrated the importance of reimagining place and knowledge and, to a slightly lesser extent, time in intercultural supervision.

Talking back to theory with data No theory or series of theories, however, can ever fully explain data. Data often exceed theory, as Clegg (2012) found with her study on students’ personal development plans. In my case, some of the theories about time that I worked

Conclusion 181 with exceeded my data. In this section, I want to outline how my data spoke back to, and unsettled, my pedagogical readings of postcolonial, Indigenous, social, feminist and cultural geography theories. I also highlight the ways in which some of the categories I had explored at a theoretical level, particularly time, were not present to a great extent in my data. As I have already indicated above, it quickly became apparent that the category of ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ was challenged by my data. As the discussion between an Australian engineering supervisor and her European student, described in Chapter 6, demonstrated, English writing and publication styles that have come to dominate many fields of research are largely anglophone or North Atlantic, rather than Western. They differ greatly from the argumentative structure expected in various continental European countries. This was not really a surprise. As I suggested in my introduction, these large, abstract categories are highly problematic and easy to challenge for their lack of specificity. Unfortunately, despite this interesting illustration from my data, I still believe these terms were necessary, in order to capture the global political relations I am seeking to highlight, especially in the early chapters. Some Asian supervisors in my study appeared to adopt assimilationist styles of supervision, including an absence of relationality, a lack of time spent with students, and the use of harshly critical feedback (see Chapter 6). Therefore, my data challenge my pedagogical readings of theory that suggest assimilation is principally a Western practice, even though these supervisors had spent a large amount of time working in Australian universities. The complexity of supervision pedagogy is also illustrated in my data in Chapter 8, when an Asian supervisor spoke reflexively about the difficulties he was having with a student from his own country, and how he realised that this had been caused by a complex amalgam of personality factors, as well as the fact that he had worked in Western countries for most of his career. All of this seemed to suggest that caution needed to be used when seeking to explain individual pedagogical approaches using broad geopolitical theories. Although I do not think this derailed my whole argument, I think it particularly suggests that it is worth remembering the complex ways in which personality, personal intellectual histories, experience, preferences and culture play out in supervision pedagogy. I also discovered, when analysing my data, that place emerged as a much stronger category in my data than time, and so I organised each data chapter to reflect this. This led me to wonder whether I should go back and change the order in which I dealt with time and place in Chapter 3. However, as I argued above, many theorists have shown how time is nested in place, and I decided to let the logical flow of this chapter reflect that (Adam, 2004; Massey, 2005). Instead, I think this is one way in which my data unsettled these theoretical resources and, as I argue below, has highlighted an area for future investigation. Finally, the theoretical resources I assembled for this book, and probably my own lenses as a historian, suggested that time and history would emerge as strong features of my data. This turned out to be the case, with a clear distinction emerging between a present-time focus, evident in assimilationist supervision

182 Conclusion pedagogies, and more holistic, circular understandings of past, present and future time in transcultural pedagogies. However, very little was discussed by supervisors and students about the impact of personal and cultural histories and the histories of their disciplines in my study. Interestingly, where Clegg (2012) found time in her data on students’ personal development plans when she had not expected to, I did not discover its presence to the extent I expected. This is clearly an important area for future research.

Areas for future research Therefore, this study has shown that there is a pressing need to continue reimagining the impact of time and history in intercultural supervision in future research. Although this book makes a start on this exploration, more research needs to be conducted into the ways in which the histories of the disciplines, and the countries from which the students come, impact upon their experience of doctoral study and upon supervision. Future investigations would need to explore more about the personal and cultural histories of supervisors and students working together, the histories of the places in which the supervision and the fieldwork are conducted, the histories of disciplinary knowledge, and so on. This future study would need to interrogate how time became unhomely for students and supervisors engaged in intercultural supervision, as it did not emerge at all in this study. Important theoretical resources for this would be Araújo’s (2005) analysis of the ways in which present time in doctoral studies is sacrificed for the future goal of achieving the PhD, and Chakrabarty’s (2007) concept of the waiting room of history, which is mirrored in doctoral studies as a waiting room of scholarly authorisation. This is a happy coincidence for me, because I am seeking to redirect and further my research into considerations of time and history, at last bringing my original and my adopted disciplines of history and education back together. Another area that requires further investigation is whether the experience of unhomeliness in intercultural supervision, which I have identified in my previous studies and extended in this book, could be turned into a location for transculturation. Opportunities for learning and reconstructing our ideas emerge when we feel uncomfortable, uncertain or ambivalent about something, when we come up against something puzzling (Clegg, 2012). These are the feelings engendered by unhomeliness. This leads me to wonder how we harness those uncomfortable, unhomely feelings of not knowing, to drive us to seek new knowledge. A future study would try to understand how students grappled with these feelings of unhomeliness about place, time and knowledge, and how supervisors might help students transform these into moments of creative innovation and exploration. It would also seek to investigate how supervisors were able to turn their moments of unhomeliness in intercultural supervision into opportunities for them to address their ‘cross-cultural ignorance’ (Singh, 2009: 186) and to rethink knowledge and their supervision practices. Finally, as indicated in Chapter 9 and above, this book only begins the conversation about the impact of disciplinarity on time, place and knowledge in

Conclusion 183 intercultural supervision. Much more research needs to be undertaken to investigate the ways in which knowledge is currently constructed in engineering and the sciences, and whether greater scope is being created for the incorporation of Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges into these disciplines. In particular, there needs to be an exploration of whether the strong arguments generated by the postcolonial, Indigenous and feminist theorists (such as Nakata, 2006; Sillitoe, 2007; Harding, 2011a), challenging knowledge construction in these fields, are actually making an impact upon current practices in these disciplines. This would involve interviewing larger numbers of engineering and science supervisors and students and trying to ensure, where possible, that matched interview data were collected.

An invitation . . . I always feel that ‘conclusion’ is the wrong word for the last section of a book. It suggests a firm closing off, a tying up of loose ends, a definitive end to the argument. As I sit here looking over the grey harbour and cloudy skies of Wellington, I feel like I have only begun the task of reimagining place, time and knowledge in intercultural supervision. I am eager to know what my readers think of my arguments and, at this stage, I can see all of their flaws, gaps and silences. So, rather than end with a ‘conclusion’, I would like to finish this book with an invitation to you, my readers, to continue this conversation about the ways in which Southern theories enable us to begin the important task of reimagining place, time and knowledge in the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision. When we read postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theories (which I have, for convenience here, labelled Southern theories) about geography, history and epistemology, we are able to challenge assumptions about the universality, timelessness and unlocatedness of Northern knowledge. Given that the construction of significant and original knowledge is the central focus of supervision, these Southern theories have a great deal to teach us about how we might create space for Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledge systems to be valued and respected in the academy. Intercultural supervision does not occur in a vacuum. Supervision takes place in a specific location, between people who bring traces of the geographies they have travelled with them into supervision. Supervision also occurs at a particular moment in history for the supervisors and students involved, for the societies that they come from and work in together, and for the disciplines that they research. If we are to wrestle effectively with the serious global problems facing our world, then we need to draw together the vast array of knowledge systems that all of our cultures have produced. This means creating space for Southern, Eastern and Indigenous knowledges in universities, and a key site where we can make this happen (and where it is already happening in some disciplines) is in the postcolonial contact zone of intercultural supervision. In order to achieve this, supervisors need

184 Conclusion to situate place, time and Other cultural knowledges at the centre of their supervision pedagogy. This would involve adopting transcultural supervision pedagogies and seeking to understand the unhomeliness that this might involve for students and for supervisors. It would also involve attempting to move beyond assimilationist supervision pedagogies. I invite you to think about how this is possible.

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Index

Note: page numbers in bold type refer to Tables. Aboriginal languages 16–17 Aboriginal peoples 8, 9, 10, 62; and place 43 Aboriginal supervision, Australia 25, 27–9 academic disciplines see disciplines academy, the; and colonisation 52, 168 accommodation issues 137, 178 Adam, B. 34–6 Africa, ethno-philosophy 67–8 ako (Māori concept of pedagogy) 26 Alatas, S.F. 50, 57, 59, 61 Alatas, S.H. 50, 57–8, 59 Al-e-Ahmad, J. 49, 55, 56–7, 65, 168 ALTC (Australian Learning and Teaching Council) 72, 73 ‘always/already autonomous’ students 100–1, 120, 174 Anastasi, N. 75 anthropology 53 Aotearoa New Zealand 55; Māori supervision 25–7; place pedagogy 44, 45; postcolonialism 9, 10; South-South theoretical work 66 Araújo, E.R. 36–7, 39, 162, 164, 182 Ashwin, P. 161, 171 Asia, as method 65, 170 assimilation 4, 12, 18–20, 78, 84, 85–6, 131, 171–5, 181–2; and the body, the personal and the relational 90–4; and destructive feedback 87–90; and disciplines 151, 152–3; effects on students and supervisors 101–2, 174–5; and independent students 100–1; and lack of place and culture 86–7; limits of relational supervision 102; and Northern knowledge 94–6; and Northern research practices 96–100

audio recorders 125 Australia: and Aboriginal languages 16–17; Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander supervision 25, 27–9; postcolonialism 9; and South-South theoretical work 66 Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) 72, 73 Banerjee-Dube, I. 34 Bartlett, A. 102 Behar, R. 11 Behrendt, L. 28, 102 Benang (Scott) 19 Bhabha, H.17–18, 20–1, 23, 62, 136 biodiversity 58 bioprospecting 58 body, the: and assimilation 90–4; and place 43, 47; and transculturation 111–13; and unhomeliness 139 Bourdieu, P. 24, 38, 60, 163–4 Bourke, S. 75 Britain, social science knowledge 59 Budby, J. 28 Bullen, E. 17, 21, 23, 27 Cambodian students 29–30 Canclini, G. 64 captive mind 50, 57 Caribbean students 59, 170 Chakrabarty, D. 33, 38, 39, 54–5, 60, 61, 63, 64, 153, 162, 163, 164, 182 Chen, K. 10, 24, 49, 65, 168, 170 Chinese knowledge 128, see also Confucian heritage cultures Chinese students 23–4, 59 Clegg, S. 7, 8, 36, 39, 162, 164, 182

194 Index clustered supervision 25 coevalness 32–3 colonisation 4–5, 13; and the academy 52, 168; and knowledge 51; and language 16–17; of the mind 56–8, 168; and Western academic disciplines 52–4 communication, and unhomeliness 141, 146 Confucian heritage cultures 23, 24, 58, 98, 174, see also Chinese knowledge Connell, R. 49, 54–5, 60, 61, 64, 66, 153, 154, 163 constructive feedback 122–4 contact zone 1–2, 4, 12, 16–18, 43–4; intercultural supervision 18–21, 23, 30 core countries 59 critical thinking 96–7, 173 cross-cultural ignorance 131, 167, 177 cultural: dress 150; genocide 19, 52, 168; hybridity 8; imperialism 52, 168; interface 62, 63 culture: and assimilation 86–7; and disciplines 153–6 culture shock, reverse 140–1 Davies, B. 44 de Carteret, P. 44 decolonisation 43, 65 deimperialisation 49, 168 Deleuze, G. 42, 44 Derrida, J. 41, 44 destructive feedback 87–90, 178 Devos, A. 29–30, 66 difference, individual 156–8, 178 Dirlik, A. 64 disciplines 151–2, 159–60, 179–80; and colonisation 52–4; and individual difference 156–8; and knowledge and culture 153–6; presentations and writing 158–9; and transculturation, assimilation and unhomeliness 151, 152–3 displacement 40, see also unhomeliness doctoral education: English model of 2; Portugal 36–7, see also intercultural supervision case studies dress, cultural 150 Dube, S. 33–4, 38, 53, 64 Eastern, as a concept 4 Eastern knowledge 14, 170, 183 Eliot, T.S. 11 emotion, in supervision 22 engineering disciplines 6, 151–2, 164, 179–80, 183; and individual difference

156–7, 180; and knowledge and culture 153–6; and presentations and writing 158–9, 180; and transculturation, assimilation and unhomeliness 151, 152–3 English language 65, 76, 87, 138–9, 172, 178 Enlightenment 15, 33, 34, 35, 162, 163, 174; and knowledge 50, 51, 52, 54, 56, 60 essentialism 5, 148 ethics, and research studies 74 Europe: as a concept 4; and history 33 Fabian, J. 33 Fanon, F. 19, 67 feedback 141; constructive 122–4; destructive 87–90, 178 female international students see women femininity 41–2 feminist theory 8, 12; and place 41–2; and science 155; and time 34–6 first contact 16 Ford, L. 28 Foucault, M. 15, 41, 60 France, social science knowledge 59 Gandhi, L. 20, 21, 23 Gannon, S. 44 gender: concepts of 51; and unhomeliness 139, 144–5 gender identities 133 gene-harvesting 58 genocide 19, see also cultural genocide geography 12, 53, see also place Gharbzadegi (Al-e Ahmad) 56–7, 168 globalisation, and neocolonisation 58–60 Goodenough, W. 156 governmentality 15 Grant, B. 21, 22, 25–7, 50, 71 Grosz, E.A. 41–2 group supervision 113–15, 176 Groves, C. 35–6 Gruenewald, D. 43 Guattari, F. 42 habitus 24, 38, 163–4 Hall, S. 32 Harding, S. 155, 156 Harvey, D. 41 Hegel, G.W.F. 21 Henry, J. 29 history 12, 21–2, 33, 79, 162, 181–2; and assimilation 90–1, 174; and colonialism

Index 195 53–4; and intercultural supervision 37–9, see also time Hobson, J. 155 Holbrook, A. 75 homesickness 137, 178, see also unhomeliness Homewood, J. 75 hooks, b. 21 Hooper, J. 75 Hountondji, P.J. 49, 61, 67–8, 170 Huang, X. 24, 38, 58, 128, 163–4 humanities disciplines 152, 163, 164, 179–80; and individual difference 158; and knowledge and culture 154; and presentations and writing 159; and transculturation, assimilation and unhomeliness 151, 152–3 Huon, G. 75 hybridity 17, 18 ICT (information and communication technology): Skype 45–6; and time 35 identities: gender 133; and unhomeliness 140 independence of students 100–1, 120–9, 143–4 India, history 33, 34, 64 Indian language 16 Indigenous, as a concept 4 Indigenous education 45 Indigenous knowledge 14, 37–8, 58–9, 62–3, 68, 170, 183; and science and engineering disciplines 155–6, see also Southern knowledge Indigenous standpoint theory 62–3, 68, 156 Indigenous supervision 3, 7, 24–6, 32, 66; Aotearoa New Zealand 25–7; Australia 25, 27–9, see also intercultural supervision; supervision Indigenous theories 3–4, 8 individual difference 156–8, 180 Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University 29 intercultural supervision 1–2; contact zone 18–21, 23, 30; and place 39–40, 46–8; and postcolonial theory 21–30; and time 37–9, 46–8, see also Indigenous supervision; supervision intercultural supervision research studies 70, 74–7; context of 70–1; methodology 71–2, 73, 74; working with theory 77–8, 79–83, 84, see also assimilation; transculturation; unhomeliness

Iran 55, 56–7, 65 Irigaray, L. 44 Irish cultural heritage 7, 8, 9 Irwin, K. 25–6 Islamic knowledge 154–5 Jamarani, M. (Shirini) 74–5 Jones, A. 66 Kaumātua 27 Kaupapa Māori 25 Kenway, J. 17, 21, 23, 27 Kidman, J. 25 knowledge 1, 6–7, 12, 78, 81–3; and colonisation 51; and disciplines 153–6; evaluation of 68; pedagogical reading of 167–71; respecting systems of 66–7; and supervision 50; and unhomeliness 142–4, 178, see also Chinese knowledge; Eastern knowledge; Indigenous knowledge; Northern knowledge; Southern knowledge; Western knowledge Kristeva, J. 23 language: and colonisation 16–17; English 65, 76, 87, 138–9, 172, 178; issues in supervision 6 learning preferences 144 Levinas, E. 44 liminality 17, 18, 39 Lingard, B. 58, 59, 65, 170 literature reviews 121–2, 127, 159 Loomba, A. 23, 50 Lovitts, B. 47, 172 Lusted, D. 14, 50 McKinley, L. 25–7 McLaughlin, J. 66 Macquarie University 72 Māori and Indigenous (MAI) Te Kupenga programme 25 Māori people 8, 9, 45 Māori supervision 3, 10, 25–7, 66 Marshall, S. 75 Martin, B. 44 masculinity 41–2 Massey, D. 33, 41, 42, 53, 162 master-slave dynamic 21 mentoring 108–9, 110, 176 Mercer, G. 102 metaculture 58 Middleton, S. 25–6 miscommunication, in supervision 22, 102

196 Index moderate essentialism 5 modernity 15 Morris, S. 75 multiculturalism 157, 180

Pratt, M. 1–2, 16, 17, 18, 23, 43, 44, 104 presentations 158–9, 180 Protestant work ethic 51 questions 96, 141, 173

Nakata, M. 51, 58, 62–3, 67, 153, 156, 170 Nelson, J. 155 Nelson, L.H. 155 neocolonisation; and globalisation 58–60 New Zealand see Aotearoa New Zealand non-Indigenous, as a concept 4 Northern, as a concept 4 Northern knowledge 49, 50, 54–6, 85–6, 153, 154, 163, 167–8, 169, 170, 173; and assimilation 94–6; dialogue with Southern knowledge 61–3; and transculturation 63–4, 104, see also Western knowledge Northern research practices, and assimilation 96–100 ‘Oriental West’ 155 Orientalism 23, 27, 52, 58, 64–5, 147–8, 168, 179 Pākēha supervisors 25, 26–7, 32, 66 pedagogy 2; place-based 42–5; and time 36–7 peer support networks 117–20 Pelias, R. 11 Penetito, W. 45, 47 peripheral countries 59 personal development programmes for students 36, 39, 182 personal, the: and assimilation 90–4; and transculturation 111–13, 175 Peseta, T. 10–11 place 1, 6–7, 78, 80–1, 84, 181; and assimilation 86–7; and cultural geography 40–2; and disciplines 151; and intercultural supervision 39–40, 46–8; pedagogical reading of 165–7; place-based pedagogies 42–5, 166; and transculturation 105–8; and unhomeliness 137–9, 178, see also geography Portugal, doctoral studies 36–7 postcolonial theory 3–4, 8, 12, 15–16, 31–2, 55, 163; and intercultural supervision 21–30; and supervision 13–14; and time 32–3 Power, K. 44 power relations, colonial 4–5

race, concepts of 51 Rak Mak Mak Marranunggu people 28 Reid, A. 75 relational, the: and assimilation 90–4, 172; and transculturation 111–13; and unhomeliness 146–50 research culture: and transculturation 117–20; and unhomeliness 142 ‘Research Foundry’ 114–15 research practices, and unhomeliness 142–4 reverse culture shock 140–1 rhizome metaphor 42 Rizvi, F. 1, 24 Ruitenberg, C. 44–5, 47 Said, E. 13, 23, 27, 52, 58, 64–5, 168 science disciplines 6, 151–2, 164, 179–80, 183; and individual difference 156–7, 180; and knowledge and culture 153–6; and presentations and writing 158–9, 180; and transculturation, assimilation and unhomeliness 151, 152–3 science, philosophy of 12, 154–5, 164 Scott, K. 19 semi-peripheral countries 59 settler/invader groups 9, 19, 168 Shrestha, M. 24 Sillitoe, P. 155–6 Singh, M. 23–4, 38, 58, 128, 131, 163–4, 167, 177 Skype 45–6 Smith, L.T. 13, 24–5, 51, 53, 55, 58, 61, 65, 168, 170 social sciences disciplines 152, 163, 164, 179–80; and individual difference 158; and knowledge and culture 59, 154; and presentations and writing 159; and transculturation, assimilation and unhomeliness 151, 152–3 sociology 54 Soja, E. 23 Somerville, M. 29–30, 40, 43, 46, 48, 66, 68–9 South, the, as a laboratory 54–6, 168–9 Southern, as a concept 4 Southern knowledge 14, 60–1, 129–31, 168, 169, 170, 183; critique of 67–9;

Index 197 dialogue with Northern knowledge 61–3; South-South theoretical work 64–6, 170, see also Indigenous knowledge space see place Spence, S. 75 stories, and place 43, 46 students: accommodation issues 137, 178; effects of assimilation on 101–2, 174–5; independence of 100–1, 120–9, 143–4; life outside research 115–16; peer support networks 117–20; personal development programmes 36, 39, 182; voice of 126–9 Subaltern Studies 37, 64, 162, 162–3 supervision: and culture 3–4; definition of 2; group 113–15; and knowledge 50; language issues in 6; and postcolonial theory 13–14; as project management 3, 91; and Skype 45–6; and time 31–2, see also Indigenous supervision; intercultural supervision supervisors: effects of assimilation on 101–2, 174–5; mentoring role 108–9, 110, 176; transculturation for 134–5, 177; and unhomeliness 144–6, 178–9 sustainable development 58 Sykes, B. 24 terra nullius 55 ‘thesis family’ support 113–14, 121, 125, 176 Third Space 17–18 Thomas, N. 15, 169 time 1, 3, 6–7, 78, 79, 84, 181–2; and assimilation 90–1, 174; and disciplines 151; and intercultural supervision 37–9, 46–8; pedagogical explorations of 36–7; pedagogical reading of 161–5; social/feminist theories of 34–6; and supervision 31–2; and transculturation 108–11, 176; Western perspectives on 32–4, 35, 41, see also histories time-space compression 41, 165, 169 Torres Strait Islander supervision, Australia 25, 27–9 Torres Strait Islanders 8, 9, 10, 43, 62 transculturation 4, 8, 12, 18, 23, 24, 28, 29, 78, 84, 104, 169–70, 175–7, 182; and the body, the personal and the relational 111–13; both-ways 61–4; and culturally appropriate support 113–14; and disciplines 151, 152–3; facilitating

knowledge and identities 131–4; and life outside research 115–16; and Northern knowledge 63–4, 104; and place 105–8; and research culture 117–20; and respecting difference 116–17; and student independence 120–9; for supervisors 134–5; and time 108–11 Trowler, P. 5, 77–8, 84, 161, 171 Tyikim students 28 unhomeliness 4, 12, 20–1, 62, 78, 84, 136, 177–9, 182; and the body 139; and communication 141, 146; and disciplines 151, 152–3; and gender 139, 144–5; and identities 140; and knowledge 142–4; and place 137–9; and the relational 146–50; and research culture 142; and research practices 142–4; and reverse culture shock 140–1; and supervisors 144–6, see also displacement universities: Asian 130; and colonialism 13–14, 50 University of Sheffield 59 US, social science knowledge 59 Usher, R. 42, 45 Venables, E. 23 Verran, H. 68, 156 Vietnam 105, 106 voice, of students 126–9 ‘waiting room’ metaphor 39, 164, 182 Western, as a concept 4 Western knowledge 13–14, 49, 51, 131, 153, 168, 169, 178; academic disciplines 52–4; building student bridges into 120–9, see also Northern knowledge Westoxication 56–8, 168 Whatman, S. 66 Williams, L.T. 25–6 Winchester-Seeto, T. 75 Wisker, G. 19 women: and doctoral supervision 3–4; experiences as female international students 23; restricted mobility of 41; and unhomeliness 20–1; Western gender roles 51 writing 87, 98–100, 109, 110, 125–6, 143, 152, 158–9, 173–4, 180 yeast metaphor 127

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