Doctoral researchers are our present and future knowledge-makers. Social justice requires democratic opportunities for knowledge creation, and to this end doctoral supervision theory and practice have become increasingly inclusive, flexible, culturally responsive, and person-centred over time. However, consideration of trauma and trauma-informed…

Doctoral supervision is a subtle but complex form of teaching in higher education, where supervisor-to-candidate expectations including support around the literature are important, but supervisory practices and candidate starting points can be disparate and expectations are not always discussed. This paper uses autoethnographic reflections and a…

The undergraduate honours-level dissertation is a significant component of many UK undergraduate programmes, as a key stage in the longer-term intellectual and career development of potential researchers and knowledge-workers, and also a critical contributor to immediate award outcome. This study aims to identify how dissertation supervisors…

This interview-based study with thirty doctoral supervisors in the UK focused on the diverse goals and intentions behind their supervisory activities, from which we derived a six-dimensional model of concepts of supervision. We explored how strongly each of these concepts featured in supervisors' intentions and whether this varied by discipline.…

New to the academy's 'publish or perish' game, doctoral students hold varied expectations of supervisors in relation to their publishing endeavours. These expectations can be unrealistic or contradictory to those of the supervisors and thus make supervision problematic. Set in a faculty of education in New Zealand, this study explores fantasies,…

Traditionally, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is predicated on a supervisor as teacher/expert -- candidate as learner/novice model. But what becomes possible when the materialities of this power dynamic are destabilised and reimagined? This article draws from emerging feminist ontologies to introduce the concept of velo-onto-epistemology…

This paper describes a study investigating the effectiveness of an online group supervision model developed to respond to the plight of postgraduate students forced to complete their research theses in China due to the COVID-19 pandemic border closures in 2020-2022. The supervisory group included academics with variable supervision experience who…

Postgraduate education has grown enormously worldwide, which has led to supervisors being expected to take on a supervisor's role immediately upon graduation. But crossing the border from being a doctoral candidate to becoming a doctoral supervisor entails significant shifts in identity and an understanding of postgraduate pedagogy and…

This paper examines supervisors at a reform university where most supervision concerns undergraduate and Master's project work. Drawing on Grant's ([2018]. 'Assembling Ourselves Differently? Contesting the Dominant Imaginary of Doctoral Supervision'. Parallax 24 (3): 356-370) understanding of being a supervisor as an ongoing process of assembling…

This paper provides insights into thesis supervisors' perceptions of the supervisory relationship and process in English-medium international master's degree programmes (IMDPs). It contributes to the field of supervisory pedagogy in a master's level education by examining how supervisors perceive their supervisory practices and what they consider…

Existing literature on transcultural doctoral education remains largely silent about how history enters knowledge creation and the supervisory relationship. This paper draws upon Andzaldúa's borderlands theory and de Sousa Santo's theory on epistemologies of the South to examine the complex ways that history impacts upon First Nations, migrant,…

The expansionist nature of the higher education sector has led to an increase in the provision of online Masters programmes. Many of these programmes are offered part-time attracting working professionals. The dissertation component that can be the culmination of many of these degrees is largely unexplored. A constructivist grounded theory…

This qualitative case study investigates two early-stage doctoral students' developing conceptions of research in their situated context. Drawing on data collected from in-depth interviews and informal conversations with the participants over two years, the study showed that the participants' research conceptions were in a symbiotic relationship…

While higher education (HE) research has long recognized the importance of providing emotional support to doctoral students, empirical inquiries have barely investigated doctoral supervisors' practice from the perspective of extrinsic emotion regulation. The current qualitative study used the framework of extrinsic emotion regulation (Gross 2014,…

This paper considers the experiences of a PhD student researcher grappling with a highly complex project. We examine a number of issues relating to teaching in the multilingual university and question the powerful role of English in the PhD journey. We focus on the implications of relying on English academic resources, the problem of the…