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international students and doctoral study, Kindness and the neoliberal university, supervision across cultures
by Claire Aitchison
I’ve been to Bali. I’d always eschewed the possibility, so corrupted was my view of the place by images of ‘ugly Australians’ and other badly behaved tourists. But, intrigued by the work of some doctoral researchers and a couple of enthusiastic friends, I took the plunge. We spent time in a little village in the mountains. It was an extraordinary and beautiful experience in so many ways – but here I want to talk about kindness.
Kindness in Bali seems to be a national pastime. I was blown away by the numerous, daily acts of kindness. We were the recipients of so many kindnesses arising from concerns for our welfare, health, enjoyment, comfort and so on; it was almost unnerving. We were invited into people’s homes, to ceremonies at the village temple, we were offered food; the list goes on. Each morning and evening someone came to our house to lay out beautifully constructed offerings to protect us, and the home. It seemed extraordinary that this woman would care so much for the welfare of strangers, but by virtue of coming to the village, we were welcomed into their sphere of kindness, it would seem, without question.
Prior to arriving in Bali, I, like my colleagues, had been working at a manic pace in an environment where kindness, well, frankly, it simply rarely features.The contrast could not have been stronger, and it made me ponder on what’s happening to our university workplaces. How could village life be so rich in kindness and care, and our lives at work so lacking by comparison?
Theorising on neoliberal education and the enterprise university presents a convincing account of how the contemporary neoliberal subject (that is, us) is constructed in opposition to kindness. See for example, the Special Edition of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (Volume 20, No. 3, 2007). What counts in the global enterprise university is competitive advantage, so often made visible through self-promotion for personal advancement. Davies and Bansel speak about how, as neoliberal subjects, our everyday practices are corrupted and corrupting (reference below).
As our work as academics, administrators and research student supervisors becomes increasingly pressurised, making space for kindness takes time and effort that could be considered unproductive, even foolish, in the face of the relentless drive for job security and productivity – which, by the way, is mostly counted in the form of written, published outputs. The pressure to publish.
I couldn’t help reflecting on how hard it must be for those students who come from places where collective advantage is valued above individual pursuit. How hard it must be to reconcile those values in a context where doing kindness can be seen as a weakness, and where independent scholarship is promoted above collaboration. This clash of cultures can become acute within the student supervisor relationship and particularly in interactions around doctoral writing where differing expectations and ways of knowing surface. Anita Devos and Margaret Somerville explore some of these tensions in their article ‘What constitutes doctoral knowledge?: Exploring issues of power and subjectivity in doctoral examination’ http://www.aur.org.au/archive I know of others who write in this area including Michael Singh with colleagues from China, and Catherine Manathunga and Barbara Grant and colleagues (eg see: http://www.aur.org.au/archive )
There are many more; if you can alert us to other references, here’s your chance to help us build awareness and extend current prescriptions for doctoral practice.
Some references:
Davies, B., & Bansel, P. (2007). Neoliberalism and education. International Journal of qualitative studies in education, 20(3), 247 – 259.
Devos, A., & Somerville, M. (2012). What constitutes doctoral knowledge? Australian Universities’ Review (AUR) Special Issue: Contemporary Issues in Doctoral Education, 54(1), 47 -54. http://www.aur.org.au/archive
McKinley, L., & Grant, B. (2012). Expanding pedagogical boundaries: indigenous students undertaking doctoral education. In S. Danby & A. Lee (Eds.), Reshaping doctoral education: International approaches and pedagogies. London: Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415618137/
Ryan, J. (2012). Internationalisation of doctoral education: possibilities for new knowledge and understandings. Australian Universities’ Review (AUR) Special Issue: Contemporary Issues in Doctoral Education, 54(1), 55 – 63. http://www.aur.org.au/archive
Singh, M., & Chen, X. (2012). Ignorance and pedagogies of intellectual equality: internationalising Australian doctoral education programs and pedagogies through engaging Chinese theoretical tools. In A. Lee & S. Danby (Eds.), Reshaping doctoral education: International approaches and pedagogies (pp. 187 – 203). Oxon: Routledge. http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415618137/
Thanks Claire -it’s great to read your reflections on the interactions between kindness, academic identities and ways of knowing – hope we will see further posts on this topic!
Glad you enjoyed the post. I’ve had a surprising number of similar responses in the week since it went up. Perhaps a timely reminder for us (me too!) to think more inventively about what we do, and how we do it, as the academic year hots up… Have a good year. Claire
Your comments of Balinese people reminded me of home. NZ Maori are community minded, our research is often undertaken with our people in mind and is more regularly undertaken in collaboration with communities. Pasifika communities also have a similar story. It is challenging for tertiary providers and postgrad supervisors in NZ. There have been challenges about what constitutes knowledge, collaborative research and cultural competencies which is reshaping research and the supervisory relationship in NZ. AKO Aotearoa has some research on supervisory relationships – there are some good references in it and provides some insight into the supervisors view of the relationship. https://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/download/ng/file/group-1614/n1622-developing-research-supervision-skills—full-project-report.pdf
Ted Glynn also has a nice article that explains the view of a researcher with Maori communities.
http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10289/3296/Engaging%20and%20working%20with%20Maori.pdf;jsessionid=7B3D1E3275090FA92FD1EAA7260A1848?sequence=1
McKinley, E., Grant, B., Middleton, S., Irwin, K., & Williams, L. R. (2009). Supervision of Maori doctoral students: A descriptive report.
Kokonga, T. He rautaki mo te akoranga kairangi: The nature of doctoral supervision.
Daniels, J., D’ANDREA, M. I. C. H. A. E. L., & Kim, B. S. K. (1999). Assessing the Barriers and Changes of Cross‐Cultural Supervision: A Case Study. Counselor Education and Supervision, 38(3), 191-204.
Trafford, J. A. (2012). Research supervision practices in New Zealand postgraduate geography: capacity-capability potentialities (Doctoral dissertation, ResearchSpace@ Auckland).
Kia Waimarie – good luck.
Thank you Averil for your thoughts and more great references. Sometimes under the weight of the auditing regimes that dominate our work, it can be hard for alternative ways of seeing, doing and supervising doctoral research to get exposure. Thanks for the references!
I’m entering this conversation rather late, but it’s a great topic and so interesting to hear all your thoughts on this. I’m tackling this area in my doctoral studies where I’m using the concept of kindness (and related ‘relational’ concepts of care and the gift) as an analytic through which to imagine an alternative, more generative, view of being and becoming an academic than is emerging from the rather dire views about the future of academia. At the heart of this is thinking about ‘selves in relation’, which doesn’t get much press in our neoliberal discourses.
I particularly related to the comments about Bali and about NZ Maori. I had similar feelings when I visited Vietnam. We have so much to learn from these cultures, yet ‘progress’ is seen as turning these communities to our much more individualized western ways.
I’ve come across some great references along the way and have put a few below. I did a presentation at AARE last year and, though there isn’t a paper (yet) I would be delighted to discuss my ideas with anyone. Stephen Rowland and Sue Clegg have also written some nice pieces about kindness in higher education, and there are some interesting books that analyse our modern views of kindness (see Phillips & Taylor and Hamrick).
McLean (2012) Working the spaces of neoliberalism with kindness: An alternative view of becoming and being an academic in the modern university. Presentation at the AARE conference, Sydney December 2 – 6, 2012.
Clegg, S., & Rowland, S. (2010). Kindness in pedagogical practice and academic life. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31(6), 719–735
Rowland, S. (2009). Kindness. London Review of Education, 7(3), 207–210.
Phillips, A., & Taylor, B. (2010). On Kindness. Picador.
Hamrick, W. S. (2002). Kindness and the Good Society. SUNY Press.
Thank you Jan. I’m so pleased you shared this info with us – Great references and what a fabulous doctoral project! I’m sure it will be hugely satisfying; and such important work.
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I read your blog post about kindness in Bali and the issues of what constitutes knowledge. I was intrigued by both topics.
Regarding kindness, I am inclined to believe that it is an issue of a modern versus traditional society. Many traditional societies put special emphasis on values such as hospitality. In modern societies hospitality is something exotic and romantic. Whereas neoliberalism might have exacerbated the situation by putting extra focus on the material aspect of being, losing such values is a probably a by-product of modernity. I am afraid many western scholars fall in the trap of characterizing everything modern with western and everything western with modern, and at the same time essentializing traditional values as something non-western and as either positive or negative. This is not a critique of what you said, just a thinking-out-loud exercise. In this respect, I wanted to share with you some questions related to modernity, that as a students of transforming societies I have been pondering. The obvious one is: Is modernity western? Is modernity a western phenomenon which arose under specific circumstances and can not be replicated somewhere else? Are non-western societies doomed/blessed with remaining traditional? Can non-western societies become modern? How does modernity manifest itself in developed East Asian countries? Are doing modernity differently than the West? Did the West do modernity wrong? What can the West learn from non-western modernities such as East Asian and East European (which is most closely related to the west)?
Regarding what constitutes knowledge and the issue of international students. Some important questions can be raised from this as well. What is the total amount of knowledge that a PhD student from another country brings? What if he/she has been a refugee, experienced war, lived in apartheid? How does life experience matter? If these questions are taken seriously and if alternative forms of knowledge are valued than the real question is how to express and operationalize that knowledge?
I hope I have not bothered you with this email.
Best regards,
Follow up:
I agree that it is almost impossible for societies to remain “traditional” now even if they chose to do so (Bhutan?), or explicitly claim to be so (Saudi Arabia?). The work of Fred Riggs and Zygmunt Bauman is, of course, very informative on the issue of modernization and modernity.
I am sceptical that internationalization agendas or international students will lead to any move towards finding a middle ground between the modern and the traditional. As you say, the current model of a higher education institution leaves no room for that.