Conscious disassociation / Objects of desire.

Sometimes, I need to sit at the top of the low I can see from my bedroom window. Being up high clears my busy head.

I’m in a complete state of information overload and I have to take a strategic and intentional approach to securing and reformulating my ideas. I’ve catalogued my reading, I’ve been dissecting that into themes and have pondered/written/spoken at length about a lot of these throughout various margins, blog posts and incoherent social media threads.

It currently feels very insular. I think I’m frustrated by a lack of broader experience supporting my area of study. To discuss and consider supervisory dynamics whilst very much living within them, and having had very little experience external to the one outside of my identity and position as a doctoral student, is at times like being enclosed within a room with no windows. I need to see what’s going on outside. I need to be able to see the bigger picture to understand what I’m grappling with. Naturally, this will come out in the data collection and analysis but I’m nowhere near that stage yet. So I’ve been making informal inquiries, latching onto anybody who has been even remotely outspoken about their own supervisory experiences just to season my reading and thoughts with an external perspective. 

I’m finding a lot of the reading I have been doing is from the technical POV with a means to guide academics into being and becoming better supervisors. Additionally, those that speak about the co-construction of space and experiences, for me, feel passionless and dry. There has to be more to the phenomenon that I’m yearning to understand. It’s not quite scratching the itch. 

There are two pieces of literature that have captured the essence of that particular intrigue, though. I’ll likely concentrate on just one for the sake of this post as it’s grown into a bit of a beast. 

The work of Barbara Grant fearlessly explores the depths and emotional resonances of supervision work. I was unsure of her writing and topic matter at first, but I’m slowly coming round to it. She was one of the first people I cited in my proposal, because she unashamedly spoke of the technicalities of power and desire in these transactional exchanges. She also made reference to the exchange of intellectual equals imparting knowledge. Mere acknowledgement of seeing your doctoral students as intellectual equals is subversive enough if the disdainful discourse I’ve seen online is anything to go by. I digress…

Grant challenges traditional conceptions of supervision pedagogy, deconstructing former models of master/slave dynamics, in where the student or supervisee is framed as subservient and passive. She also speaks fairly candidly of the transferences and countertransferences within the nature of these relationships, something that is often considered taboo and inappropriate to discuss within any educational context. However, it is one we perhaps need to seriously and deeply consider, because ultimately, our ways of relating dictate the trajectory and effectiveness of supervision. I’m also conscious that this needs to be considered with dignity and care for all involved.

It’s too mechanical to assume that two or more people within the supervisory space are there simply to get a job done. Perhaps this is true of some. That said, it cannot be denied there is an additional intensity in concentrated, shared working spaces. The supervisory dynamics during a student’s initial starting point is unequally weighted for a multitude of institutional and positional reasons – we know this and there is no separating it. If the supervisee needs specific guidance and coaxing to the starting block, the work undertaken on behalf of the supervisor(s) has to be underpinned by an ethic of care. It’s scary for everybody involved:

Can this person cope with the demands of the study? / Can I cope with the demands of the study?

How can I make sure this person gets what they need from this experience? / How comfortable do I feel effectively communicating what my needs are so not to hinder my progress?

In short, supervision simply cannot be completely distant and technical. It isn’t. I refuse to believe it’s like this in any discipline or subject area.

And yet as I read about some of these external perspectives, again I’m struck by the dryness and distant nature in some of the data. Perhaps I’m struggling to empathise. Or perhaps I’m not convinced. Above all, I question whether this is a true representation what may be actually happening. 

In one particular example within Grant’s work [I’ll go back into this and add references], a supervisor spoke of the emotional labour and concerned themselves with whether they were doing too much for the student. They reflected on the tone in which they addressed them – were they too abrupt or forceful? Interestingly, the supervisee simply said they found their guidance helpful, useful and they were able to capitalise upon this to help guide the trajectory of their work. I didn’t feel this particular bit of dialogue and data was all that insightful on its own, but it did trigger an alternative perspective I hadn’t fully considered. 

The insular nature and feelings I spoke about at the start of this post reverberate in the literature. Perhaps there is a key element to this phenomenon that implies our neurotic obsession to be liked actually transcends normative archetypal boundaries. That it’s more widespread than we give it credit for and hasn’t been explored because we’re not supposed to admit that sort of thing. We’re supposed to be professional.

I’m tentatively considering the idea that we seriously need to consider this from the perspective of the supervisor especially. So often, the research emphasis is about what is being done to the student or supervisee as the passive entity. I find it hugely contradictory that, whilst we challenge the constructions of power in these spaces and consider the dynamic to be transactional, the onus is on the supervisee to navigate these deeply personal contentions on their own.

My following hypothesis considers a couple of things that may be happening in response to being confronted by these emotional transferences. The third will explain how I intend to manage this: 

  1. Conscious disassociation: The supervisor intentionally ignores their impact and focusses solely on the technicalities of the role. It’s just a job. There’s minimal reflexivity and very little consideration for the emotional or relational resonances that form. If positive progress is being made with the work, that’s insight enough to know that their supervisee is on track. This is where the line is drawn. It’s filed away.
  2. Objects of desire: The supervisor obsessively reflects and considers their personal impact in relation to how they feel they are perceived by their supervisee. It becomes entangled in a web of their own subjectivities. This response, they understand, is through deep empathy for the supervisee in their care. It is also perhaps compounded by the supervisor’s desire to be liked and perceived in a way that fulfils the cultural/institutional expectation of the role or the personal conception of the role as a professional identity [perhaps this should be unpicked in future]. Above all else, there’s a desire for this care to be reciprocated in the appreciation and acknowledgement of their emotional labour. But in doing so, they objectify themselves and their supervisory dynamic. It’s self-indulgent. 
  3. Unashamed reflexivity: I would personally like to approach this with curiosity and open-mindedness, knowing where to place these contentions and manage them with intentional rationality. With that comes an acceptance that bonds may form, disagreements may occur and all of this has the potential to disrupt should it not be frequently checked. This is probably indicative of the flavour of brain I have, but if I, a mere doctoral student 6-weeks in, can see trends in the literature aligned with my own experiences so far [I mean, I’ve already grappled with deep foreboding dread, my imposter syndrome and the fear that I’m not putting as many hours into this as I should be doing…] and I can map that against very particular concepts and schools of thought to give myself a sense of what could be occurring in the moment… surely that means we’re a little more able to move away from this self-objectification and towards the understanding that the dynamic can be technical, but not cold; resonant, but not all-consuming. So that it purposely doesn’t deny the undeniable: this is the nature of the dynamic and the space.

In the third point above, I have clumsily explained a process of critical reflection. Ironically, something that trainee teachers are beaten with a stick about but something I’ve seen very little of since. Not until again recently upon the recommendation of starting a PhD journal. Again, the onus is framed solely on the student to navigate these contentions…

So I guess I have to ask: if i’m consciously reflexively analysing, are my supervisors? And I don’t mean the self-objectified self-indulgence in point 2. Or in the mechanical, distanced coldness of point 1.

Is there much room or opportunity for truly critical, unashamed and raw reflexivity in their own pedagogies of supervision? If so, what do those opportunities look like? Do they happen in unregulated third spaces over wine and coffee? Are they in the habit of privately journaling? Or are they inauthentically forced to embed it within performance management forms?

How are supervisors evaluating their practice and their effectiveness with all of the above going on? It’s messy. No wonder nobody wants to go near it.

Or is that where I come in?


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