Supervision in educational contexts: raising the stakes in a global world

Abstract

This paper brings together discourses surrounding two areas of supervision, educational and clinical, in order to address the increasing complexity of academic life. Educational supervision of postgraduate student researchers resonates with more clinical supervision practices. All are widely perceived as beneficial and promoted on ethical grounds. However, a comparison foregrounds supervision's problematic and questionable association with a neo-liberal economic agenda. Following a desire to speak the unspeakable in academic spaces, we apply a discursively informed critical analysis to describe supervision as an affluent, professional response to an increasingly restrictive individualism, which compounds the isolating function of an unsustainable regime. We explore the possibilities that supervisory practices offer as an organisational space in the domain of power, locating untapped potential in their ambivalence. We invite a radical revisioning of supervision as a platform that might have potential for an increasingly subversive and inclusive voice in higher education.