Doctoral supervision across boundaries

This book explores how trends of increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity and internationalization on the one hand, and efficiency and professionalization on the other, affect doctoral supervision. Based on experiences from a Scandinavian interdisciplinary research school, the volume explores supervision as a distributed practice in a particular context.

The volume discusses existing research on interdisciplinary doctoral education and supervision, as well as how handbooks on supervision discuss the impact of conducting interdisciplinary projects. It highlights how PhD students and supervisors experience their roles in the supervision of interdisciplinary projects and analyzes how committees evaluate interdisciplinary dissertations. Additionally, it explores processes of learning interdisciplinary research practices between Scandinavian and North American contexts.

The volume broadens the field by adding new empirical and theoretical insights on how larger transformations of the context of PhD education in late modern knowledge societies shape interdisciplinary supervision practices. The chapters confirm insights from previous research showing that supervision involves multiple agents and processes of socialization, intersecting components of identity, and negotiations between varying cultures and expectations. In addition, the book offers new insights about how alternative learning modes and continuous interactions between PhD students and supervisors across disciplines can provide fruitful spaces for handling new challenges. A core argument for practice and future research is that supervision can no longer be limited to the dyadic, pre-scheduled meetings between a supervisor and a PhD student, but needs to be approached as a distributed practice across temporal and spatial modes of organization.