Breaking the thesis mould

Becoming a PhD supervisor

This is a handy link to an outline for conventional thesis structure. I wish I’d had something like this, right from my colloquium, so that I was more alert to what I needed to be thinking about. It could form an organisational framework for note-taking… and yet I wonder whether this might preclude more creative work. Some students find ways to create sophisticated and innovative thesis structures that fulfil all the requirements of the conventional thesis, and do more as well. In my own thesis, I enacted my Bakhtinian conceptual framework, around the volatility of language and the tensions of competing discourses, by interspersing more conventional chapters with clusters of images and creative writing. In my introduction I listed the conventional sections then wrote:

Yet interleaved between these sections are clusters of words and images that themselves portray sites of struggle (Bakhtin, 1981), in the cultural production of girls, young…

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Special issue: call for papers

CFP

Teaching in Higher Education

Possibilities and complexities of decolonising higher education: critical perspectives on praxis (co-editors: Kathy Luckett, Aneta Hayes and Sharon Stein)

Photo by ICSA on Pexels.com

There is wide acknowledgement of the need to ‘decolonise’ higher education (Anderson, 2012; Aman, 2018). There have also been critiques of Western mono-conceptualizations of modernity, democracy and the nation-state (e.g. Chatterjee, 1997; Mbembe, 2015) and the role of modern universities in imposing these ideals on Indigenous and Global South communities. These critiques are also epistemological, challenging the assumption that Western-centric knowledge is humanity’s only valid way of knowing and that the West is both the model and apex of human development. The decolonial critique insists that modernity and ‘coloniality’ should be understood as mutually constitutive concepts. Further that the coloniality of modern universities manifests in hierarchical economic, political, socio-cultural, linguistic and intellectual relationships between dominant and marginalized populations (see for example Quijano, 2000; Marker, 2004; Mignolo…

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