Intercultural Postgraduate Supervision
Reimagining time, place and knowledge
Join the Department of Language and Literacy Education in welcoming Associate Professor Catherine Manathunga of the College of Education, Victoria University as she gives a research talk on Tuesday, August 4th, 2015, from 1o:00 to 11:30 am in Neville Scarfe, Room 310.
Decades of postcolonial, Indigenous and feminist research has been largely ignored in contemporary geopolitical power struggles over knowledge. Western/Northern knowledge continues to claim universality across time and space in many social science and science disciplines as many theorists have demonstrated (eg. Chakrabarty, 2007; Connell, 2007; Alatas, 2006; Cortini & Jin, 2013). The forces of globalisation and neoliberalism that continue to dominate current educational discourses have only further entrenched Northern epistemological hegemony. In this seminar, I will briefly outline the arguments presented in my recent book on Intercultural postgraduate supervision: reimagining time, place and knowledge (Manathunga, 2014). In this book I sought to conduct pedagogical re-readings of an eclectic collection of postcolonial, Indigenous, feminist, social and cultural geography theories about time, place and knowledge in order to reimagine intercultural doctoral or graduate education. I argue that we need to place history, geography and diverse cultural knowledges at the centre of intercultural supervision pedagogy if we are to develop effective, transcultural approaches to supervision. I will then briefly describe the empirical study that I did of intercultural supervision at an Australian university, which found evidence of assimilationist and transcultural supervision pedagogies and experiences of unholiness among doctoral students and supervisors.