The Supervisory Assemblage: A Singular Doctoral Experience

Product Description In this unique book, Liz Done undertakes an affective thought-provoking nomadic inquiry into the doctoral process in which she engages with the writings of Deleuze, Cixous, Nietzsche, Foucault and many others. The paradox of learning, as thoroughly relational but simultaneously implying the radical specificity of every learner s experience, is unpacked in a text that is careful to explain the ideas and theories that are mobilised. As a pedagogic intervention, the book seeks to raise questions, not answer them, but ultimately offers a very powerful statement about the value of education as learning and its capacity to transform a life. Academic production is revealed as a situated, embedded, relational, and complex process. The book s rhizomatic threads include: transgressing linear neopositivist models, doing something different with theory, the importance of free experimentation, and memory as both mobility and freedom. Braidotti s nomadic subjectivity and Gannon s refusal to be pinned down in a bid for intellectual purity were also mobilised in the writing of this text. It performs the inclusive potential of Deleuzian and feminist poststructuralist thought, insisting on a scholarship that is about open inquiry, (ad)venture, and learning as multiplicity. It is untimely, as Deleuze might say, in its contemporary relevance. Review Liz Done makes a distinctive and original contribution to the literature on doctoral supervision and to academic supervision in general. Her alternative model has the characteristics of free and practical experimentation. It is suggestive of a process of becoming, in which writing is an intrinsic element. Liz successfully interweaves distinctive auto-ethnographic material with scholarly reflection and conceptual analysis of a careful selection of sources pertinent to her nomadic inquiry. --Dr Joanna Haynes, Associate Professor in Education Studies, University of PlymouthLiz Done has performed us all a favour with this book. It is a gift. Her writing is lucid, her thinking nuanced, and she takes us on her travels through the doctoral experience with energy and passion. She has crafted a work of depth and intelligence, one that offers a powerful, poignant, theoretically-rich challenge to the prevailing instrumentalism of higher education discourse. --Jonathan Wyatt, Research Fellow and Head of Professional Development, University of OxfordI would like to commend this remarkable new book. Rather than the tired linearity of much academic argument, where options for thinking otherwise are systematically closed down as the text progresses, this book opens the reader to multiplicities, provokes intensities, ripples and resonances in our own lives. It argues against the expansion of education without learning , those approaches that homogenise thought, infantilise students by disregarding their prior worldly experiences, or position them as more or less compliant or recalcitrant in response to proper supervisory guidance. --Susanne Gannon, Associate Professor, Center for Educational Research, University of Western Sydney About the Author Liz Done is an Associate Lecturer at Plymouth University and a Visiting Fellow in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Bristol. Her research interests include postgraduate writing, CPD, qualitative methods, inclusion and post-identitarian pedagogy. Liz has published in Studies in Higher Education, the International Journal of Inclusive Education and Reflective Practice.