Abstract:
Little is known about how disciplines have developed in the late 20th and early 21st century within rapidly changing and sometimes contradictory institutional, national and global contexts. These include influences of the: rise in globalising higher education; privileging of research as the distinguishing activity of universities; calls for interdisciplinarity to address complex issues; national efforts to assess research performance, especially in disciplinary terms; and pressures to ‘grow’ the postgraduate research numbers. In contributing to better understandings of contemporary geography and postgraduate education, this thesis interrogates the emergence of postgraduate research supervision practices in NZ university geography in the period 1993-2008. The point of entry to this thesis is Harvey’s (2000) call on geographers to focus on what it might mean to ‘think like a geographer’ to ensure the discipline’s future. I proceed further to explore both ‘thinking and doing like a geographer’ and ‘thinking and doing geographies’ in postgraduate geography education. My research transcends strictly representational approaches, incorporating the ‘practice’ turn in geography, to draw on and articulate a blend of representational and performative geographies through a poststructural political economy lens. The thesis interrogates NZ’s postgraduate geography knowledge production enterprise against a discussion of the changing NZ higher education context and NZ geography’s trajectory as a globalising/localising set of knowledges and practices. In the study period a total of 1208 masters and doctoral geography theses were completed, involving 230 supervisors. The thesis conceptualised research supervision initially as a supervisor-student relation to inform methodological development. First, a broad description of topic emphasis, thesis completions and profile of supervisory involvement was undertaken using government, university and departmental data sources. Second, the performance of supervision relationships was then explored by constituting new data about supervision practices from (1) abstracts and acknowledgements of the theses and (2) interviews of students and supervisors relating to practices they encountered when supervised or when used in the course of supervision. These methodologies allowed Abstract and key words iv supervisor-student relations to be examined as a gradually emerging assemblage of identified, grounded and critiqued practices. The approaches revealed a gradual move away from more disciplinary-centric research practices to more outward-oriented, bordercrossing engagements. Third, a review of ‘good’ supervisory practices identified in the burgeoning international education literature in the late 2000s identified new understandings about the supervisor-student relation. A re-framing of supervision as pedagogy makes the object of inquiry the student-supervisor-knowledge relation. Reading away from the empirical evidence, and informed by the new international understandings from the educational literature, NZ postgraduate geography research supervision practices were revisited. Voices of supervisors and students elucidate co-learning, co-production and other distinctive practices that sustained the postgraduate geography enterprise through changing contexts. Assemblage of these practices, dependent on effective communication, enabled generative work to be done in and from the steadily transforming disciplinary knowledge space in NZ. The thesis argues that supervision as pedagogy, with its framing of the triad of student-supervisor- knowledge, demands attention to research capacities and capabilities to enable new lines of knowledge production to be performed. The insights from NZ’s postgraduate research supervision trajectory inform framings and guiding questions for explicitly considering how research capacity-capability might be built. It is concluded that working simultaneously with representational and performative appraoches will nurture geography's future as a generative discipline.