Where: Stellenbosch, South Africa
When: 25-28 March, 2025
Conference theme: ‘Postgraduate Supervision as Relational’
The last few decades have seen a ‘relational turn’ across the social sciences with an emphasis on knowledge and research as relational processes. Here one focus is on the interaction among stakeholders as they generate knowledge together. Of increasing importance are the relations among the social, the biological and the technological in a more-than-human world. Relationality also has significant implications for postgraduate supervision. We expect presentations, discussions and debate to focus on postgraduate supervision in its variety of relational spaces, processes and outcomes – particularly in the context of increases and decreases in international and cross-border postgraduate study opportunities, the role of knowledge and innovation in economies around the world, the important role supervisors collectively play in the quality of postgraduate work as well as the variety of countries and institutions where postgraduate work and future researchers are produced.
Within graduate studies and its supervision, multiple authors have pointed out that compassion for students and research rigour are not opposite points on a spectrum, or that a movement towards one automatically reduces the other. They are better described as mutually arising and mutually reinforcing. It is thus possible to embody both research rigour and compassion at the same time.
Supervision and postgraduate work take place in a variety of relational spaces: personal, individual, disciplinary, collective, institutional, material, physical, virtual, and others. The ‘relational journey’ in supervision and postgraduate work has been debated as useful, but probably insufficient, to capture all its complexities and intricacies. We may therefore link the term ‘relational’ to ways whereby studies are started and promoted, how challenges and obstacles are overcome, how assistance and support are provided and a host of other dynamic features of the supervision-study relational interface.
Finally, the term ‘relational’ points to connections and behaviours that are important to promote engagement between students and supervisors, students and students, supervisors and supervisors, between institutions and their (post)graduate students, institutions and their supervisors, and more. Also of interest is the impact of AI and digital platforms on supervision relationships. The theme is thus sufficiently broad to theorise, report, discuss and debate research on postgraduate supervision in its entire relational complexity and variety. All topics and strands (specifics to be announced later) will therefore focus on the inevitability of everyday realities that supervisors, (post)graduate students, graduate schools, and institutions of higher education face.
Important Dates:
First call for abstracts: 06 May 2024
Final submission date for abstracts: 30 September 2024
Final date for feedback to all authors of abstracts: 21 October 2024
Final submission date for amended abstracts: 04 November 2024
Closing date for early registration: 24 January 2025
Final date for late registration: 03 March 2025
Final submission of full papers (for conference publication): 21 April 2025
More on registration and other conference aspects will be added to the conference site in due course.
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