Supervisory scratchings: critical autoethnography complicating “process” in doctoral supervision

In this dialogic paper of interwoven stories we employ a critical autoethnographic approach to explore moments of our lives as we worked through the official “research plan” at the heart of the supervision timeline. Lucinda’s doctoral thesis in education, supervised by Jo, highlights the way curriculum emerges from the struggles of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981) as she and a group of teachers develop curriculum and perform identity both as co-researchers and as inescapably gendered subjects. Here instead we turn to how this might work in relation to the supervisory relationship, linking the personal and political to trouble the research plan developed in the first months of the PhD timeline. We write around a narrative from the original thesis which troubled both of us and rework our own stories of the supervised and the supervisor through the competing discourses of our work and lives.