CIHE Speaker Series - Graduate Education in Global Context

The traditional masculine architecture of master and apprentice (or disciple) in doctoral supervision for the arts, humanities and social sciences is undoubtedly under challenge. This architecture, the father’s house of supervision, with its exclusively male occupants was established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It persisted largely unchallenged until the final decades of the twentieth century, when doctoral numbers bloomed throughout the West and women took occupancy of the house as students and supervisors. In this seminar I will review the extant (anglophone, largely white feminist) literature on women doctoral supervisors to ask two questions: what are women doing to supervision? And, is the woman supervisor really just a man? My conclusions underscore the complexity of efforts to dismantle the father’s house of supervision.