ABSTRACT
Research on doctoral students and their academic supervisors necessarily involved us in studying our own peers in the academy. Academics are all familiar with peer review of research and publications, but they are much less familiar with studying one another, or with being studied. Research in universities is not always easy: studying one’s own peers, members of the same profession, is not straightforward. Difficulties-practical, theoretical and political-can arise from the tensions between strangeness and familiarity in research sites, and from the tensions that arise from transgressing disciplinary boundaries. When Bourdieu writes of ‘excessive proximity’ he alerts us to one of the central ambiguities that we faced in conducting the fieldwork on academic socialization. Studying our peers, especially about a key aspect of academic policy such as higher degree supervision, can often be problematic. We should not, however, assume that we enjoy equal ‘proximity’ to all our fellow academics, or that proximity can be treated as a single dimension. There are many sources of proximity or distance and they are not coterminous. In this chapter we explore some of the key dimensions that informed our research. (The more mundane account of the data collection is given in Appendix 1, in which we outline the extent of our field research and its practical conduct.) We begin by discussing our fellow academics. We introduce the research experience with some brief vignettes that capture some aspects of our research negotiations and relationships. We present them in order to draw out more analytic themes for this chapter. Our main, overarching theme is an exploration of the tensions between Bourdieu’s ‘excessive proximity’ and ‘excessive remoteness’, as enacted in the field of doctoral research.
