ABSTRACT
The acquisition of a PhD in South Africa is as big an achievement as it is elsewhere in the world. It is an event that has deep significance for the questions of self and other, especially as these are refracted through the vectors of race, class and gender. It constitutes a moment where individual identity is profoundly reconfigured and where the social hierarchies that order status positions of subordinate-ness and superiority are, if not turned upside down, then certainly, recomposed and rearranged. What I do in this chapter is lift out for consideration the sociological issues that present themselves in the course of doing a PhD in South Africa. In identifying these issues I draw essentially on my experience as a participant in the development of a number of doctoral initiatives in South Africa, a convenor of PhD programmes and, most pertinently, a supervisor/adviser of more than a dozen doctoral students in the last 14 years. My experience during this period has essentially been with students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, namely, students of colour and women. Although I have had the opportunity of advising socio-economically advantaged students – those who come to the PhD with the economic, cultural and social backgrounds to manage the progression into the PhD with relative ease,1 it is my work and relationship with many economically and socially disadvantaged students, and particularly female students of colour, that is of consequence here. The approach I take is not empirical, in the sense that I have systematically documented the experience of my students. Instead, I reflect on the issues that they have deliberately and consciously raised with me, and also many that they have not but of which I have become aware. It is for this reason that I present this chapter as an exploratory analysis. I look particularly at the experience of what it means to do a PhD from a social and
cultural perspective as opposed to the procedural mechanics of doing so. I am not concerned with the questions of supervisor-relationship per se, or the kinds of questions that relate to how one conducts these. I do not look at the question of how one might do a PhD. What kinds of challenges arise in this experience and how these experiences reflect the specific dynamics and nature of the South African higher education environment are essentially what I am interested in.
