ABSTRACT
Spatial questions are central in academic work. As a supervisor of doctoral students, a manager of doctoral programmes, and a researcher on higher education, I have heard countless stories from doctoral graduates about ‘finding time’, ‘clearing space’, or ‘making room.’ As Harvey (1996: 267) argues, ‘space may be forgotten as an analytical category open to questioning, but it is omnipresent as an unquestioned category in everything we do’. Academic life is replete with spatial language. Thesis-writers are required to locate their
research in epistemological or abstract space: to position research topics, questions, methodologies and theories in recognised fields or disciplines. The conceptual, interpersonal, financial and professional components of disciplines are globally constructed, coalescing around and forging connections between international, national, regional and local hubs, including conferences and journals. Disciplines rank and reward; according differential status to individuals, research units, paradigms and publications where ‘The language of exclusion is by and large spatial; who’s in, who’s out, at the heart, on the margins’ (Gulson and Symes 2007: 99). Doctoral students’ engagements with disciplines are faceto-face, in print, and online. As learning spaces, the disciplines of the twenty-first century have been reconfigured by ‘the interactive effects of globalisation and the ICT revolution’ (Ferguson and Seddon 2007: 117). Students’ and supervisors’ intellectual identifications and professional affinities with
these ‘fields’ are overlaid by the organisational categories of the institutions in which they are enrolled or employed. Institutions classify students and staff according to administrative categories (such as programmes and subjects) and locate them geographically in buildings assigned to faculties and departments. As Bernstein (2000) indicates, organisational divisions within institutions do not always coincide with researchers’ wider professional disciplinary affiliations. Students whose topics do not neatly fit the organisation’s departmental structure may find themselves torn, straddling multiple institutional locations. The locational complexities of doctoral work are evident in the following extract from
an interview with Dee, a PhD graduate in education.1 Dee was enrolled in an education faculty in which she was also a member of staff:
The first six months were terribly angst driven. I wandered around reading way out, this great breadth of Pacific Ocean reading, in order to try and write something that
was fine and focussed and blazing – only to find that I couldn’t bridge the gap between the Pacific Ocean of reading to this fine line of academic writing. And that was painful – trying to tame the ocean, trying to pull it into something that was going to be really focussed. That took six months and I felt like I was wasting time. I could hear the clock, ‘tick, tick, tick.’ And I could feel my anxiety levels rising ‘cause I was on study leave to begin it and I just felt it was going nowhere. I got very fit. I went for lots of runs. After each run I would think, ‘I’ve got it now and I know where I am going,’ only to go and do a classroom observation and find that I was more confused than ever.
