Of Other Thoughts and Renegade Knowledges

TES: Kia ora Bob, I’m happy that you could make the time to contribute to our book in the end. It matters to me because you were the external advisor to my own PhD, so it is nice to collaborate like this many years later! Now, let me ask what you think about the term “non-traditional” in the title of this book, given that the term “traditional” is so habitually associated with Māori culture?

Tolerance of uncertainty is crucial in creative practice-led PhD projects. This paper draws on our combined experiences as an Iranian born candidate and a German born supervisor negotiating their supervisory relationship in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. We argue for the vital role of negotiated territories, threshold spaces of potentiality, in PhD supervision. While we take this to be crucial in all PhD projects exploring a research topic creatively, it is even more important for candidates who are not what Taylor & Beasley (2005) call "traditional candidates". They and their supervisors often have to confront tensions resulting from different world views. The field of difference and differential power between them can be imagined as a threshold, limiting and divisive at times, but also providing possibilities for change, dialogue and discovery.

Ever since scientific work … has given itself its own proper and appropriable places through rational projects capable of determining their procedures, … ever since it was founded as a plurality of limited and distinct fields, in short ever since it stopped being theological, it has constituted the whole as its remainder; this remainder has become what we call culture.