Detonating the research plan: exploding the supervisory process

Bomb making is dangerous work. And not just because what you’re creating can blow up in your face. Even as you type in your search terms – how to make a bomb – you wonder who is watching, what algorithm might throw you up into the light of surveillance and trigger the knock at the door. (McKnight, 2014, p. 1) Abstract So begins Lucinda’s PhD. In this dialogic paper of interwoven stories we employ a critical auto-ethnographic approach to explode moments of our lives and work together as we worked through the “research plan” at the heart of the supervision timeline. Lucinda’s thesis highlights the way curriculum emerges from the struggles of ideological becoming (Bakhtin 1981) as she and a group of teachers, sought to produce and perform both individual gendered identities (Butler 1997, 2007) and plans for the identities of student subjects, while negotiating subject positions made available to girls and women in broader social contexts. The link between the personal and political is created by a methodology combining narrative inquiry and discourse analysis as a heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) text. In this paper we detonate the research plan developed in the first months of the PhD timeline as Jo responds to Lucinda’s narratives with her own, and we share jointly written narratives that try to capture some key moments of the process. We rework our own stories of the supervised and the supervisor through the competing discourses of our work and lives.