One of the greatest joys and simultaneously greatest sources of confusion (and sometimes, frustration) is that mysterious pact that gets made between a PhD candidate and their guide. Okay, it’s not a pact, it’s never quite worded as that, but it is an agreement of sorts. It’s a relationship. But like parenting, it’s slippery and shape-shifting twin, it is something we rarely learn through instruction and more often by experience and emulation. That’s what makes it tricky. If we’ve been parented well (or, more correctly, in healthy ways—my, what loaded words!) we may ourselves parent well. But there are an infinite number of variables that might intervene and moderate our translation of being parented into the act of parenting. Supervision is something like that, but on a much smaller scale and much more limited in temporal and spatial terms—even though some might say that it can be as life-transforming a phase for the supervisee. But then is that even the appropriate analogy? Th...
making sense of the everyday