To inherit or to interrupt: Rethinking the relational politics of doctoral supervision

Situated within the tradition of critical pedagogy, this paper reconceptualizes doctoral supervision as a relational site of academic inheritance that is contested, embodied, and under-theorized. It critiques the technocratic and patriarchal undercurrents of contemporary doctoral education by framing supervision as a pedagogical space where processes of subjectification and socialization are inseparably entangled. Building on this foundation, the paper mobilizes Michel de Certeau’s praxeology of tactical resistance, Barbara Thayer-Bacon’s relational epistemology, and Gert Biesta’s ethics of subjectification to frame knowledge production not as the static replication of norms but as a situated, intersubjective, and politically charged practice. Doctoral students emerge as agentive tacticians who reconfigure inherited discourses through resistance and situated creativity. Supervisors, positioned as bearers of disciplinary authority, are confronted with the paradox of sustaining institutional continuity while accommodating disruption. The encounter between strategic constraint and tactical agency gives rise to a heterotopic academic space marked by critical reciprocity. This paper contributes to reimagining supervision as a locus of emancipatory pedagogical practice within the neoliberal university and offers insight into how critical pedagogy can inform more relational and reflexive modes of supervising knowledge production in higher education.