'TALKING DIRTY': SITUATING POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH Postgraduate Research Supervision. Transforming (R)Elations. Alison Bartlett and Gina Mercer, eds. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. By Gillian Whitlock Last year a colleague discussed with me his plans for a large international conference to be held here in Australia in mid 2002. From the very start the idea of a day set aside for postgraduate students was one of the priorities. This day was, in his view, a unique opportunity to place postgraduate research and the needs of postgraduate students at centre-stage, and as the focus of attention for researchers renowned for their work in our sub-discipline. And so the fourth and last day of the conference was set aside for this purpose. A week or so ago at the end of a session when we had discussed several chapters of her thesis which had excited us both, one of my PhD students raised an issue which was causing her some grief. A conference which would gather the very best people in our research area here next year was organised in a way that made postgraduate students second class citizens. She regretted identifying herself to organisers as a postgraduate student, for this meant she was scheduled to give her paper on the last day of the conference, and at a more remote campus location. She felt sure many delegates would leave early, shop for books, or otherwise avoid the day. From her perspective, the plans for postgraduates produced an awkward and unnecessary split in what should function as an integrated research community. Thankfully the dilemma was quickly sorted out. She (and others) made their case to conference organisers in a way which led to a rapid reshaping of plans for the conference sessions. The postgraduate day remains, but postgraduate students will present papers throughout the conference. This incident raises issues which are at the heart of Bartlett and Mercer's collection of essays about the codes and conduct of postgraduate research in Australian universities. How are relations between postgraduate students, their supervisors and the larger research community best conceptualised? What are the needs of postgraduate students in a tertiary sector which is ongoing rapid transformation? How are good working relations established and sustained during the long passage of the research thesis? As the small story above indicates, good intentions do not necessarily produce good results. Gestures of respect and concern can have unintended outcomes. And this is so because this relationship is situated in a nexus of power relations which need to be negotiated with care by both supervisor and supervisee. It is a highly complex and vulnerable personal, social, institutional relationship. The intention of this collection is to bring a cluster of different approaches and ways of thinking about this relationship together. Many of the essays are personal, and the collection begins with Bartlett and Mercer's subjective discussion of their own relationship as student and supervisor. In the past decade there has been a growing body of literature on postgraduate research supervision. Some of this is the 'how to' genre and, as Mercer points out, when we set out to become supervisors many of us feel overwhelmed by the commitment and responsibility which it involves, and in need of good guidance. Most importantly, we also set out with our own history as a postgraduate student, and this shapes our practices in powerful ways. The editors argue that much of the material currently available fails to recognise how supervision is embedded in various forms of inequality and difference. Characteristically this literature deals with academic preoccupations about topic, research methodology and thesis writing, with little attention to the commitments, identifications and complexities that arise due to the impact of family responsibilities, cultural and racial difference, differently-abled bodies, and sexualities. The point is, that the nature of the relationship between supervisor and supervisee in the Australian system of postgraduate research, a close and exclusive working relationship over a long period of time, means that these considerations are vital. The intention here is to trigger a particular kind of thinking about postgraduate pedagogy. By drawing on metaphors and notions of mutual and cooperative interrelationship – the conversation for example, or the narrative made up together – and by focussing on intimate and detailed stories about actual postgraduate supervision experiences which become emblematic stories the editors seek to develop a situated knowledge. “We want to make space for 'talking dirty'… for slipping beneath the 'cleaned up'official discourses of the institution, for going beyond the hygenic checklists of the 'how-to' guides'(5). Clearly, and quite specifically, feminist methodologies are important in generating this approach to postgraduate pedagogy. For example the concern with difference, and the importance of the subjective and experiential as important ways of knowing, the interest in the specifics of social, cultural and corporeal circumstances, and the search for more egalitarian ways of representing this relationship suggest the influence of feminist thinking. Germinal here is the idea that current dominant ways of conceptualising postgraduate teaching and learning, organised in terms of the master/apprentice model, simply don't work for women academics. In this way, rethinking postgraduate pedagogy is part of a more wide-ranging attempt to dismantle the fiction of the disembodied scholar. Much of the existing literature on supervision presumes a highly generalised 'student' and 'supervisor'as the rational and autonomous individuals of liberal discourse, and this eschews the importance of desire and anxiety, pleasure and emotion in the work of pedagogy. Inevitably power is an important issue here. As Barbara Grant points out in the essay which introduces the notion of 'dirty talk'to the collection, two senses of power are relevant to an analysis of supervision. The first is the notion of power as structured and unequal – supervisors, because of their institutional position and function, have more power than students. Second, the more interactive and intersubjective sense of power is important in conceptualising this relationship, for it figures a power relation which is lived out in productive but constrained ways. The desire to shift thinking about postgraduate supervision to that more interactive and situated model is the recurrent theme and purpose of these essays. Grant, for example, points out how codes of student conduct legitimate unrealistic pictures of supervision as a fundamentally reasonable practice rather than risky business. Bob Smith's essay also reframes postgraduate pedagogy with particular attention to the limitations of administrative discourses of 'best practice.' The instrumental logic that reduces supervision to roles, responsibilities, attributes of quality, and structured teaching strategies also works to obscure and deny that power/ knowledge nexus which is at the heart of postgraduate work, and it also installs the rational subject in centre stage. As a collection of emblematic stories these chapters work brilliantly to produce a more situated perspective. Balatti and Whitehouse discuss eloquently the loss of power they experienced as they moved from busy careers to postgraduate studies, 'out of the loop and into the dark'. Here, in the 'dark', they learn the currency of photocopier pin numbers, the various codes which regulate access to badly needed resources in resource depleted departments, and the all-important hidden curriculum. Kelly and Ling place postgraduate studies in the context of a 'posttraditional era', a time when rapid technological advances blur boundaries between groups, nations and identities, where relationships take on new meanings and require new skills and understandings. They argue that postgraduate studies need to be rearranged accordingly. Other agents of change are shifts in the substance of postgraduate studies, and so Perry and Brophy consider the ways that creative writing has entered tertiary Arts courses, and other contributors point to the ways that different histories, shaped by Indigeneity or migrations, for example, fundamentally affect the construction of postgraduate subjectivities. Altogether some fifty contributors are included in this collection. Together they take up in very diverse ways the desire of the editors to reconfigure ways of thinking about postgraduate supervision. In their own chapter, Bartlett and Mercer offer some ways of imagining new narratives of creative and interactive work between supervisor and supervisee. And so they imagine the supervisor and candidate positioned in the kitchen, cooking up a feast. Or the candidature is analogous to creating a garden/thesis on a patch of spare ground, with the supervisor as the kindly experienced neighbour. Or the postgraduate candidate and supervisor are companions setting out on a lengthy bushwalk together. They suggest that creating a metaphor to represent their relationship is a useful teaching tool to initiate discussion between potential and existing candidates and supervisors. In this way at least a supervisor eager to set out on a bushwalk and a candidate who desires a formal, hierarchical relationship more in the nature of a waltz can quickly establish their difference, and explore ways of accomodating their preferences. It is a strength of this collection that it does explore consistently various ways towards more collegial and egalitarian postgraduate pedagogies. These alternative narratives do not always recognise the impotence of good intentions against the overwhelming realities of the power relations that structure postgraduate studies (I write this review in the week where postgraduate rankings for Australian Postgraduate Awards are determined.) Nor do they establish clear models of alternative practices in a 'how-to' fashion. But this is as it should be, for the work of essays like this is to encourage a self-reflective approach to postgraduate supervision. The challenge is to invent one's own narrative, metaphor and praxis not just through introspection, in theory and in solitude, but through dialogue with that other half that coexists with you in supervision. Gillian Whitlock is Director of Graduate Studies in English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. She was supervised by Professor John Matthews at Queen's University, a supervisor with a formidable reputation for assisting candidates to complete the PhD through meetings which were timed always by the act of filling, lighting and smoking a pipe.