‘The Western tradition’, as passe-partout, includes fringe figures, émigrés and migrants. Rather than looking to resources at the core of the Western tradition to overcome its own blindnesses, I am more interested in its gaps and peripheries, where other thoughts and renegade knowledges take hold. It is in the contact zones with strangers that glimpses of any culture’s philosophical blindness become possible and changes towards a different understanding of knowledge can begin. In the context of education, I am above all interested in PhD candidates who wish to draw on the bodies and modes of knowledge they bring with them to the university. Some are not well represented: Indigenous and other non-Western traditions, non-English languages, and the renegade knowledges of marginalised groups. My context is that of creative practice-led PhD theses at AUT University, Auckland (Aotearoa/New Zealand) which have made me aware of the importance of cosmopolitics to understand education in the context of entangled histories of colonisation and domination; border-crossing interdependencies; new types of conflict and new ways of building communities. My study thus explores aspects of transculturation—involving not only ethnic cultures (often the default understanding of culture) but also different disciplinary knowledge cultures. The place that no-one owns in Western tradition, the place of fringe figures, émigrés and migrants, may offer a point from which non-traditional candidates’ thoughts can lever off to build connections with their own stores of knowledge. (Non-traditional candidates belong to minorities in Western universities until about thirty years ago when traditional candidates were ‘male, from high-status social-economic backgrounds, members of majority ethnic and/or racial groups, and without disability’.) This usually means for Western supervisors that they need to recognise their ignorance towards parts of their own traditions, as well as those of their candidates. The proposition I will explore is that the emergent research of non-traditional candidates can thrive on gaps and on the fringes—provided that both candidates and supervisors are able to be porous to the unknown and ‘troubled by the presumption of equality’. The potential of the gap, the unknown, which simultaneously separates and connects candidates and supervisors, can be the beginning of generating a thing in common. This is a rich and creative place for new thought, which may open the academy to transcultural knowledge.
To speak of the offerings of fringe figures and migrants implies an engagement, if only by contrast. Offering’s antonyms are refusal or withdrawal. Offering also implies movement (L. ob ‘to’ + ferre ‘to bring, to carry’), an engagement with something left behind or not yet accessed, the transfer of something to be presented in a new context (L. offerre ‘to present, bestow, bring before’). This mobile, engaged presentation, I propose, raises issues concerning more than one intellectual tradition, cultural configuration, or language. Fringe figures, émigrés and migrants always contribute (L. con-‘with’ + tribuere ‘bestow’) to a society or culture—even after they have left. I base this proposition on the literature as well as on my own experiences and observations. Both suggest that insights into situations, strategies and chances of success grow along with the knowledge of more than one society, culture, language and tradition. The crises often associated with the transitions from one to the other can strengthen determination, confidence and independent action, and a lack of familiarity with the dominant culture can amplify the recognition of contradictions.
Since I was born and raised in Germany, ‘the Western tradition’ is my own starting point. I was for the first time confronted with a non-European tradition and a non-European language when I migrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand in the early 1980s, in my twenties. The immediate experience of Māori culture, in all its differences and similarities, caused shock, and Te Reo Māori (Māori language), as a very different ‘window on the world’, opened new vistas. This was the first step in a gradual estrangement from my own culture and history, an estrangement Gilroy regards as essential for a critical knowledge of one’s own society (2005, p. 67). My PhD, undertaken much later at the University of Auckland, was another. Originally conceived in Germany, the thesis developed decidedly local inflexions during explorations of European/Pacific connections. As it neared completion, I realised in hindsight that a large proportion of the writers I had chosen to engage with were fringe figures, many of them Jewish refugees who left Germany during the Nazi regime: Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Ernst Cassirer, Norbert Elias, Sigmund Freud and Ernst Gombrich. All were, at various stages of their lives, dissidents and migrants.
A conjunction of experience and theorising is apparent in Arendt’s themes of plurality and natality. Likewise, Benjamin’s concepts and theories were influenced by his experiences as émigré and migrant. Their examples show how ‘the Western tradition’, as passe-partout, includes liminal figures. Today, the gaps and peripheries of traditions, where other thoughts and renegade knowledges take hold, are equally or even more significant. Authors such as Gilroy (2005) and Honig (2006) explore the potentials of agonistic forms of cosmopolitanism that thrive on exposure to otherness and place great store on virtues like listening and friendship; Baecker (2012) and Beck and Grande (2010) highlight the contributions of pluralistic reflexivity to European society; Gunew (2013) and Todd (2010) link these forms of cosmopolitics to education. Finally, Jacques Rancière’s writings concerning that Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jean-Joseph Jacotot (1770–1840), who fled to Belgium during the Bourbon Restoration in France (1991, 2010), are of interest.1
The choice of authors with experiences and theories of liminal existence in my PhD was not a conscious strategy but based on intuitive elective affinities. These writers knew ‘the Western tradition’ I set out from, and to which they contributed after the end of the Nazi regime, as well as the many transitions between departure and arrival in a new society. Their writing was relevant for my exploration and theorising of ‘New Zealand culture’. Soon after my arrival, I had become aware that there was no such thing as a New Zealand culture. The concept was either too exclusive (e.g. for white settlers only) or meaningless (e.g. not recognising the autonomy of Māori culture). As an outsider, I noticed increasingly how mainstream New Zealand culture was blind to its own condition: white settler society lacked the identity it so desperately sought, precisely because it considered its culture as normal. Yet, a little more than 140 years earlier, the designation ‘Māori’ resulted from the new relationships between Tangata Whenua (Indigenous ‘people of the land’) and the immigrants (Pākehā or Tangata Tiriti, people of the Treaty): ‘māori’ means normal, ordinary or common. By the 1980s, Māori had become the Other of (white) New Zealanders.
By contrast, Māori attitudes towards immigrants during early contact were characterised by interest: many rangatira (chiefs) were keen to have their resident Pākehā– Māori (Bentley, 1999) to enhance their status and wealth and also to mediate the settlers’ knowledge and culture. Māori engaged with the strangers’ religion, language, literature, technology, science and economics—and a number of Pākehā immersed themselves in Māori culture. Over subsequent decades, though, the relationship between Tangata Whenua and Tangata Tiriti changed. From the perspective of contemporary settler society, Māori had become fringe figures and strangers. Their visibility in their own country decreased, as it were, along with their version of a common world. Before the so-called Māori renaissance, they became visible in the media usually through sports and cultural performances or criminal offending. In the 1980s, they became increasingly visible due to the uncomfortable challenges they began to mount to the prevailing configuration of the sensible, that is, the settler society’s claim to normality.2 Māori dissent made visible that what counted as self-evident facts resulted from the contingent distribution of parts and positions, starting with in-or exclusion in the national community.
As I developed my English language capacity and began to learn Māori in the 1980s, new worlds spread out before me, in which teachers, houses, aunts, friends, ancestors, mountains, rivers, ships, dogs and fridges behaved and related in ways I had not known before.
A culture’s philosophical blindness can be glimpsed more easily in the contact zones with strangers, where changes towards a different understanding of knowledge can begin (Baecker, 2012; Beck & Grande, 2010; Gilroy, 2005; Gunew, 2013). Locals learn to imagine themselves as strangers through sustained contact with different perspectives on their social and cultural normality. They achieve a creative degree of estrangement from the culture into which they were born and which seems so normal (and thereby invisible or, at least, difficult to describe). It becomes obvious that the constant expectations to comply, directed by mainstream society at liminal figures, serve neither party. Obedience yields assimilation, which reduces the spaces of possibility arising from the consciousness of a gap between established order and fringe. Such consciousness supports vital and mutually productive explorations. Hannah Arendt’s consciousness of otherness, for example (she lived much of her life in limbo and knew from experience what it means to be fringe figure, émigré, migrant and immigrant), afforded her with ‘an exceptionally clear view of civilization’ (Goultschin, 2014, p. 279). Shared with others in friendliness, such view helps develop the ‘carefully cultivated degree of estrangement’ by which to recognise blind spots in one’s culture, that is, to see where people cannot see that they do not see what they cannot see (Baecker, 2012, p. 109). As a case in point, Beck and Grande observe that certain European fallacies can only be uncovered by looking through non-European eyes (Beck & Grande, 2010, p. 424).
In Jacques Rancière’s terms, every society or group has a specific distribution of the sensible, which can be re-partitioned by disagreement between the established, institutionalised order and those outside or on its fringes. When that happens, aspects hitherto indiscernible can rise into visibility. For example, what is now termed a ‘deficit model’ (Cunningham, 2011; Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt, 1999; Slee, 2010) was regarded as a progressive, socially responsible way of considering students with cultural, physical, cognitive and other disadvantages until a controversy arose. Even today, there is much talk about the fact that, increasingly, ESOL students do not speak and write English sufficiently to succeed. While this is often correct, what is not commonly discussed is the fact that many of their teachers are mono-lingual. As a consequence, they cannot appreciate the epistemological advantages of their bi-or multi-lingual students,3 which is ‘normal’ in an environment where the prevailing language, English, and the prevailing culture, Anglo-European, are presumed to establish the common world.4
Thus, the estrangement from one’s culture fosters alternative ways of seeing. Even if the Nazis had not forced Benjamin to emigrate because he was a Jew, he would probably still have been a fringe figure, an internal émigré as it were, within Germany, rather than a normal citizen with a family and his own home. However, his exilic experiences prompted a questioning and thinking that might have never happened had he been fully integrated into German society. He wrote in a letter, ‘my life no less than my thought moves in extreme positions’, and the ‘freedom to juxtapose things and ideas that are supposed to be incompatible, depends for its specific manifestation on danger’ (in Eiland & Jennings, 2014, p. 431). Becoming émigré also entailed turning renegade for Benjamin, Arendt and many other refugees from Nazi Germany. Arendt, particularly, preserved the disagreement of the renegade as immigrant to the USA: she stood to differ, and her commitment to the ‘preservation of otherness’, as Moshe Gouldschin puts it, can be traced back to the connections she had formed with Benjamin in the 1930s (2014, p. 283). Significantly, Benjamin called the project of preserving otherness, ‘friendliness’ (Freundlichkeit, Benjamin, 1998, pp. 72–74). Friendliness, as the ‘minimum programme of humanity’ (entailing a considered and continued maintenance of distance between human beings), ‘brings that distance to life’ (p. 73). Arendt’s notions of plurality, politics and the creation of a public sphere all rely on the maintenance of distance and the productive use of alienation and difference.
What is visible and sayable in any culture (this refers not only ethnic cultures, often the default understanding of culture, but also to different disciplinary knowledge cultures, for example) also depends on context. When different cultures confront each other in transculturation, that is, partially merge and create something new (Ortiz), the configuration of the visible changes and, with it, what can be said about it (Rancière, 2003, S5). The gap between the participants in such situations, the place in Western tradition that no-one owns, can provide non-traditional candidates’ thoughts with a point from which to lever off and build connections between their own and the institution’s knowledge.5
Overwhelmingly, Western institutional education is oriented towards individual achievements, with a strong competitive slant. However, there have also been many approaches and pedagogies within Western culture that thrived in the gaps or on the fringes of state education (for example, the Ècoles modernes or Modern Schools of Celestine Freinet, or the twentieth century Freie Schulen or Free Schools of, e.g. Montessori, Pestalozzi, Steiner or Neil). All these pedagogues considered radical changes to the traditional, authoritarian and scholastic pedagogy of their times necessary, if children were to access and participate equally in a democratic world.6
Rancière claims that, despite manifest differences in demonstrated knowledge, the same intelligence is at work everywhere. When students arrive at the educational institution, they have already demonstrated, by learning their mother tongue, that they have the ‘capacity to learn something without being taught’ (Pelletier, 2012, p. 616). Rather than an end to be achieved, equality is a point of departure for Rancière. By contrast, most of our educational institutions presuppose inequality, and their deficit models target students with short fallings for remedial actions. Equality, then, has to be enacted, and it is enacted, through dissensus, which is ‘not primarily a quarrel, but … a gap in the very configuration of sensible concepts, a dissociation introduced into the correspondence between ways of being and ways of doing, seeing and speaking’ (Rancière, 2010, p. 15). Dissensus disrupts the routines of our perception and interpretation and constructs a stage, in Rancière’s terms, or an in-between, in Arendt’s.7
These spaces of appearance continuously change when people claim their place. As global movements between countries and across disciplines increase, and changes in political constellations and personal life styles admit more non-traditional candidates and supervisors into the academy, ‘the global other is in our midst’ (Beck & Grande, 2010, p. 418). Increasingly, too, domestic PhD candidates wish to draw on the bodies and modes of knowledge they bring with them to the University, which are often not well represented: Indigenous and other non-Western traditions, non-English languages and the renegade knowledges of marginalised groups. Consequently, situations in which a supervisor cannot directly convey knowledge relevant to a candidate’s research are proliferating everywhere.
My experiences in the supervision of several non-traditional candidates in the last years have highlighted the importance of cosmopolitics (Honig, 2006; Todd, 2010). They open onto the dependencies and ‘entanglements of histories of colonisation and domination’, ‘border-transcending dynamics, dependencies, interdependencies and intermingling’, and ‘new conflict structures, conflict dynamics and new processes of community building’ (Beck & Grande, 2010, p. 411). In this situation, a move away from highly personal and private styles of supervision (which incidentally can breed dependencies and undetected interpersonal problems) may encourage more open, collaborative and democratic styles of supervision. Amongst the PhD candidates with whom I have worked in the last years are Moana Nepia (choreographer, dancer and visual artist from Ngāti Porou), Azadeh Emadi (spatial designer and video maker from Iran), Albert Refiti (Samoan born architectural theorist) and Fleur Palmer (architect from Te Rarawa/Te Aupouri). None of their projects fit into mainstream paradigms, and they are sometimes difficult to carry out. Moana, Azadeh and Fleur’s PhDs are practice-led, Albert’s is fully written. In each case, I had adequate expertise in parts of the project, but not in others.
Moana investigated strategies for innovation and creativity within Māori visual and performing arts. His creative practice-led PhD thesis, Te Kore—Exploring the Māori concept of void (2013b), crossed several disciplines, only one of which was established at AUT. As a consequence, his 2009 application for confirmation of candidature was largely misunderstood by the reviewers—a signal to Welby Ings and me, as supervisors, that a more explicit positioning was required. Accordingly, beyond the discussion of precedents, the literature in the field, the practical submission and its contribution to knowledge, Moana’s exegesis contained an extensive discussion of the grounds and details of his methodology, aratika. Aratika (ara ‘pathway, approach’ + tika ‘appropriate, correct’) drew upon iwi (tribe) and hapu (subtribe) knowledge traditions. One of the examiners described the methodology as ‘creatively conceived and negotiated’, offering ‘a model for other doctoral candidates involved in creative practice’. Another examiner commented that the involvement of ‘Māori principles as an artistic strategy was productive’ in generating original and distinctive works that ‘bore within them the marks of their origins’. Moana’s greater emphasis, post confirmation of candidature, on mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) meant for me as supervisor that I knew even less about his research field and methods. This was scary, also in the face of a prevailing consensus amongst colleagues about the importance and necessity of a tight fit between candidates and supervisors’ research fields.
This perspective, though, only considers the dyadic relationship between supervisor and candidate, not those a candidate may have with other members of the ‘learning alliance’ (Halse & Bansel, 2012, p. 384). Particularly at PhD level, candidates come with substantial resources of relevant and refined knowledge in their field, often gleaned from experience outside of the University. Crucially, they may belong to networks of distributed knowledge they can activate when needed. This was particularly clear in Moana’s case; he is extremely well connected in several intersecting worlds of, for example, choreographers, dance practitioners, visual artists, managers, academics, peer researchers and Māori tribal repositories of knowledge. To strengthen the latter connection, we appointed an additional, Māori supervisor, Wiremu Kaa. Moana now holds a professorial position at the University of Hawai’i, following his very successful examination in December 2012.
Azadeh immigrated to Aotearoa/New Zealand in 2003, switching languages and cultural context. With Bachelor and Masters’ degrees in Spatial Design completed, she enrolled in a practice-led PhD thesis in 2010. The thesis, Motion within motion: investigating digital video in light of Substantial Motion (2014), is informed by Persian/Islamic and Deleuzian philosophical concepts. Her video practice explores the conjunction between pixel/frame and individuals/communities in a realm of transnational moving images. With Azadeh, I started out as a truly ignorant supervisor, but we soon enjoyed the support of two secondary supervisors, Prof. Laura Marks (Simon Frazer University, Vancouver) and Dr Geraldene Peters (AUT). The geographical distribution of her supervisory team sometimes generated additional complexities. Thus, on her return from a two months visit to Vancouver, during which she almost exclusively read and discussed core texts with Laura Marks, Azadeh wanted to increase the written, scholarly part of her thesis—her practice was suspended and scholarship drove her thesis. In the process of clarifying the relationship between scholarship and practice, we attempted to create a thing in common by diagramming the territory of her thesis to reposition practical modes of investigation. As the latter regained importance, Azadeh started to think through practice again and the proportions of theory and practice in her thesis were readjusted. As I write, Azadeh has just been awarded her PhD, after an exhilarating oral defence. She was congratulated by one of the examiners for ‘an exemplary creative practice PhD project’ that ‘combines theory and practice’ symbiotically, in a way ‘not easy to achieve’, so that ‘it is the holistic body of written and creative work that makes the thesis’. My role in Azadeh’s project was obviously not that of a conveyor of knowledge; rather, it was about challenging Azadeh to stay with her project and to make informed decisions about the orientation and processes of her thesis project.
Albert is about to complete his fully written PhD, Mavae and Tofiga: Spatial Exposition of Samoan Architecture, which concerns Samoan concepts of space, particularly as they relate to the faletele (guesthouse). The faletele, according to Albert, not only acts as an apparatus that corrals, binds, holds and signals the rituals and identity of the extended group (aiga); it also creates connections with Lagi (the cosmos) by collecting, binding, knotting, looping, braiding, weaving, wrapping and extending architectural elements to capture the cosmos within its interior. Albert grapples with the (dis) placement of aspects of knowledge of Samoan lifeworlds within the general, Western-dominated world of knowledge. Of necessity a renegade at times, he explores the potentials this position offers to act and speak from another position that highlights incommensurabilities within any single determining ontological position. Co-supervisor Dr Ross Jenner and I have been constantly challenged into constructing meeting grounds with Albert, juxtaposing concepts and theories, in the process of which new ones arose. What I know today about Samoan cultures of space and fabrication, I have learned during our collaborations. Crucially, these collaborations involved three visits to Albert’s territory, Upolu.
Finally, Fleur is about half-way through her practice-led PhD thesis, Papakāinga development: Negotiating on contested ground. Māori self-determination and assertion of tino rangatiratanga in building sustainable communities. Her project involves participatory action research in her tribal area, Te Rawara, which is difficult to accommodate within mainstream ethics committee regulations. Fleur, too, increasingly sees herself as a renegade, or at least as someone who moved to the fringes of her accustomed field of knowledge. Consequently, Fleur decided to relocate her research from the School of Art and Design to Te Ara Poutama, the Faculty of Māori Development, where she hopes to find better institutional support in Māori environments. As a consequence, my role has changed from that of primary to secondary supervisor. Fleur’s case highlights even further the importance of epistemological modesty in cross-cultural, transdisciplinary and participatory research projects: supervisors can never assume the relevance of their expertise.
This does not mean they are superfluous. Rancière has little to say about the conditions under which an ignorant supervisor supports a candidate in obtaining knowledge that is, at the outset, unknown to both. ‘Jacotism is not an educational idea that one could apply to systemic school reform.’ (Bingham, Biesta, & Rancière, 2010, p. 14) He only states that a distinction must be made to enable judgement and action in confusing situations: if knowledge is transmitted in the relationship between teacher and student, it must not be with set expectations of the ways in which students will take hold of the knowledge put at their disposal (Rancière & Stamp, 2011, p. 245).8 But, in the relationship between teacher and student, the teacher’s task is to oblige the student to exercise her own intelligence, a capacity she already possesses, and to send her down a path of discovery.9
Supervisors still have a lot to do, as critical respondent, guide and/or midwife, to help unfold the territory and path of discovery: epistemological context and appropriate structures and contexts. They can greatly assist in translating expectations and requirements of ethnic, institutional and disciplinary cultures, and they can make their knowledge and expertise available, ‘to be, for an other, the source of an enacted equality’ (Bingham et al., 2010, p. 14). To succeed, they need to understand that students whose mother tongue is not the ‘language of instruction’ at their university, for instance, have not only already demonstrated that they can learn without instruction; by learning another language they have also opened up another world, with its own ways of being and knowing, and acquired the distinct epistemological advantage of comparing and questioning both their original world and the new. Similarly, most sexual minority students have accumulated experiences of difference, alienation and stigmatisation, long before they enter the university, that cause them to question prevailing standards and information. Students from non-Western traditions, for whom family and community connections are equally or more important as individual goals, might resonate with Arendt’s notions of plurality and find them helpful in coming to terms with the discrepancy between Western frameworks and their own (Lane, 1997, p. 168).
Crisis and criticality share a common root, krínein—divide, separate, decide—meaning both ‘subjective critique’ and ‘objective crisis’ (Isenberg, 2012). Crises force into view questions that seem to have already been answered, to the point of congealing into prejudice; crises are undetermined, call for ‘decisions, distinctions and discernment’ (Isenberg, 2012). They are catastrophic only when they trigger prejudice (Arendt, 1961, p. 174); otherwise, they stimulate explorations beyond the apparent, new beginnings, bold and fresh ideas. Unsurprisingly, then, candidates who have experienced profound crises have frequently developed habits of sustained questioning, seeking validation of knowledge and pronounced independence (Ings, 2013). Likewise, people whose actions move them out of their accustomed territory, who have had to relearn to live life differently, often experience paradigm shifts concerning their understanding of what is possible in the world (Lane, 1997, p. 165).
Thus, ‘the one who is supposedly ignorant in fact already understands innumerable things’ (Rancière, 2010, p. 5). Whether the institution can respond to this adequately depends on its self-understanding: as an establishment, it is something fixed and beyond the influence of students; as the living part of this establishment, it is a cluster of ‘processes, creative phenomena, meaning-making activities or supports’ that is much more amenable to change and collaboration (Pesce, 2011, p. 1146). In this form, an institution is more likely to recognise the value of non-traditional candidates and renegades’ challenges to the validity and value of institutional standards and concerns in preventing insincere assimilation of difference, for the sake of monetary or political gains. The latter too often leads to a negligent benevolence characteristic of many inclusion programmes (targeted at women, Indigenous, coloured, ESOL, SEN, sexual minority students and so on). Already, practice-led theses are becoming a hot new product in the universities’ competitive diversification. In New Zealand, international fees and double funding for Māori and Pacific postgraduate theses completions link these candidatures directly to institutional economic gains—without automatically improving the candidates’ conditions of study. The latters’ questioning can counteract these tendencies by revealing the contingent nature of any configuration of sensible concepts, including the relationship between pedagogical and social logic (see Rancière, 2010, p. 1). Candidates such as Moana and Azadeh provide, in a climate of institutional harmonisation, a ‘transgressive will’ when they act ‘as if intellectual equality were indeed real and effectual’ (Rancière, 2004, p. 219)—a necessary dissonance throwing different epistemologies into focus.10
Between non-European and new and emerging research approaches, new modes of knowledge are inaugurated. To some extent, candidates undertaking creative practice-led research still operate on the fringes of many traditional Western universities. Non-traditional candidates, who can make unique contributions to our common body of knowledge, negotiate academic engagements across several intersecting worlds. Frequently imbedded in diverse, even contradictory webs of experience, they may not feel fully at home anywhere, neither on the absolute margin nor at the centre of their academic tribe (see Disch, 1994, p. 23). They struggle to have their ‘distinctiveness recognised as an excellence’ rather than ‘a deviation from existing norms’. Eventually, though, they may well ‘redefine the standards by which distinctiveness is recognised’ (Disch, 1994, p. 57). This is precisely what happened to Moana over the course of his PhD project (see Nepia, 2013a, p. 19). Azadeh, Albert and Fleur, similarly, self-consciously occupy marginal positions and want their distinctiveness to be validated as potential excellence.
At least for now, non-traditional candidates are likely to work with supervisors who are not quite at home with their research agendas. In those cases, supervisors can best offer support by assuming a position of epistemological modesty (Arendt, 1992, p. 33; Barone, 2008, p. 35) to make room for creative links between non-traditional candidates’ interests and dispositions and the concerns of non-traditional fields of knowledge or research. Otherwise, supervisors who do not fully understand the complexity of non-traditional research contexts and positions risk pulling the contextual/theoretical focus into their own fields of expertise, away from their candidates’ frameworks and interests (Ho, 2013, p. 84). The uncertainty inherent in non-traditional thesis projects requires supervisors and candidates to appreciate each other’s capacities and to be open to mutual education.11
Before concluding, I would like to address important issues of resources and friendliness, which are insufficiently considered in Rancière’s account. The first is almost exclusively addressed through a ‘thing in common’ between teacher and students. For Jacotot, it was the Télémaque, a bi-lingual book he gave his students to work with: ‘placed between two minds’, it served not only as a source of information, but as a gauge of equality, a source of material verification, and a bridge—a passage and a distance maintained (Rancière, 1991, p. 32).12 In creative practice-led research projects, it is often the most current piece of practice, in fully written theses a chapter draft, and in all cases, it can be a doodle, diagram, image, sound or text.13 Equally emphatic about the need to maintain distance, Arendt refers to a ‘world of things’, of human artefacts and fabrications. They are located between actors in a common world, simultaneously relating and separating them (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 52). The distance affords, in the best case, an opening for different positions to generate diverse and productive encounters and perspectives; the thing in common repositions all involved. According to Arendt, the appearance of worldly reality relies on ‘the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects’ (p. 57).
In my experience, outcomes produced in the context of the thesis are things in common. Apart from the candidates’ theses proper, I would also include occasional collaborations between candidates and supervisors on workshops, papers or publications. During Moana’s initiation of PhD research with a four-day wānanga (School of Learning) in Tokomaru Bay, for instance, I was both participant observer and cook. Partaking in discussions of choreographed pieces and video experiments at the outset of the project was immensely helpful in understanding later developments, and the shared experiences created a common ground supporting our supervisory relationship to the end. With Azadeh, various types of things in common were indispensable to the generation of new potentialities: visiting her in Tehran, and our shared travel to Isfahan, triggered a subtle but substantial shift in understanding. Jointly producing diagrams of her work, at the critical point of determining the relationship between the written and the practice part of her exegesis, was another instance.14 Azadeh and I also coauthored an article reflecting on threshold experiences in PhD research and supervision (Engels-Schwarzpaul & Emadi, 2011), which involved us in extensive discussions about appropriate epistemologies and metaphors, particularly as her PhD research project spans four different continents. This joint production generated a common space in which our mutual understanding of the research contexts as potentiality and new beginnings grew, and in which we were repositioned in relation to each other (Masschelein, 2011, p. 532).
The relationships created by things in common, particularly if made by the participants themselves, feature in many alternative pedagogies as resources for collective exploration and learning, experimental testing, and communication with outsiders.15
Insofar as things in common give rise to dialogue and discussion in and beyond the supervisory team, they tend to draw into the project the candidates’ networks of peers and outside advisors as an important resource. Supervisors then become a resource amongst many others—a calming thought when considering the increasing possibility of their ignorance vis à vis their candidates’ projects. Hans-Georg Gadamer remarked that a common language is first worked out in conversations around something that is placed at the centre. The participants, rather than simply adjusting their tools or adapting to each other, ‘come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community’. Understanding in dialogue, then, ‘is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were’ (1975, p. 371).16
To many supervisors, non-traditional candidates are strangers (e.g. national, ethnic, gender or disciplinary). The supervisory contact zone provides them with a chance to obtain a degree of estrangement from their own (national, ethnic, disciplinary, etc.) culture, which helps developing a sense for their own blind spots and a different understanding of knowledge. Beyond tolerance of difference, the presumption of equal value and complexity makes room for more active engagements with the unknown than are likely to occur in multiculturalist frameworks or through the consideration of some generalised Other. Gilroy holds that demotic forms of cosmopolitanism find ‘civic and ethical value in the process of exposure to otherness’ and glory ‘in the ordinary virtues and ironies—listening, looking, discretion, friendship—that can be cultivated when mundane encounters with difference become rewarding’ (2005, p. 70). In these ‘exciting transcultural possibilities’ (Manathunga, 2013), a friendliness can develop that is neither unreflected nor casual but based on mutual interest and respect. It not only preserves the distance between human beings but brings it to life, in the liminal space of possibility arising from the encounter (Benjamin, 1998, p. 73). In supervisory relationships between those established in the university and those who arrive, pass through or even plan to leave the university, this vitality of uncompromised autonomy creates an opening for different perspectives and ways of thinking, embodied in heterogeneous languages, sciences and cultural narratives.17
The emergent research of non-traditional candidates thrives on gaps and on the fringes—provided both candidates and supervisors are able to be porous to the unknown and ‘troubled by the presumption of equality’ (translator’s note in Rancière, 2010, p. 24). The potential of the gap, the unknown, which simultaneously separates and connects candidates and supervisors, institutes the beginning of a thing in common. This is a rich and creative place for new thought, an opening for the academy to transcultural knowledge.
1. If I take liberties in discussing Benjamin, Arendt and Rancière in concert, without also explicating their differences, I follow Benjamin’s notion of claiming the ‘freedom to juxtapose things and ideas that are supposed to be incompatible’ (in Eiland & Jennings, 2014, p. 431). Rancière has on several occasions stated his disagreement with both Arendt and Benjamin. However, there are parallels between Arendt and Rancière, as ‘thinkers of ruptural and inaugurative politics with a particularly spatial conceptualisation of politics’ as a world building activity and with spaces of appearance (e.g. their orientation by praxis, the construction of space for acting together, their focus on process and performance rather than identity, see Dikeç, 2013). In my understanding, Rancière’s disagreements with Arendt concern primarily matters that lie outside the scope of discussion here (see Dikeç, 2013; Schaap, 2011). His disagreement with Benjamin, as I understand it, hinges on a different definition of aesthetics—their deployment of this term operates mostly at different levels. Like some writers (e.g. Balibar and Ingram), I prefer to see similarities and shared potentials, rather than differences that seem irrelevant in this context.
2. The configuration or distribution of the sensible denotes the prevailing ‘overall relation between ways of being, ways of doing and ways of saying’, seeing and hearing (Rancière, 2010, p. 8) that regulate visibility.
3. In Ignorance and pedagogies of intellectual equality, Michael Singh and Xianfang Chen (Singh & Chen, 2011) show how, in a four-part process of challenge, conceptualise, contextualise and connect, hegemonic Western concepts can be replaced by new ones that are generated through the exploration of Chinese metaphors, creating transcultural relationships advancing common understanding (Singh & Chen, 2011). Similarly, Moana Nepia worked with Māori concepts and narratives to generate an innovative methodology for his creative practice-led doctoral research.
4. That teachers often do not know as much about their own culture and history as they assume, and less than some outsiders, complicates matters. Challenges to these assumptions might render visible an unexpected lack of familiarity on the part of many educators with the gaps, twists and fissures of the dominant culture and history. It may become clear that the common world is made up by more than the dominant culture.
5. Non-traditional candidates belong to minorities in Western universities until about thirty years ago when traditional candidates were ‘male, from high-status social-economic backgrounds, members of majority ethnic and/or racial groups, and without disability’ (Taylor & Beasley, 2005, p. 141).
6. Arendt is surprisingly conservative when it comes to education: whereas political action is the freedom to ‘change every constellation’ (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 190), education is, first and foremost, about creating a place for newcomers in the common world (Curtis, 2001, p. 134).
7. Arendt would call this in-between a ‘space of appearance’ in which we can act in concert with others (Arendt, 1998, pp. 199, 244).
8. Arendt has a similar concern: ‘Our hope always hangs on the new which every generation brings; but precisely because we can base our hope only on this, we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that we, the old, can dictate how it will look’ (Arendt, 1961, p. 192).
9. Sugata Mitra, instigator of the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ experiment, in which Tamil speaking groups children learnt to browse a computer without receiving any instructions from outside, describes this relationship as one where a ‘friendly mediator … provides supervision but exercises minimal intervention (encouraging rather than teaching)’ (Mitra & Dangwal, 2010, p. 685). Rancière’s position is frequently misunderstood to mean that a supervisor will be the better the less she knows about the subject; it is certainly based on ‘a thorough-going resistance to a certain form of epistemological and ontological mastery’ (Chambers, 2012, p. 639). Prof. Mark Dorrian, now at the University of Edinburgh, suggested in an interview that a supervisor who is ‘not necessarily an expert’ might be more open to ‘a different kind of approach to the subject matter’ in (Jenner, 2013, p. 216).
10. When equality becomes performative in the affirmation that Western and non-Western traditions are equal in depth, scope and complexity, dissonances are often the result. While the day-to-day efforts to improve educational contexts leave little space for these dissonances, paying attention to them from time to time helps keeping the contingency of our normality in view (Rancière, 2010, p. 16). In any event, all traditions of thought have much to gain form these engagements. There is probably no single method for this process, since it must grow out of each unique constellation in which it arises.
11. I have noticed that twinges of uncertainty and anxiety can make me close down and become rigid. A supervisor interviewed by Christine Halse (2011, p. 563) reflected that fear of non-completion can incline supervisors towards spoon feeding and filling deficient areas with Spakfilla, particularly when faced with intensifying accountability regimes. This is unsustainable: graduates eventually realise that they have not acquired the knowledge needed. A different scholarly identity for both supervisors and candidates, involving collaboration, interdependence, and an appreciation of each other’s specific capacities, would always see knowledge in the diverse contexts of its production and distribution (Halse & Bansel, 2012, p. 388).
12. Rancière contrasts explicator-instructors with artists, whom he sees more closely aligned with equality and common action. His consideration of the pedagogical relationship takes place, though, in a tightly vertical, hierarchical atmosphere. By contrast, Hannah Arendt explores horizontal difference between equals in the public realm, the common world. We constantly co-produce this in-between, which relates and separates us at the same time, gathering us and providing distance that ‘prevents our falling over each other’ (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 52). Imagine that European books might have played a similar role to that of the Telemaque in Jacotot’s class room during early immigration to New Zealand—a thing in common not only between immigrants and Māori but between Māori teachers and students (Head & Mikaere, 1988, p. 19).
13. King Tong Ho recommends the early production of glossaries and various forms of documentation, to create a shared vocabulary and context (2013, p. 89). Useful for consultation and mutual education, these things in common act as material references at various stages in the exploration and testing of different ideas. Later, as part of the exegesis, they may provide a focusing device for examiners.
14. Arendt’s notion of training ‘one’s imagination to go visiting’ (1992, p. 43) and to think from standpoints not one’s own is also useful. The space of the visiting imagination is ‘open to all sides’ and allows our particular conditions to stand next to those of our hosts—never becoming the same, though—and always maintaining their distance. Across those distances, our common world—‘not a given but produced as a result of visiting’ (Peng, 2008, p. 74) —arises in conversations. The double movement of the imagination produces both distance from the familiar (a space for thinking and seeing something a-new) and connectivity with the strange (through stories told from a plurality of perspectives). This work of distancing and bridging is typical not only of critical thinking, but also of creative processes (see Engels-Schwarzpaul, 2013, p. 167).
15. Strangely, Rancière insisted until recently that emancipation can only be an individual act but recently, he seems to open up to the possibility of including collective process in emancipation (Rancière, 2010, pp. 6, 16).
16. Thanks to Ross Jenner for his comments on the final draft and particularly for reminding me of Gadamer’s remarks.
17. See note 3.
Arendt, H. (1998). The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Original work published 1958.
Arendt, H. (1961). The crisis in education. Between past and future: Six exercises in political thought (pp. 173–196). New York, NY: The Viking Press Inc.
Arendt, H. (1992). Lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. Edited and with an interpretive essay by Ronald Beiner. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Baecker, D. (2012). Wozu Kultur? [Why culture?]. Berlin: Kadmos.
Barone, T. (2008). How arts-based research can change minds. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor, & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 28–49). New York, NY: Routledge.
Beck, U., & Grande, E. (2010). Varieties of second modernity: The cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory and research. The British Journal of Sociology, 61, 409–443.
Benjamin, W. (1998). Understanding Brecht (A. Bostock, Trans.). London: Verso. Retrieved from /z-wcorg/database
Bentley, T. (1999). Pakeha Maori. The extraordinary story of the Europeans who lived as Maori in early New Zealand. Auckland: Penguin.
Bingham, C. W., Biesta, G., & Rancie`re, J. (2010). Jacques Rancie`re: Education, truth, emancipation. London: Continuum.
Chambers, S. A. (2012). Jacques Rancie`re’s lesson on the lesson. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45, 637–646.
Cunningham, C. (2011). Chapter 11: Adolescent development for Ma¯ori. In Improving the transition. Reducing social and psychological morbidity during adolescence. A report from the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor (pp. 145–152). Auckland: Office of the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Committee.
Curtis, K. (2001). Multicultural education and Arendtian conservatism: On memory, historical injury, and our sense of the common. In M. Gordon (Ed.), Hannah Arendt and education: Renewing our common world (pp. 127–152). Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Dikec¸, M. (2013). Beginners and equals: Political subjectivity in Arendt and Rancie`re. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, 78–90.
Disch, L. J. (1994). Hannah Arendt and the limits of philosophy. Ithaka, NY: Cornell University.
Eiland, H., & Jennings, M. W. (2014). Walter Benjamin: A critical life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Emadi, A. (2014). Motion within motion: Investigating digital video in light of substantial motion (PhD). Auckland, NZ: Auckland University of Technology. Retrieved from http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/handle/10292/7932#fulltext
Engels-Schwarzpaul, A.-C. (2013). Emerging knowledge, translation of thought. In A.-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Of other thoughts: Non-traditional ways to the doctorate (pp. 163–179). Rotterdam: Sense.
Engels-Schwarzpaul, A.-C., & Emadi, A. (2011). Thresholds as spaces of potentiality: Non-traditional PhD candidatures in art and design. ACCESS critical perspectives on communication, cultural and policy studies, 30(2), 1–14.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and method. New York, NY: The Continuum Publishing Corporation.
Gilroy, P. (2005). Postcolonial melancholia. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Goultschin, M. (2014). We who stand to differ: Hannah Arendt on maintaining otherness. Atlantic Studies, 11, 277–299.
Gunew, S. (2013). Estrangement as pedagogy. The cosmopolitan vernacular. In R. Braidotti, P. Hanafin, & B. Blaagaard (Eds.), After cosmopolitanism (pp. 265–297). Miton Park: Routledge/GlassHouse.
Halse, C. (2011). ‘Becoming a supervisor’: The impact of doctoral supervision on supervisors’ learning. Studies in Higher Education, 36, 557–570.
Halse, C., & Bansel, P. (2012). The learning alliance: Ethics in doctoral supervision. Oxford Review of Education, 38, 377–392.
Head, L. F., & Mikaere, B. (1988). Was 19th century Maori society literate? Archifacts. Symposium conducted at the meeting of the Conference Papers: Off the Beaten Record (11th annual conference of the Archives and Records Association of New Zealand, Christ-church, 28–29 August 1987), Christchurch.
Ho, K. T. (2013). Transfer and translation: Negotiating conflicting worldviews. In A.-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Of other thoughts: non-traditional ways to the doctorate (pp. 83–99). Rotterdam: Sense.
Honig, B. (2006). Another cosmopolitanism? Law and politics in the new Europe. In S. Benhabib (Ed.), Another cosmopolitanism (pp. 103–127). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ings, W. (2013). Queer as a two-bob watch. In A.-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Of other thoughts: Non-traditional ways to the doctorate (pp. 131–146). Rotterdam: Sense.
Isenberg, B. (2012). Critique and crisis. Reinhart Koselleck’s thesis of the genesis of modernity. Eurozine-Network of European Cultural Journals. Retrieved from http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2012-05-18-isenberg-en.html
Jenner, R. (2013). Thought out of bounds: Theory and practice in architecture doctorates. In A.-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Of other thoughts: Non-traditional ways to the doctorate (pp. 203–220). Rotterdam: Sense.
Lane, A. M. (1997). Books in review. Political Theory, 25, 137–159.
Manathunga, C. (2013). Culture as a place of thought: Supervising diverse candidates. In A.-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Of other thoughts: Non-traditional ways to the doctorate (pp. 67–82). Rotterdam: Sense.
Masschelein, J. (2011). Experimentum scholae: The world once more … but not (Yet) finished. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 30, 529–535.
Mitra, S., & Dangwal, R. (2010). Limits to self-organising systems of learning—The Kalikuppam experiment. British Journal of Educational Technology, 41, 672–688.
Nepia, M. (2013a). Ruku – Dive. A physicality of thought. In A.-C. Engels-Schwarzpaul, & M. A. Peters (Eds.), Of other thoughts: Non-traditional ways to the doctorate (pp. 17–22). Rotterdam: Sense.
Nepia, P. M. (2013b). Te Kore – Exploring the Ma¯ori concept of void (Thesis, Doctor of Philosophy). Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, NZ. Retrieved from http://aut.researchgateway.ac.nz/handle/10292/5480
Pelletier, C. (2012). Review of Charles Bingham and Gert Biesta, Jacques Rancie`re: Education, truth, emancipation. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31, 613–619.
Peng, Y. (2008). A U-turn in the Desert: Figures and motifs of the Chinese nineteen eighties (PhD). Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota.
Pesce, S. (2011). Institutional pedagogy and semiosis: Investigating the missing link between Peirce’s semiotics and effective semiotics. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43, 1145–1160.
Rancie`re, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation (K. Ross, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rancie`re, J. (2003). Comment and responses. Theory & Event, 6(4). Retrieved from http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.4ranciere.html
Rancie`re, J. (2004). The philosopher and his poor (A. Parker, Trans.). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rancie`re, J. (2010). On ignorant schoolmasters. In C.W. Bingham, & G. Biesta (Eds.), Jacques Rancie`re: Education, truth, emancipation (pp. 1–24). New York, NY: Continuum.
Rancie`re, J., & Stamp, R. (2011). Against an ebbing tide: An interview with Jacques Rancie`re (R. Stamp, Trans.). In Reading Rancie`re. Critical Dissensus (pp. 238–251). London: Continuum.
Ryan, Y., & Zuber-Skerritt, O. (1999). Supervising postgraduates from non-English speaking backgrounds. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Schaap, A. (2011). Enacting the right to have rights: Jacques Ranciere’s critique of Hannah Arendt. European Journal of Political Theory, 10, 22–45.
Singh, M., & Chen, X. (2011). Ignorance and pedagogies of intellectual equality. In A. Lee, & S. Danby (Eds.), Reshaping doctoral education: International approaches and pedagogies (pp. 187–203). Milton Park: Routledge.
Slee, J. (2010). A systemic approach to culturally responsive assessment practices and evaluation. Higher Education Quarterly, 64, 246–260.
Taylor, S., & Beasley, N. (2005). A handbook for doctoral supervisors. Milton Park: Routledge.
Todd, S. (2010). Living in a dissonant world: Toward an agonistic cosmopolitics for education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29, 213–228.