I am available to supervise Honours, Masters and PhD students on topics related to message sticks. Some potential topics are listed here.

Writing

The number one question I want to know before undertaking to supervise you is how much experience you have in writing. I will ask you to send me the most recent and longish piece of academic work you have completed. This could be a long essay from one of your units (if you are applying to do an Honours degree) or an Honours or Masters dissertation (if you plan to enrol in a PhD). This will give me the best idea of where your strengths and weaknesses are from the outset.

I will also want to understand your broader relationship to writing as a process. So if you have written pieces for the media, or works of fiction, or government reports I’m interested to know about this too (but I won’t ask you to send any such samples to me). Doing a research degree is mostly writing. Your ideas have no real currency until they are written down in a coherent way. On a more practical level, it is by means of written drafts that a supervisor and student communicate with one another. If the act of putting pen to paper is something that causes you a great deal of stress, then now is probably not the right life-stage for you to be doing a research degree. Timing is important!

What is a research degree?

Before agreeing to be your supervisor I will also want to get a sense of your expectations around what a research degree is. It is normal to have uncertainty about this before you begin. The best way to reduce that uncertainty is to get hold of a copy of an Honours, Masters or PhD dissertation that has been recommended to you as good work, and skim through it. This will be your model. By the end of your tenure you will need to produce something similar to this, from the abstract, to the table of contents, to the diagrams, to the appendices.

From reading the abstract of your model you should see that a good dissertation is fundamentally about finding something out that you didn’t know before. It should show a detailed pathway towards that knowledge. After you have submitted your dissertation it gets sent out to external examiners who provide an anonymous assessment. These examiners will not be interested in how clever or ‘correct’ or ‘academic’ you are. They will not be scanning for buzzwords or obscure-but-impressive theories. And they will not have an ideological agenda and mark you up or down based on how they feel politically about your bold takes. Instead, they want to see how you formulate a question, how you position yourself in that history of others asking the same kinds of questions, how you identify relevant evidence for that question, how you analyse it, and what you found out.

Motivation

Research degrees are powered by intrinsic motivation, so recognising what drives you will be important. Your personal motivations do not need to be high-minded but you will need to be honest about them and capable of connecting with them easily. Do you see your proposed degree as a an opportunity to pursue a passion? A means to getting a job? A way to demonstrate your authority in a subject area? An opportunity to show prestige or be influential? A way to signal leadership in your community? Be realistic about what really lies behind your decision and decide whether it’s going to be enough inspiration to power you through a major project. There is a popular view that a research degree—especially a PhD—confers social status and opens doors that might otherwise be closed to you. It’s true that there is social capital to be gained from such degrees but it is probably a whole lot less than you had been led to imagine. It is also relative to the country you find yourself in. If you are solely interested in the presumed social capital pay-off, be aware that cost-benefit analysis is not going to be favourable.

Topic and intention

Just as crucial for your motivation is having a research topic that speaks directly to you. Ideally this is a burning question that you are super curious about without being invested in a specific outcome. As long as you remain fascinated by the research question as a question rather than merely a theme, you will be able to draw on enough reserves of passion to get you through the hard times. For topics that relate to Australian message sticks, it will be a good idea to read the Very Short Reading Guide to Research on Australian Message Sticks, and a make a note of what generates a response in you. Puzzlement? Anger? Curiosity? Excitement?

Conversely, topics that are about making an important point or giving greater visibility to something, or setting the record straight, or celebrating a culture/language/experience, are much better explored in non-academic forums, like the media. Here you can connect with thousands, influence public opinion and help shape the discourse. A dissertation cannot do those things. It will be read by you, your supervisors, your examiners and maybe other students much later on. It will not by itself make waves in the world. It is best thought of as an apprenticeship that sets you up for the next phase in your career or in your personal journey. Sometimes a dissertation can be a step towards a published book, but the book will always involve a significant re-write of your dissertation. They are different products for different audiences.

Working together

One of the great strengths of Australian higher degree research programs is that supervisory panels can be adjusted in a non-adversarial way and the student is empowered to initiate this. In this spirit is important for me to be able to work effectively and collaboratively with students under my supervision. If it turns out that we happen to have incompatible styles/approaches/personalities I want to be able to help you find an alternative supervisor who is more suitable without interrupting your progress. Or perhaps the topic of your dissertation evolves in a new direction that is beyond my expertise. It will also be important to think about who might be able to replace me, even if things are going well. Remember that life could get in the way of any single person on your panel.

Working style

Do you prefer a hands-off approach to explore your own path independently? Do you like structure and deadlines? Will you want to investigate your topic in a more discursive, narrative or reading-based way? Or will you be taking a more hypothesis-driven approach?

Whatever your particular style, as your supervisor I will want to encourage you to read heavily and consistently and to take well-structured notes from those readings. What I don’t expect is for you to demonstrate that these sources are ‘wrong’ or outdated, and that your perspectives are ‘filling a gap’. Instead I will want you to understand these sources on their own terms and be able to review them with a sensitivity to the intellectual context in which they were produced. It is in this process that your unique critical perspective will emerge. A higher-degree dissertation is not about knowing all the things better than anyone else, it’s about being able to tell a compelling story from the evidence.

Feedback and final submission

If you are doing a ‘degree by publication’ you will be submitting a defined number of articles to academic journals. A more traditional ‘dissertation’ is a bit more like a book, but a book with a very defined structure. Whatever type of degree you chose, I will be giving regular feedback on your written work and providing guidance on when that work is ready for submission. You may decide to ignore my recommendations but in some cases I will need to make it clear that if the advice isn’t followed I will not be able to approve the submission. This is because it ends up being much more work for everyone if an examiner or peer reviewer rejects the manuscript on the basis of obvious flaws. When you commit to submitting your best possible work (even if it’s late or you’re thoroughly sick of it!), you will be saving time and emotional energy in the long run. If, at the submission stage, there are serious disagreements remaining it might be a good idea for us to get an objective second opinion from another academic within the same field. This will be a clarifying exercise for both of us and help to resolve the impasse.

Expectations

Finally, the University of New England has a great questionnaire about role expectations. The idea is that the student and supervisor to fill out the same form independently and then compare responses. There are no right or wrong answers and everything is on a sliding scale, eg, “Supervisors should set the agenda for frequent and regular meetings”. To take that statement as an example, some students may want the supervisor to take complete charge of this, while others will prefer to do it collaboratively or by themselves. I will take your preferences seriously and support your working style as long as this style remains productive for you. It’s also worth noting that, at the University of New England, a student is entitled collectively to 120 hours of input from a supervisory panel over the period of their candidature. When thinking about what’s important to you, it can be clarifying to think about how much attention you want to what areas and at what stage of your research. Do you want lots of meetings up front? Or do you want detailed attention to drafts in the final six-month stretch?