Doctoral Education, Danger and Risk Management

Abstract

This paper examines how risk management is reworking the doctoral supervisor/candidate relationship. We argue that a larger and more diverse population of doctoral students means special challenges for universities worldwide in managing doctoral programs to optimize their productivity and minimize the risk of failure, costliness and/or litigation. An effect of this is that professional and personal relationships in universities, as in many other public and private institutions, are being reshaped in order to be more closely aligned with risk minimization policy directives and strategies. To understand what effects such reshaping is having on doctoral education, we bring together anthropological theorising of risk with pedagogical theorising of power and identity in education contexts. This theoretical cross-over between anthropology and education situates the pedagogic work of doctoral training within a culturally constituted order of professional care and risk management. We utilize this framework to interrogate ‘soft marking’ as a specific domain in which risk minimization is producing new relational identities for both supervisors and students involved in doctoral studies programs.