Supervisors watching supervisors: The deconstructive possibilities and tensions of team supervision

Many universities have introduced team supervision as a means of intervening in the intensity of the traditional supervisor-student dyad. This policy is intended to provide students with a great support during their candidature and to share the burden of sole supervision. It is also a pedagogy that seeks to support students' engagement with new knowledges that cross institutional and epistemic boundaries. However, few researchers have studied the effects of team supervision on doctoral pedagogical practices and on the already complicated fields of power circulating in supervision. This paper focuses on one particular aspect of the operations of power within team supervision - the issue of how power circulates between supervisors. Drawing on Foucault's notions of governmentality, technologies of self and surveillance, I seek to track supervisors' self-regulation and peer-regulation when they co-supervise doctoral students with one or more colleagues. I conclude by arguing that the need for more post structural research into supervision pedagogy remains just as urgent as it was when Green and Lee first made their call for theorising postgraduate pedagogy in 1995.